On Wednesday, November 2 The Staff Canteen attended the Drum Content Awards in London where we were nominated for an award in the category for Best B2B Content Marketing Strategy.
This week we put on our best black ties, little black dresses and crutches (it's a long story) and set off to London's west end, where The Staff Canteen was nominated for our Featured Chef video feature - http://www.thestaffcanteen.com/featured-chef in the Best B2B Content Marketing Strategy. Just some of the brands also listed in our category were Virgin Media Business, Vodafone and L'Oreal Professional, in fact the only reason I went was because I was hoping to grab a sneaky peek of Ms Fernandez-Versini but live in hope I guess!
Now, awards are something we seem to be attending more of, they've never really been my thing I guess, however try stopping our editor, Cara from a night out on the town with free food, it can get ugly, trust me! The big difference here was rather than rubbing shoulders with the Michelin Guide’s elite chefs or those nominated for The AA award world's 50 best, our fellow diners were from some of the UK's biggest creative digital agencies and boy are they a noisy bunch or diners! Although they demand a much lower quality arrival nibble with champagne but perhaps crisp and bubbles could be the next big thing???
When you're in a room with Google, The BBC and Yahoo, three things happen, first you just dream of what budgets these guys probably have to work with, and secondly you start to think, bloody hell, are we really here, and lastly was that Cheryl over there???
We are treated to some Aussie comedy, then dinner was served, never an easy gig cooking for a 1,000 punters so well done Chefs! Then the awards begin. Let's be honest people only give a damn about their own award(s) so we all clap and keep our fingers crossed while all the time thinking are we next? When suddenly we are.
"Now to the award for Best B2B Content Marketing Strategy." The nominees are read out…"Featuring Chefs" by The Staff Canteen "my personal favourite" did she really just say that? Have we won, was that a sign? As the final nomination is read out we’re treated to the overview of the judges feedback, which went, "The judges said that this content was in fact so niche, and so targeted to its audience that it was a clear winner.” At this point my heart is racing as I prepare to thank everyone I have ever met including God, though I've not met him, or Cheryl for that matter, but the night is not over and if we win who knows. "And the winner is......................Oh come on, it's not the X-factor! Fox agency for Pagid UK”, now it's time for your Oscar face, clap politely smile and internally break down and cry!!!!
Did we expect to win, no of course not, yes we wanted to win, it would have an outstanding achievement for the team, however what it showed is that great content however small the budget can really make an impact. Yes our feature is very niche, we have been fortunate enough to have captured and filmed some of the world's best chefs, our YouTube Channel has just passed 11,000,000 million views and each month people watch over a 1,000,000 minutes per month, that's a staggering 23 days’ worth of video consumed each day on our YouTube channel! So it's clearly working well.
I must thank the team here at Cooking Towers for their dedication, hard work and commitment to becoming the number one platform for Chefs, sadly we didn’t win an award on this occasion but I hope they can all be as proud as I was for just being nominated.
