The closing date has been extended for entries in the Engineering Excellence Award at the 17th annual ACRAs (Australian Commercial Radio Awards).
The award is sponsored by Comsyst Engineering and includes a scholarship of a return trip to Las Vegas to attend NAB, the world’s largest electronic media show.
Entries will be accepted until Monday 11 July and the winner will be announced on 15 October – along with all other category winners – at the ACRAs gala ceremony at the Sydney Convention Centre.
Commercial Radio Australia CEO, Joan Warner, says the Engineering Excellence Award recognises innovation in engineering and is aimed at fostering professional development: “Attending NAB is a fantastic opportunity to network with electronic media professionals from 130 countries and get up to date on the latest developments and ideas.
“The award will be judged by a specialist team of industry engineers and executives. The judges are looking for a single achievement or specific engineering project, which is based on an innovative idea, demonstrates exceptional engineering skill, has broad application to the industry and/or achieves cost efficiencies.
“The entry should address at least three of the four criteria. The winner of the scholarship will not necessarily be the winner of the award, but will be chosen from among the finalists.”
Last year’s winners were Max Healey and Alastair Reynolds, of Southern Cross Syndication, who developed an innovative radio monitoring service to address the issue of station accountability to advertisers. The service delivers an independent, accurate means of providing post time reports on radio campaigns as they are broadcast. It removes the need to provide automation logs and can report on the activity instantly, allowing any problems to be corrected quickly.
Healey, who recently returned from NAB 2005, describes the event as a wonderful opportunity: “The NAB exhibition proved to be an excellent source of technical knowledge in my areas of interest. I was able to bring back several ideas that we could instantly use in our business, simply by talking to people who provide similar services in the US. This is above and beyond the new products you will see. I gained a lot from the experience, both personally and professionally.”
His radio monitoring service uses digital audio watermarking to encode commercials with a 48bit ID, which is embedded every five seconds. The service has a web based reporting system, allowing advertisers and account managers to log on and receive post times on their spots within minutes of broadcast.
Information about the ACRAs can be found via the link below.