Pakistan-Digi-Awards-2017-event
Pakistan Digi Awards 2017 – What Went Wrong And How

Digital Marketing is a vast field. It consists of content, social media and search engine optimization (SEO) which are sub-divided in further categories. Digital marketing enthusiasts and professionals have seen many conferences, seminars and workshops happening around the world. They are huge, effective, informative and a perfect place to connect with the think tanks of the industry. In Pakistan, we are unfortunately far behind the standards of genuine Digital Marketing, very few agencies and professionals are aware of the methodology and research part of this field. We are striving to build and nurture this industry of digital marketing.

Pakistan-Digi-Awards-2017-Shafiq-Siddiqui

Recently Brand-E organized Pakistan’s first ever Digital Marketing Awards titled “Pakistan Digi Awards 2017”. The concept and ideation were good but what lacked bigtime was the association with relevant professionals from the digital marketing field. I was thrilled and excited to attend the Pakistan Digi Awards 2017 because for the last 10 years I was dreaming about something like this to happen in Pakistan – right from the day when I started blogging (a minute part of digital marketing). Digital marketing professionals should be rewarded and acknowledged for their hard-work and undying dedication. Unfortunately, Pakistan Digi Awards 2017 went wrong disastrously. And following are a few points why!

Lack Of Professional Attitude At DigiAwardsPk:

The event was supposed to start at 7:00 PM as per the invitation cards dispatched to the attendees. Keeping in mind that these awards were not for every Tom, Dick and Harry who don’t value time and punctuality, it was shocking to see the event starting at around 9:00 PM. That was the biggest turn-off for people who value their time and actually believe in the phrase “Time is money”. We, in professional world, never appreciate wasting time or do we? So, how come such a prestigious and one of its kind event took off too late? Weren’t things synced? I was there at 7:00 PM dot and that was how the scenario was.


Pakistan Digi Awards – Below Average Management

Usually such events i.e. award ceremonies are backed with some refreshments not talking about huge buffet but at lease welcome drinks to the attendees as they are the invited guests and only “Invite-Only” individuals are expected to attend them. Sadly, no such treatment was given by the management to those who attended Pakistan Digi Awards 2017. There was a huge screen installed but it was never utilized to its full glory – couldn’t get that in to my head – why not?

Nominations At Pakistan Digi Awards 2017

The general audience was very confused, actually, as for none of the category competing brands, campaigns or agencies were mentioned. It was like just calling out the name of the winner of the category and not sharing with whom that winner fought. There was a huge screen behind, at least they could have ran the videos and let the audience know who participated for the categories. There might be a possibility that there was not critical thinking behind the event and awards function; all their intentions were to hurriedly organize the event so that they can be known as pioneers of Digital Marketing Awards in Pakistan.

List of Winners at Pakistan Digi Awards 2017

Drastic Turnout Ratio

It was very sad to see that most of the attendees either couldn’t attend the awards or left the event before it even got started, as it got too late. When the anchor person called the guests to honor the winner, they were found nowhere in the crowd and then a proxy guest was called upon. A few winners were missing from the award function – were they not informed about their winning? Not many people were there at the Pakistan Digi Awards 2017.

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Irrelevant Crowd

Another alarming sign at Pakistani Digi Awards was that the crowd was mostly irrelevant. People who had nothing to do with digital marketing were there and those who are considered as the faces of the industry were not even invited, I got calls and messages from many professionals from the digital marketing industry asking about who organized the award and what was the criteria of finalizing the list of reputed guests? Anyway, let’s just not dig deeper.

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Unknown Bloggers

It was a bummer for me to not find any “Blogger” other than a few in the award function that focused on digital marketing. Pakistani bloggers are working days and nights to prove their mettle and some of them are doing really great. There were about 25 – 40 seats allocated for the bloggers and social media influencers but there weren’t any known bloggers out there. That was such a lame thing to happen.

The Twitter Trending Drama

Events which are digital marketing related have the tendency to trend over Twitter with utmost ease, after all every individual is social media savvy and most of them post quality tweets which are backed with retweets, quote tweets and engagement as well. It was really strange to find out that the hashtag “DigiAwardsPk” failed to trend on Twitter in Pakistan or even in Karachi. Here is the link of established and reputed website’s (Trendinalia) link which lists daily top trending topics from different countries, Pakistan is included in that as well, nowhere you can find the said hashtag trending between 00:05 hours to 23:50 hours on 7th October, 2017

Source: http://www.trendinalia.com/twitter-trending-topics/pakistan/pakistan-171007.html

Source: http://www.trendinalia.com/twitter-trending-topics/pakistan/pakistan-171007.html

Now comes the most interesting (read funny) part, according to the above mentioned details and insights no such hashtag titled “DigiAwardsPk” trended but on the Facebook group/event-page the admin posted that #DigiAwardsPk was a huge success and it also trended over Twitter, here have a look:

PDA2017 DigiAwardsPk

Just focus on this picture, there are 3 images merged and the spelling of trend on the last image is different with that of the first two images. This cannot be possible practically that one hashtag can get trended with 2 different cases (one with upper case letters and the other with small cases). Decide yourself the authenticity of this entire success. Need I say more?

Here are some pictures from Pakistan Digi Awards 2017 held at P.A.F. Museum, Karachi on 7th October 2017.

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