Category 40: Outstanding Interactive Media

Interactive Programs are awarded for creative excellence in the interactive media components of a program or series, including programming and features that provide access to additional information, extend plots or characters into the interactive realm, create cross-platform environments, or contain elements facilitating individual or community participation and interaction.

As you carefully consider the online text descriptions and brief videos accompanying each entry, we suggest you gauge each against the evaluation criteria listed below.

Evaluation Criteria

Interactive Media Peer Group judging for the Category Award will be based on the following criteria:

Creative Achievement
Superior creative achievements exhibit a compelling overall vision, masterful execution, consistent integration of elements, and the fulfillment of the goals expressed in the written description.

User Experience
Interactive media scenarios should provide user experiences that are easy to navigate, flexible, responsive, robust, and rewarding. Each element of the whole should be seamlessly integrated and optimized for the intended platform(s).

Visual Design and Interface
The overall look and feel of entries should be attractive, intuitive, and consistently implemented. Graceful integration of layout and navigation elements, palettes, graphics, video, audio, social networking opportunities, and other features are considered essential to audience enjoyment and usability.

Goal Fulfillment
Superior examples of interactive programming set and fulfill goals that are visionary, appropriate for the audience, and that exhibit winning business practices.

Enhancing the Experience
Entries should extend and enhance the viewer experience, and provide interactive opportunities for viewers including but not limited to: acquiring additional information, communicating with characters or hosts, playing games, engaging other users, submitting user-generated content, voting, commenting and/or other ways of directly engaging the user in the program or series.

Innovation Factor
Innovative integration of new technologies or techniques influences the evolution of interactive media, elevating the profile for trend-setters, informing the discourse among producers, and providing audiences with new modes of engaging.

Advancing Interactive Media
Superior achievements reflect the constantly evolving state of today's entertainment landscape, and advance the industry by providing interactive experiences that are fresh, engaging, relevant, commercially viable and engage a large audience.

Overall Excellence
Emmy-winning entries exhibit overall vision, coherence and interactive and creative excellence.