Results of our 2014 blogging competition

The results are in. But before I reveal the winner and runners-up in our blogging competition on The Future of Copywriting – here are a few thoughts on how the event turned out.

The first thing that surprised me was the apparent lack of interest when we first publicised it. With only two entries at the original deadline, we took a look at the rules and made a couple of tweaks.

Clearly reflecting my generational worldview, the idea of an “essay” competition was a turnoff for many. Perhaps it sounded too much like hard work, or harked back to university courses they’d rather forget. Either way, we renamed it a “blogging” competition, which certainly stimulated people to get writing.

It’s entirely possible that people were too busy earning money to write essays or blog posts and in that case, great! That’s what we should all be doing.

Or perhaps the idea of being coached by yours truly for a year was a sufficient disincentive for most people to sit on their hands until the closing date passed safely over the horizon.

We ended up with a respectable number of entries, enough to give the judges something to chew on for a few days.

Now. The results.

Honourable mentions go to Lyubitsa Lukanova, Dimitri Lambermont, Sean Lukens and Jamie Day.

Joint runners-up, and the recipients of a copy of our distance learning course Breakthrough Copywriting, are Gemma Stride and Eric Moeller. Well done both of you.

And the winner, and unanimous favourite of the judges, is Chris Smith. Chris wins a year’s personal copywriting coaching from me and an engraved trophy.

On behalf of my fellow judges Katherine Wildman and Dr Sian Lewis I’d like to thank everyone who entered and everyone who RTed my tweets publicising the competition.