Award Emcee's listen up - know your audience!

Our company recently traveled to New York to accept an award for Excellence in Electronic Communications. It is a very prestigious award and we were thrilled to receive it. The Gala awards dinner and event was colourful. Great high points but one particular low point that cannot go unmentioned. The Emcee was a famed model, actress and host of her own ‘highly rated’ cooking show. But all of these things did not a good or well chosen Emcee make. I am not sure if it was the lack of knowledge about the event and subject matter or her cavalier style that left several people including myself wondering why this starlet was chosen to host. She admitted upon coming up to the podium that she had finished penning her speech during dinner and started her introductory comments peppered with yada yada yada. I mean, really, she’s not Jon Stewart! This kind of casual funny just doesn’t work on her.

After presenting the first series of awards, we were shown a self-promotional video which was followed by an adlib portion of her speech that was intended to relate her role to intent of the evening (better to stick to script). My personal favourite was her complete ignorance when it came to Canada and the world of the web when referring to our particular winning website entry appended with “dot Canada” instead of ‘.ca”. Instead of relating to her audience, she came off as insincere, trite and succeeded in trivializing the importance of the event and the achievements of the awardees. Fortunately the people in the room had a healthy dose of ego themselves which got us all through.