Award Entries and Editorial Roundup Placements

Award entries lose in the evidence box, not the prose. A judge reads between forty and a hundred submissions in a sitting, and the ones that survive attach a number, a date and a source to every claim. We put a client forward for four to seven awards a year and decline most of the rest, because an entry costs roughly fifteen hours of your team's time to do properly and there is no partial credit for a good try. Which awards we enter: Schemes with a published judging panel, a published entrant count, and a category your work genuinely fits. For food and drink that means SIAL Innovation, the Great Taste Awards, the Sustainable Food Awards and the Misset Horeca categories. For travel and hospitality, the Skift IDEA Awards and the national trade schemes. For games, the Dutch Game Awards, Develop:Star and the BAFTA Games entry windows, which close earlier than most studios plan for. Some of these are not writing exercises at all. Great Taste is judged by blind tasting, so the work is choosing which product goes in and how it survives the journey. FD Gazellen is decided on filed revenue growth, so the work sits with your accountant and a deadline, not with us, and we will say so rather than bill for it. Which we refuse to enter: Schemes whose business model is the gala table. The tells are consistent. No published panel, no entrant numbers, a call offering a trophy upgrade within a day of the shortlist, and a category list long enough that nearly every entrant wins something. Several well-known travel and hospitality programmes work exactly this way. We will name the ones on your wishlist before you pay an entry fee. If you decide to enter anyway, that is a decision you can make without us. How the entry gets built: We start from the published judging criteria and score your case against them honestly, then go looking for what is missing. That usually means a before-and-after with dates attached, one piece of third-party verification, and a customer or partner willing to be named in a supporting letter. We write, you supply the proof, and we cut any claim we cannot source. Where the scheme allows a sample or a video, that is the entry and the text is only support. Editorial roundups: Different work, same list-making discipline. Getting into an editorial roundup is a pitch to a person with a deadline, at the Time Out city desks, Eater, Lonely Planet, the Sunday travel desks, or the trade titles' annual lists. It works when you can give them something the other twenty candidates cannot, and it fails when the pitch is a press release with a hotel photograph attached. Two things you should hear from us and not later. Michelin inspectors cannot be pitched, and any consultancy implying otherwise is selling you something. Paid slots in 'best of' lists are advertising, they carry no editorial weight with the readers who matter, and we do not broker them. Fees: Entry fees, sample shipping, travel and ceremony tickets are yours and are not included in ours. Across a programme this size they usually run between four and eleven thousand euros a year. We forecast them before you commit rather than after you have approved a shortlist. Not for you if: You need a badge on the website by a fixed date for a funding round or a sale process. Schemes set their own deadlines, judging takes months, and nothing compresses that. If a specific award by Q4 is the actual requirement, say so on the first call and we will tell you whether the calendar allows it, which most of the time it does not.