Mastering the art of award submissions

It can be surreal to write about your day-to-day work as if you’re working up a pitch for a client, but working to find your voice can help you strike a balance between good salesmanship and bragging.

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Awards and contests, on television or otherwise, have much in common: You promote yourself while letting your work/skills do the talking.

Writing about and promoting your own agency’s PR expertise is a bizarre experience—like the scene in the surreal “Being John Malkovich” in which actor John Malkovich slips into his own consciousness and finds himself in a restaurant filled with infinite John Malkoviches all repeating one word, “Malkovich,” over and over again. I’m sure our friends at Central Coast will find it equally strange watching themselves pitch potential clients on national television.

Sure, PR is work. It’s the work we do every day, but when it’s under the microscope, it starts to look very different. Writing is the same, when no one is watching there is an immense freedom, creating the story, finding your voice, etc., but how do you find it and how does it change when you know others are watching?

We work in PR: We make our living tooting horns, spreading the word, and leveraging our relationships and our knowledge of the industry to do so. However, this is all behind the scenes, we prefer our clients capture the limelight—we are the worker bees, not the queen.

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