What's Up with Tech?

Inside The Business Of Recognition And Why Credibility Wins

• Evan Kirstel

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Trophies are easy to buy; credibility is not. We sit down with Russ Fordyce, Chief Recognition Officer at Business Intelligence Group, to unpack how modern awards can be rigorous, transparent, and genuinely valuable for marketers under pressure to prove results. From volunteer judges with track records to blockchain certificates that verify logos across the web, Russ explains how trustworthy recognition turns into search-friendly proof that buyers and even AI systems can validate.

We dig into why the old models struggled—small panels, popularity contests, and murky criteria—and how a distributed, community-led approach fixes scale and fairness. Judges review a manageable set of entries, earn micro-credentials for service, and are themselves evaluated for quality. That structure keeps standards high while opening doors to niche categories that big shows ignore. Along the way, Russ shares memorable wins, from a solo founder behind BenjiLock turning recognition into Shark Tank momentum, to TD Bank’s creative use of enterprise tech across immersive learning and Roblox engagement.

For marketers navigating the shift from classic SEO to generative engine optimization, this conversation hits the heart of what works now: white-hat proof. Verified awards create durable authority signals that LLMs and search systems can trust, supporting your brand story with evidence rather than ad spend. If you’re building in B2B tech and feel drowned out by bigger budgets, you’ll find a pragmatic path forward through community, validation, and disciplined storytelling.

Ready to earn visibility instead of renting it? Subscribe for more conversations like this, share with a teammate who needs a credibility boost, and leave a review to help others find the show. Want to get involved? Go to we love techawards.com or visit bintelligence.com and check out my awards program at welovetechawards.com

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SPEAKER_00:

Hey everybody, fascinating topic today on the business of awards with Russ Fordyce, Chief Recognition Officer at Business Intelligence Group. Russ, how are you?

SPEAKER_01:

I am doing well. We're getting ready for the 2026 award season.

SPEAKER_00:

And when you think of that, you think the Oscars or you know other awards shows, but this is a little different. Fascinating industry, fascinating business uh venture that you've founded, created. Maybe start with introductions. Who is Russ and what is the big idea?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so um I am Russ Fordis. I'm the founder and chief recognition officer of the business intelligence group. And we run a series of awards programs, kind of business and industry awards programs targeting kind of different verticals and different categories. And I uh I started this about, I think it's 14 years ago now. Uh I was a B2B telecom marketer, technology marketer, and I kind of looked at the awards landscape and just kind of wasn't impressed. Um, we spent a lot of time in budget winning awards, and the process was messy, and the the awards were a little shaky and sketchy sometimes. Uh, but we validated product through there and we really kind of valued the the uh the process of nominating for an award, and we obviously liked the outcomes, right? So we liked the badges and the trophies. But I knew there was a better way to do it and kind of to take my spin on it. So that's what we've been trying to do for the last 14 years.

SPEAKER_00:

Wow, that's fascinating. And you have a lot of a lot of categories, a lot of um uh industries you serve, a lot of different types of clients. Maybe describe the awards landscape. Uh you know, this is a a big industry across many different verticals. Um, how do you see this whole space today and how do you see it evolving?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it well, it's interesting. Um, I think I think the you know, there's just like we have bad doctors and good doctors and good cooks and bad cooks, there are good award programs and bad award programs. And what we're seeing is kind of the the the bottom shake out of the of the industry. The the kind of the flyby nights, buy a diploma, buy an award type of thing are really going away because it's too easy to catch you now. You know, it's too easy to look up uh, you know, to validate that Harvard diploma with a QR code or to validate an award win now. Uh, we're doing blockchain certificates now so that somebody can validate that the logo on your website or your business card or wherever you have it is actually real and that you earned it, like your diploma.

SPEAKER_00:

Fantastic. And how do you think about credibility when it comes to the judging process? Talk about the judges, who are they, and how does the process work?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I actually, if you want to bring up our website, I'll show you our judges. The judges, in my opinion, are kind of the secret sauce of what we've built. Um, our judging philosophy has always been let's hire volunteers, because there was no budget. Um, and so what we've done is create a very transparent judging model where people volunteer their time to score and nominate or score and kind of review nominations, they're reading and scoring nominations. And in the background, we're kind of reviewing and scoring judges as well to kind of look for reputation. But but these judges volunteer their time and they come in and they have a you know a profile here, but they get little badges of their own of which awards they've scored. So it's kind of credibility for them as well. And so the on the backside of you know winning awards, maybe you get promotion. Our judges also get promotion for what they do and for the help they give us. So it's it's really an interesting model. It's not, you know, it's not 12 journalists sitting around picking a winner, and it's not a people's choice to see who can, you know, kind of activate their customers the most. All of those are valid for the you know different reasons, but you know, we wanted something that seemed fair and transparent and kind of open to the business community. So that's what we've tried to build.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I would concur on the judging. I was am a uh CES uh innovation judge, and I spent too many hours judging too many products and solutions. And uh it's a lot of work. How do you think about all that effort that goes into judging and then running a whole awards program? This seems like many, many, many person hours, if not weeks of effort.

SPEAKER_01:

It is, and if if you think about it, I came out of out of local media, out of kind of newspapers, if you remember what those were. Um and the judge, the the programs there were interesting because you had, like I said, you had 12 journalists sitting around picking winners. And you know, you kind of wonder who they are and what they do. And as you said, you know, if you're if you're one of 10 judges at C V CES or 20 or 50, holy macro, you've got some work to do, right? There's thousands of booze and thousands of entries. So just the work of processing that is really hard, right? For you in a time, just a time manner, reading all of that. So we always worried about quality. We didn't want a kind of a round table kind of concept where we hired experts or or got AI experts together because it would just be too much work for one group of people. And so that's when we really kind of developed this kind of democratized model of crowdsourcing everything. So, you know, our judges are asked to score usually about eight to 12 nominations in a given program. And so that usually takes about an hour. And so we're only asking for you know all these people to give us an hour. But when you cumulatively add up all those hours, there's there's a lot of hours. Actually, that'd be that would be a cool fun stat to figure out is how many hours of judging did we have. Fascinating. So it's you know, the the number of hours doesn't matter, right? It's just how you break them up. And so we chose to break them up in kind of an easy way for people to to join us into building the community. Fantastic.

SPEAKER_00:

And describe the you know, enterprise marketing landscape now. You you're in a firsthand view of that. Why do these awards matter now and how can they be valuable for marketeers?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, we're seeing a huge shift right now because of AI. And so um the way uh AI searches for information is very different at how humans did and how we've spent as marketers our life uh dealing with SEO, search engine optimization. We're now pivoting to something a lot of people are calling generative AI optimization, so geo, generative engine optimization. Um, and I've actually been working with some companies to look at how we make sure that uh the validation that we're doing and the authentication that we're doing with these businesses is actually getting consumed by AI so that we're a source of validation. And so that's what I think we're we're gonna see more and more in the world is we need to make sure that the AIs are consuming real information and real data, and it's not getting fed by malicious actors. So this is actually proving to be a very interesting market right now for marketers because you're getting that validation and authenticity kind of check mark uh for AI.

SPEAKER_00:

Fantastic. And you've run hundreds of awards programs and participated in many, many of them. Uh, any favorites in terms of awards that you've been involved with or helped manage, co-manage with with clients and partners? Give us some highlights or uh anecdotes, if you would.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, you know, we run your program, which is the We Love Tech Awards. You know, the one I think we talked about this earlier. The one really struck to me are all the where the companies are kind of deploying enterprise tech either internally or externally. And it's an interesting story. The one that again speaks to me was TD Bank. They they really are leveraging technology in very interesting ways, both internally and kind of immersive learning environments to externally and Roblox. They're developing game components and Roblox, which is pretty interesting. So hearing those stories is really always the most interesting part to me. In terms of my the like favorite awards program, um the most meaningful ones, I think, are are the most are the ones that kind of um I remember the most. The first one was uh in our big innovation awards. I don't remember the year, I'd have to go back. Is there was a a winner by the name of Robbie Cabral, who was from a company called um Benji Lock. And so his his idea, this was, I think it was 2018, if I'm right. His idea was a fingerprint lock, right? Totally no-brainer. You know, we have this new technology, it was getting cheap enough. So let's put a fingerprint on a lock. So at the gym, on your bike, whatever, duh, right? Super duh. But he executed it himself. Like he wasn't a huge brand. It was, you know, it was Robbie himself. And he's built this into a really great company. He ended up, I think, doing a deal with uh Westinghouse or one of the big brand manufacturers for locks and and doors. And uh the reason I say it was most memorable is about a week after we announced the winners, our trophy process takes a little bit after we announce winners. Um and he called immediately said, I need a trophy kind of overnight. And I'm like, what's going on? He's he said, I'm going on Shark Tank. And so we worked, we worked with our manufacturer to get a trophy out to him very quick. And so if you look on the website, if you look elsewhere in our materials, you'll see Robbie there uh with Mr. Wonderful. And I think he won, I think he won CES that year, too. So it was a good year for him.

SPEAKER_00:

Wow, that is phenomenal. And it's really satisfying to hear a story like that. It seems like big tech and big dollars are taking over everything on social. Um, even content I create will get, you know, millions of impressions over time. But, you know, someone with a paid campaign will get 10x, 20, 50, 100 times that for the same piece or inferior content. Um this sounds like more of a grassroots way to get your product or service solution noticed. Um as a marketeer, what do you think about all these changes in the social digital landscape? I think um it's looking a little scary when it comes to the dominance of big AI, big tech, the big platforms, and the little guy, whether it's that startup you mentioned or a startup in general who don't have millions of dollars to spend on paid social, paid promotion, paid marketing, SEO, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, well, you know, we've spent we've spent 14 years building this community, and that's what it's turned into. We've had this community of judges and community on social platforms, which has been really, really empowering for me. Just that's kind of what keeps us going, is now we're we look at it as a platform that kind of manages these communities. And um, and so that's been you know very interesting because uh I think as a marketer, you're looking for those communities to get into. Um that's where I think uh where you really start to, you know, sing as a marketer, you where you really find your niche is you get into the communities where people are using your product and you become a part of that community. And so I think AI is driving us towards that. You know, these are you know, awards and and programs like awards are kind of those white hat initiatives. They're your public relations marketing campaigns. They're good. You know, we're not doing anything tricky, we're not trying to trick the AI, we're not trying to trick Google to rank you first. We're just giving you good basic blocking and tackling foundational marketing tactics, you know, to help you kind of elevate your brand, validate your product, and reward your people.

SPEAKER_00:

Brilliant. Yeah, I love that. Communities are king, whether it's like subreddits or you know, certain online uh sort of Slack communities or or others. Uh, they're just Facebook groups, they're just amazing places to connect with like like-minded people. Um, speaking of which, we're building a little community of our own with the We Love Tech Awards. Let me get a plug-in here for folks who might be interested in nominating this uh award. Uh, innovators in the B2B tech landscape, whether it's security or CX or IoT or other applications. Um, oftentimes, you know, B2B tech companies are a bit under the radar, off the radar. They're not getting all the attention that shows like CES. So you presented this as an opportunity to me and my audience uh last year. And I'm really excited about this second annual We Love Tech Awards coming up.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and and these, as you'll see, as we'll see in this journey that we're on with the We Love Tech Awards, these just grow year to year. The communities get bigger, the judges pool gets bigger, everybody gets excited about you know, um, kind of being a part of these programs, especially with the visibility you're bringing and this kind of new angle. It's a new angle for us of this YouTube audience, uh is new for us. So we're we're excited to see, you know, how how we you know kind of move the move the needle here. And it was fun doing the awards show with you last year. That was us doing the awards program. Uh that was that was great. And I know you had a bunch of these winners on your show as well.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, and these are companies, again, who are doing amazing work. They're delivering real value in a practical way, uh, none of the fluff or the hype that you see in in many uh parts of the AI world these days. Um well, so just a final call to action. How can people get involved with you, Russ, in creating their own awards program or in nominating their companies or beyond?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, well, for We Love Tech, it's easy. Go to we love techawards.com. Uh that's an easy one. But for our website, it's B the letter bintelligence.com. Um, we host most of our programs through there, most of all of them are linked through there. We've got a couple of programs that we we host for other groups like Evan and uh some other affinity groups and other corporations who have kind of latched on to the idea of recognition as kind of a marketing platform. So beintelligence.com is the easiest way to find us. It's actually kind of a funny story. We we we started off with big awards.org. So I think you can you can still navigate us to there. But uh when I had the idea for kind of doing this, uh I was working in a marketing environment and I was talking to my team. I said, There's got to be a better way of doing this. And they're like, Well, yeah, I said, I said, I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna start it up. They're like, What will you call the company? I go, I I don't know, big awards. And they were like, What would what would it stand for? I go, Business Intelligence Group. And so there we are. So we have the business intelligence group, and our first program was the Big Awards for business, uh, which we just got done with our 13th year. So pretty amazing.

SPEAKER_00:

What a journey. Well, here's to a rewarding 2026, pun intended. And uh thanks for joining Russ. Appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me on, Adam. And thanks for listening, checking out the website, applying to the We Love Tech Awards, uh, My Awards program with Russ. And um, I'll see you at CS. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Russ. Thanks.