Award season: Powered by Tagboard Interactive

AuthorSky Muller

Published


Awards

  • Emmy nominations 
    • Outstanding Interactive Experience – Original Programming
      • World Cup Now, FOX Digital
    • Outstanding Interactive Experience – Event Coverage
      • 2022 FIFA World Cup
      • XXIV Olympic Winter Games
      • Thursday Night Football (TNF Optionality)
  • Webby nominations/honorees
    • Honoree: Creative Production in software category
    • FOX Sports nom: Best Mobile User Experience
    • FOX Sports Webby win and People’s Voice: Best Social Content Series: World Cup Now 
  • Shorty Awards Finalists
    • USER-GENERATED CONTENT – The Most Globally Connected World Cup Ever
    • LIVE EVENT COVERAGE – World Cup NOW
  • Hashtag Sports Award Shortlist
    • Best Use of Technology
    • FOX Sports’ World Cup NOW is also a finalist for: Best Original Content, Best Use of Live Video, & Twitter
  • Cynopsis Sports Media Awards
    • Use of Social Media (National/League) – World Cup NOW
    • Live Stream Presentation – World Cup NOW

Award season: Powered by Tagboard Interactive

If you’re like us, or Moira Rose from Schitt’s Creek, it’s your favorite season… awards! The ceremonies seem to be hitting on a monthly basis, with Webby Award winners announced in April, Sports Emmy winners revealed in May, and Hashtag Sports Awards trophies being handed out in June. For us at Tagboard, we love not only getting in the mix and partnering with some industry friends on award submissions, but also running our fingers down the list of finalists and seeing many familiar names and shows being honored for all their hard work. We get to work with the most incredible content creators in the world, and on their journey to stack shelves with well-earned hardware, they believe a key element to successful storytelling is opening up a two-way communication with their audience. And history would show – the best way to do that is through Tagboard. 

Emmy nominations for outstanding interactive experience

With a focus on interactive categories for this year’s Sports Emmy Awards, let’s peep the finalists for Outstanding Interactive Experience – Event Coverage where 60% of the finalists lean on Tagboard interactive technology to power their coverage. One of which is the defending champions in this category, NBC who won an Emmy for their coverage of the Summer Olympics in Tokyo. The others we see are Amazon Prime Video and the optionality they provided fans around their Thursday Night Football coverage, which included the interactive Dude Perfect alternate-stream we covered in great detail back in the Fall. Rounding out the list is a finalist, who is also up for Outstanding Interactive Experience – Original Programming, and that is FOX Sports and their coverage of the 2022 FIFA World Cup. The original programming category is one that’s been dominated by the team at Turner Sports over the last several years as they’ve used Tagboard to build the gold standard for outstanding interactive programming on their legendary show Inside the NBA, as well as the back-to-back defending champs in this category, NBA on TNT Tuesday. 

The FOX Sports’ digital team showcased the power of interactive technology and how it can be used to connect a global audience at this year’s World Cup, as they powered 60 interactive hours of live content and a total of 126 pre- and post-game livestreams on Twitter. That livestream has been picking up nominations across multiple award shows, and recently won Cynopsis Sports Media Awards for their Use of Social Media and Live Stream Presentation.

Update: Prime Video took home the Emmy for Outstanding Interactive Experience – Event Coverage. The team at FOX ended up taking home 9 Emmys, 3 for their 2022 FIFA World Cup coverage, while NBC Sports Group captured 8 Emmy wins, 3 for their coverage of the XXIV Olympic Winter Games.

Webby nominations and honoree in creative production

The FOX Sports’ digital team also took home a double win with a Webby Award and People’s Voice award when winners were announced on April 25th; the double win was in the Social & Sports category for Best Social Content Series. They set out to do something that had never been done before on a digital platform, and then went out and executed the company’s most viewed digital show ever, with 88.4 million views, while using Tagboard to source the best content that was being tweeted out at a clip of 20,000 tweets per-second.

Along with the FOX Sports digital double win, Tagboard was an honoree for Creative Production in the software category. Interactivity powered the most globally connected coverage of the World Cup, but this honoree also touched on FOX Sports’ use of Tagboard cloud production graphics, which allowed their graphic operators to be working remotely from Los Angeles while the production happened in Doha, Qatar; an 11-hour time difference and 8,000 miles apart.

Interactive shines in Shorty Awards 

The interactive theme continues as we dive into nominees for Shorty Awards where FOX Sports digital’s World Cup NOW is nominated for Live Event Coverage, and in partnership with Tagboard for User-Generated Content. 

Using Tagboard’s patented social aggregation technology, FOX Sports was able to filter through millions of reactions on social channels, sourcing more than 1,000 posts in real-time, and engaging the millions of fans watching World Cup NOW. This not only created one of the most globally connected productions the world has seen. It also is arguably the most expansive and dynamic use of user-generated content ever by a brand.

Hashtag Sports Awards finalist in technology and content

Rounding out the 2023 media awards season are the Hashtag Sports Awards in New York City. Tagboard and FOX Sports’ Digital are on the shortlist for Best Use of Technology, a category that features finalists from cloud, AI, and AR sectors; a strong group highlights how innovative technology is just as much a part of the sports world as stats, scores, and championships. At the center of the Tagboard and FOX Sports’ use of technology is how cloud-based technology unlocks new possibilities in the broadcast production world, and allowed FOX to produce their most-viewed digital content series of all time while keeping producers in Los Angeles for a production taking place in Qatar.

Daily content demands are consuming production teams and the race to just meet a deadline constrains the creative minds of producers. At Tagboard we believe there are many areas technology can take the reigns and remove inefficiencies in workflows and overtake outdated processes. The end result is what you see above, production teams that are allowed to dream big, flex their creative minds, and interact with their audience in ways this industry has never seen before.