Annette Densham

Didn’t you enter to win?

I’ve heard that line from the stage more times than I can count. Its cousins turn up every awards season too: “This is such a surprise.” “I’m so nervous.” “I’ll just wing it.” “I just want to thank...” followed by a list longer than the dinner menu.

Thirty seconds of free advertising wasted.

Now imagine it on repeat for five hours

One unprepared speech is forgivable. The problem is it’s never just one. I’ve spent the past ten years at awards nights, and I’d put 90% of winners in the unprepared camp. That’s 10, 30, 50 speeches, over and over, until the room hits Snoozeville. People start chatting. It’s rude, but after an hour of the same thing, the audience checks out, and the very worthy winners end up talking over a bored crowd. Not fair or polite.

Every so often someone pulls the room back. They walk up prepared, say something worth hearing and get off. They understood they weren’t there to collect a trophy. They were there to connect with hundreds of business owners who, for 60 seconds, have nowhere else to look.

Be prepared. Even if you think you’re not going to win.  It shows respect for the audience and the event organisers.  When people aren’t prepared, the waffle, go over time and put everyone to sleep.

The formula

You’ve got 30 to 60 seconds. Here’s how to use them.

• Open with a power statement. Name the problem you solve, without turning it into a sales pitch.
• Fill the middle with proof. A story, a client case or a result you’ve achieved.
• Thank a few people. Only a few. Save the rest for a thank-you post. Yes, people helped you. None of it would’ve happened without your drive, so own the moment.
• Finish with your key message. Leave people wanting to know more about what you do,

This is what it sounds like:

• Tell a story. Personal and relatable beats a list of achievements every time. Paint a picture.
• Say why you do it. It doesn’t need to be world-changing. It just has to reflect why you do what you do in your patch.
• Be funny, appropriately. A laugh lightens the room and wakes up anyone who drifted off during speech number 27.
• Don’t waffle. Rambling loses the audience as fast as being unprepared.
• End strong. A closing line, a tagline, even a fist pump. Give them something to remember.
• Command the stage. You might be shitting your pants because public speaking isn’t your thing. Stand tall anyway. Look out at the audience (the lights are so bright you can’t see anyone). Smile.

It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just needs some heart and thought behind it.

What preparation looks like

Paul Hogan nailed it co-hosting the Oscars in 1987. Remember the three Gs, he told the winners: be gracious, be grateful, get off. Then he went one better. If you really think you don’t deserve the award, don’t get up and tell everyone. Just give us a wave from your seat.

Don’t be humble. Be ready. Practise, practise, practise.

Nerves and stage fright

Breathe. That sounds like a no brainer but when we get nervous, our breathing changes and this can make us more stressed and anxious. When your category is up, take a few deep breaths before your name’s called to settle the jitters.

Plan for after you step off

Your speech gets filmed and photographed. Know before the night how you’ll use the recording, photos and moments on social media, so the 60 seconds keeps working long after the tables are packed away.

Want examples of speeches that hit the spot? 

Stress Free Super Mum - 2023 GOLD Stevie® Awards for Women in Business: Coach of the Year 

Honey Digital - Honey Digital wins in the 2022 Stevie® Awards for Women in Business

Kerry Howard - Kerry Howard wins in the 2022 Stevie® Awards for Women in Business

Randa Habelrih - https://youtu.be/FnoNNSIBNuk?si=v-GnjjeIL9Udod-h

When I'm not writing award entries, I'm deep diving into award processes. If I'm going to invest my client's time and money into entering something, it has to mean something. Every week, I go down the rabbit hole researching awards and have noticed almost weekly, there's new award on the scene. Awards have become an industry and sadly, many of these new awards seem to be more funnel fillers.

Once you get past the free entry, you find that there's a cost to buy the trophy or if you want to be able to say you're a finalist, you have to buy the marketing package. When you dig deep enough, you can see how little thought there has been into making the process credible, robust, logical and clear.  

A new award. A new day
Today I came across another new award.  It's for coaches and I work with a lot of coaches so I checked it out. Ever curious, I read every page to see if it's worth my clients' while.

It had a few things in common with this new crop of awards: a disturbing lack of clear criteria, judging process and questions that sounded like every other award out there. 

What caught my eye was this line: free, judged by our independent AI panel. It says judging is merit over popularity.

AI and judging

I've a few bugbears with award judging, and a big one is the lack of transparency around judging criteria. This often means human judges have to lean into subjective decisions because the award program doesn't clearly map out what excellence looks like or give the judges a rubric to guide them (and no, the questions don't count). Add in unconscious bias, lots of entries to get through and actual bias, and it's not always the best business that wins.

This particular award makes a big deal of its independent judging panel (I would've thought that's a given). Each entry is scored by three AI models, Claude, GPT-4 (not even the latest version) and Gemini, with the average taken as the final score.

The problem with this is AI judging self-reported claims can't check whether any of it's true, so the person who writes the most confident entry wins.

AI does have bias. Most models are trained on polished, mostly American English so if English is your second language, or you use Aussie turns of phrase, you can be marked down for sounding like you. Research on AI judges shows it tends to favour longer, more formal sentence structure, and can lean towards writing that sounds like it; forget about writing with personality. It can also be inconsistent. Go on, run your entry through twice and I bet you'll get different feedback.

They say there's a weighted rubric, but it's nowhere to be seen. Nobody entering knows what they're being judged on or why.

To be fair, one of the questions has teeth. The rest are all about belief. How do you judge that? It's like my Year 11 English teacher asking the class to analyse a poem and then marking our opinions down. But at least the English teacher had read the poem. AI has no idea whether your impact is real, so it's marking the confidence of your opinion, not the substance of it.

I wrote about this recently in Kochie's Business Builders, looking at the impact AI will have (is having) on awards. AI is changing awards and can make judging better: applying the same criteria to every entry, flagging claims with no proof, and giving us human judges more time for the deeper assessments.

Whether it's humans or AI judging, the rubric should be public. What's being judged, how each question is weighted, and what separates a strong answer from a weak one. How are entrants meant to shoot for gold if they have to guess?

Handing the whole kit and caboodle to three chatbots, keeping the marking guide and instructions a secret and calling it independent doesn't sit well with me.

Independent of what?

My friend rang me the other day and said she was hanging out with her current boyfriend. That was news to me. "What's his name," I askd her. "Claude," she replied. AI is in the hosue and it isn't going anywhere. It's poeple's pseudo therapist, travel agent, lead generator, ptich document creator, recipe writer, stand in BF, award writer and photographer. 

AI is still in its infancy. It's ever evloving and as it changes and adapts to our needs, our tolerance for what feels normal will also have to evolve. Which is hard because so much of how we talk/think about life, the universe and everything is often expressed as absolute or linear. This way or that way. There’s little room for shades of grey and the middle ground these days.

You might find an AI-edited image is inauthentic to you. But in a few years, will we even think twice about it? I’m sure when the printing press was invented, there were people rocked and shocked with what it meant for the written word. What about when photography challenged ideas of art? Or what email did to postal services? Or how photoshop changed what we believed we were seeing or how social media changed how we presented ourselves?

Technology often moves faster than our comfort zones.

Sure, people are tired of synthetic-looking personal brands, uncanny AI headshots, fake lifestyle imagery, and businesses presenting synthetic imagery as an authentic representation of their brand. But we’re all experimenting and having a go. Are we being a bit gung-ho in taking an absolute stance on these experiments while we’re still working out how AI can help in our businesses? 

Taking a ‘you’re using AI so I’m not doing business with you’ stance edits nuance from our decision making. AI editing could mean removing a distracting object, extending a background, correcting lighting, cleaning up an old photograph, resizing creative, or a conceptual campaign visual. Those things tell you almost nothing about someone’s integrity, abilities or whether you should do business with them. Making a blanket rule not to do business with someone based on their use of AI feels a bit unfair. It also doesn't factor in not everyone is flush with a mrketing budget. Those who are just starting out in business don't have the fund to outsource to a specialist; they use what they can.

Those things don’t really tell you much about whether someone is good at what they do, decent to deal with or worth doing business with. Writing someone off for using AI feels unfair. AI might be the new kid on the block, but altering images  using Photoshop, filters, colour grading, retouching, compositing, and stock photos blurred the line between real and tweaked years ago.

This shift towards absolutism is changing how we perceive people and topics. We’ve gone from ‘I don’t like this’ to ‘this is bad’; from ‘this makes me uncomfortable’ to ‘people who do this are untrustworthy’; from ‘I choose to work this way’ to ‘I want nothing to do with people who do that’. It moves from an inner reflection of your own feelings to an external judgement of others. Say goodbye to how, why, degree, context and intent. 

Perhaps the stronger position isn’t ‘never AI’ or ‘AI everything’. Maybe it’s more nuanced than that: does the execution strengthen trust, or undermine it? Instead of delivering a fait accompli about people using AI, maybe a more even-handed stance is to ask: is what’s being shown honest and responsible? Is it someone having a crack, or is it intended to deceive? 

As a small business person, who doesn’t have a never-ending budget for marketing, graphic design and all the other bits of business that’d be fabulous to outsource, AI has leveled the playing field in so many areas of my business. As much as I’d like to farm work out, AI means, for a few hundred bucks a month, I have a tool that manages my workflow, monitors my emails, reminds me to send invoices and sometimes creates marketing materials that I’d spend valuable productive time wrestling with. I know it’s not perfect, it makes mistakes (does it make me crazy that I swear at Claude and ChatGPT when it acts like a toddler not using their listening ears?) but then neither are human beings. 

Absolutes can feel principled or that you’ve climbed onto the moral high ground and planted a flag there. The problem with taking a hard line is that you can end up backing yourself into a corner.

AI is only going to get better, easier and more widely used. It’ll just become part of how we work, like the fax machine, the PC or the laptop did. The people saying no, no, never now will be using it at some time in their future. So planting a flag deep in the absolute mountain could come back to bite you on the butt. Chances are you’ll be using it for something, somewhere in your business to make your life easier. People remember absolutes. Hypocrisy, anyone?

For my birthday I posted a photo of myself as a baby from 1970, chubby little legs and bald head.

More than 234,000 views. Nearly 24,000 engagements, 85,000% more than I normally get.

Meanwhile the post inviting people to join me at the Stevie Awards in New York, the one I  agonised over, sat in the corner like me, at 10, waiting to be picked for the softball team.

That birthday post didn't sell a single seat to New York. It was never going to. So why bother? Nobody scrolls past a chubby seventies baby and thinks right, sign me up for an awards trip. 

That post is a breadcrumb. One of 1000s I've dropped over the years, On its own it does almost nothing except for giving me warm fuzzies that so many people enjoyed my story.

But someone sees it and gets a bit curious about who is this woman?  They have a sticky beak through my profile, and trip over the awards, the writing, the books… all the crumbs I've dropped. I'm no longer the woman who writes award submissions. I’m a whole person, and whole people are far easier to trust.

People aren't deciding whether to buy your service. They're deciding whether they trust the person behind it,

Sometimes we struggle with what to write on social media. We're told to be vulnerable but not too vulnerable. We labour over a single post. We do silly videos hoping people will notice. We get attached to the metrics and judge our impact on who is engaging.

Many of my business posts feel like there's more crickets engaging. I could get hung up on the numbers but I've learnt it's the posts sharing thoughts and experiences that draw people in. 

While that may not drive sales, it does drop another breadcrumb that helps people add to their perception of me. That’s what marketing is really all about. Perception. The slow, unglamorous business of shaping what springs to mind when someone hears your name.

Business posts are a broadcast: here's what we do, here's why you should care, here's the call to action. Nobody engages because there's nothing to engage with. 

The thought-and-experience is  a door open, an invitation rather than an announcement.

Every breadcrumb that shows how you think, what you notice, where you draw the line is doing the work of making the eventual buying decision feel obvious. By the time someone enquires, they've already decided. The post that converts is rarely the post that sold them. It's a culmination of how you show up.

You want people to know you in a way they can't quite articulate. Trust comes from a feeling. We think when people buy what we're selling that they've used logic but that's not always the case.  People buy because they see you, they follow you, they get to know you and when they're ready to buy, you're their first pick. Because you've banked trust by dropping breadcrumbs that build perception of who you are, what you do and why you do it.

Trust, infuriatingly, can't be rushed. It comes from the trail people followed to find it.

Marketing has changed so much in the past decade that, at times, it barely resembles the discipline many of us grew up with. It used to be about being easy to understand, easy to find, and easy to trust. Now it’s often framed as a daily exercise in public visibility. Damn what you post as long as you post something; because modern marketing rewards motion more than meaning.

When my son was at that age where adults ask, “What are you going to be when you grow up?” He said he wanted to be a Twitch star. I nodded politely and supportively, thinking isn’t twitching what you do when you are nervous.  He explained it: people watched other people build Minecraft worlds, live-stream their lives, dance badly or brilliantly, and money changes hands.

That was my first encounter with the word influencer.

Fast forward to 2026 and that wide-eyed novelty has well and truly worn off. Content is no longer something we dip into. We’re drowning in it. Everyone is creating and publishing. Everyone is broadcasting something, often several times a day, and much of it is being propped up, polished or outright generated by AI.

Never in human history have so many people worked so hard to be seen, while being so easy to ignore.

What began as a creative outlet has become an industrial operation. The creator economy has matured, professionalised and, in many corners, eaten itself. Scroll any platform and you’ll see it: identical hooks, recycled opinions, forced relatability and the same old advice served up with different filters. The tools have improved but the thinking often hasn’t.

Over the past few years, short-form video has become the default language of the internet. TikTok, Reels, Shorts…blink and you’ve missed it. Add AI-generated faces, cloned voices and scripted authenticity, and the result is a constant hum of look at me marketing, delivered at scale.

The more people chase attention, the less impact it has.

The obsession with personal brand, follower counts and visibility has flattened expertise. When everyone positions themselves as a thought leader, the real thinkers disappear into the noise. We haven’t just diluted talent, we’ve normalised mediocrity with confidence.

The participation trophy mentality didn’t just survive social media. It thrived.

Influencers are still here. But the question in 2026 isn’t whether influencer marketing works. It’s whether people still trust it.

Brands are more cautious now, and audiences are sharper. Disclosure rules have tightened. Platforms label paid partnerships more clearly. Consumers know when they’re being sold to and they’re far less forgiving when it’s done badly. The days of blindly believing a product recommendation because someone smiled nicely on camera are gone.

Influencer marketing is still big business, and driving sales, particularly in retail, lifestyle and entertainment. Used well, it can deliver strong returns. Used lazily, it’s a credibility grenade.

Because when someone is paid to say something, the transaction is obvious. Obvious transactions don’t build belief.

This is where businesses keep tripping up. They outsource their voice, authority and point of view, then wonder why their brand feels hollow. When you hand your story to someone else, you also hand over the chance to build trust directly.

That’s the real cost. There is a fundamental difference between being an influencer and being influential… and the gap between the two has widened, not narrowed. Influencers rent attention. Influential businesses earn it.

An influencer’s message is shaped by a contract. An influential voice is shaped by conviction. One is driven by algorithms and affiliate links; the other by insight, experience and a desire to actually shift how people think or act. Influence that matters, lasts.

Businesses cutting through aren’t the ones chasing trends or outsourcing credibility. They are the ones investing in their own thinking, publish consistently and say something worth disagreeing with. They share data, perspective and lived experience, not just highlights and hashtags. They understand that trust is built over time, not bought in bundles.

Influencer marketing can still sit in the mix, but it should never replace substance. It should support a strategy, not stand in for one. If you don’t have a clear point of view, no amount of borrowed fame will save you.

People don’t want perfection. They want clarity, honesty and to know what you stand for… and what you won’t touch. Tell, don’t sell hasn’t lost its power. If anything, it’s become the only thing that works in a market exhausted by performance.You can’t outsource.

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