Singapore – The Asian Television Awards has reached the finals of the 9th Annual Shorty Awards for the first time. The Asian equivalent of the EMMY Awards is shortlisted in five categories include Asia, Emerging Platform, Live Event Coverage, Twitter Partnership and Weibo. Other finalists this year include the EMMY Awards, iHeartRadio Music Awards, the iHeartRadio Music Festival, MTV EMA, Singapore Tourism Board and a few other notable events.
Every year the Shorty Awards honours the best work across social media’s vast and growing landscape, in what is widely recognised as the Oscars of the Social Media. Now in its ninth year, it continues to recognise the most innovative, creative, and culturally relevant brands, organisations, agencies and influencers on social media.
Finalists were selected by the Real Time Academy of Short Form Arts & Sciences, whose members the includes CMO of GE, Linda Boff, Apple Co-founder Steve “Woz” Wozniak and Instagram Co-Founder Mike Krieger and more. Winners will be announced during the ceremony on Sunday, 23 April in New York City.
The team at the Asian Television Awards is particularly delighted with the achievement, especially since the 2016 event was only the second year in which the awards has actively used social media to reach out to the public. Prior to 2015, the Asian Television Awards (ATA) was positioned as a trade-only event, reaching out to television professionals within Asia-Pacific.
The 2016 Asian Television Awards’ social media impressions included Facebook 10,548,763, (Source: Facebook Insights), Twitter 6.95m (Source: Twitter Analytics), Instagram 292,047 (Source: Instagram Insights), Weibo 1,622,658 (Source: Weibo) and Steller 252,025 (Source: Steller). ATA2016 partnered with Twitter’s live streaming app Periscope for the first time and also connected to visual storytelling app, Steller. ATA2016 also used Facebook Live to live stream direct via satellite feed for the first time. The numbers were outstanding for a first time user: Facebook reach (more than 1.7m), Views (353k), Comments (13.7k), Reactions (11.9k) & Shares (1.5k).
The organiser of ATA2017 has already confirmed Indonesian Superstar Afgansyah Reza, as one of its performers this year. To increase its range of social media storytelling, the Asian Television Awards has confirmed its partnerships with the likes of Dubsmash, musical.ly, Smule and Steller. Each serves a unique function in the social media ecology and will allow the awards to better engage with the celebrities and fans attending the show and widen its range of event coverage. The organiser is also looking towards to include elements of 360 videos and VR for this year’s Live event which will take place on Friday, 1 December 2017 at Suntec Singapore.
The Asian Television Awards’ Managing Director, Cindy Ng said, “We are looking to bring the social media experience of this year’s Asian Television Awards to a whole new level.”
James Chen, who leads the Marketing, Partnerships and Social media Initiative at the Asian Television Awards added, “2016 was a good year for us, as seen by our performance at the Shorty Awards. Our impressions on Facebook and Twitter grew by more than 6 folds to over 10 million and 6 million respectively. For 2017, we are already looking to raise the bar on the social front to better engage with our fans.”
