MOST Awards 2014 upgrade Legend and Rising Star Awards

Following consultations with all stakeholders to ensure the survey questions remained relevant and the process credible and transparent, Wag the Dog Publishers and Freshly Ground Insights (FGI), research partners of the MOST Awards, have changed some rules, appointed a consulting statistician and independent auditors.

Legend and Rising Star Awards upgraded

The new rules specify that winners of Legend and Rising Star categories can only win once. Rising Star nominations are restricted to people under 40 and Legends to those over 45.

"There is depth of talent across the media sector and I want people to apply their minds to nominations for Rising Stars and Legends. To add further status to the process we have a panel of judges standing by to assist us should this be necessary," said Sandra Gordon, CEO of Wag the Dog Publishers and founder of the MOST Awards.

Improvements to variances

Brad Aigner, MD of FGI consulted with his statistical experts to tackle differentiation amongst the winners. "For the 2014 MOST Awards survey, a consulting statistician has been commissioned to assist the FGI team in building greater variance into the results data. In recent years, we have noticed that the final MOST scores for companies, especially the top performers, in certain categories have been very 'close', sometimes with just decimal points separating them.

"This is clearly a result of the improvement of service levels amongst companies in our industry, making it difficult to separate them in the MOST Awards scoring. The statistician has advised on a few basic changes to the MOST Awards questionnaire and will also apply certain statistical analyses to the final data in order to yield greater variance in the scores given by MOST Awards 'voters' to media agencies and media owners respectively.

"This year, voters will be asked to rank the six performance criteria in order of importance before selecting companies to vote for. This ranking data will be used to weight the criteria scores given to each company that is voted for. Voters will then be asked to give a score out of ten for each performance criteria for each company selected. Finally, various exponential transformations will be applied to the weighting scores and criteria scores in order to yield greater variance in the final MOST scores for each company. From this process, we are confident the end result will deliver statistically valid distinctions between the final MOST Awards scores for the companies voted for."

Media owner criteria

1. Knowledge of own brands and the media landscape
2. Knowledge of client brands and market landscape
3. Service delivery
4. Innovation
5. Empowerment
6. Involvement

Media agencies criteria

1. Knowledge of the media landscape
2. Knowledge of client brands and market landscape
3. Communication
4. Professionalism
5. Empowerment
6. Involvement

The research results will be published in a special issue of The Media magazine, which will be available at the awards function, to be held in the first week of September.

For more information, go to www.themediaonline.co.za and click on the MOST banner ad or button to complete the survey questionnaire.