Our latest national award is a reminder that good news also matters
With a lot of serious work going on these days, it’s nice to be reminded of the opportunities we have to bring happy and fun moments to our audiences. The challenge will be preserving the time and energy to work on these kinds of items in the near future.
My team won first place in the 86th National Headliner Awards for online video up to 1 minute in length. Our winning entry was “The Greasy Pole.”
This 35-second recap of a bizarre local tradition went beyond “viral video†and became an international sensation during the summer of 2019.
On June 28, competitors tried to walk, scoot or scamper their way to the end of a greased horizontal pole suspended above Gloucester Harbor. The wacky competition is an annual feature of St. Peter’s Fiesta, a 5-day summer celebration sometimes referred to as Gloucester’s Mardi Gras.
Competitors are trying to make their way to the end of the slippery pole to grab a flag at the end.
WCVB live-streamed some video from the event as it happened, then took some highlights from the event to produce this 35-second jaunt.
We edited text onto the video to add context without ignoring the obvious absurdity of the event.
The video was posted to Facebook on June 29 and was immediately popular locally. Soon, it spread to Facebook users in other U.S. States and eventually to international audiences for hundreds of millions of views.