As everyone knows, the advertising industry loves its awards. Each year work from the traditional channels of Print, TV, and Radio are hailed at the Cannes Lions, the Clios, and the Addys on the national and international level and at far too many to mention on the regional and local level.

Interactive has grown to become a part of these grand award shows (plus they have some big ones of their own), but has not really taken a starring role. Sure the work that has won awards is amazing — there just doesn’t seem to be as much emphasis placed on winning awards in the interactive arena.

This probably has something to do with the interactive industry’s focus on the newest technology and what the next project will be. On the whole, web developers and designers just don’t get as excited about something that came out almost a full year ago, because 3 bigger, better, much cooler things have been created already that topped it. Plus the traditional award show can get extremely expensive and is judged by a small panel of people.

But Google may change all that. In the second half of last year, Google launched their version of an interactive focused award show.

“Get inspired by the digital work of others — and share your own great ideas.”

The Creative Sandbox allows users to submit their FREE entries with images, descriptions and details on the technologies used to build their campaign. Once a project is submitted, people visiting the site are then allowed to add comments and vote based on three categories “That’s Smart,” “That’s Fun,” & “That’s Cool.” The most popular campaigns at any given moment are featured on the site’s homepage and you can spend hours digging through all the great case studies that have been submitted.

Beyond their name in the title, the only other major self-serving portion of the site lies in the “More Stuff “ section. Here Google has listed tools and resources, made by Google, all about marketing in the interactive space. All good items, and if you only have time to check out one of them, take a look at the “Digital Creativity Guidebook”. A really well done online pop-up book that features some of the ways you can use Google products to expand your brand presence online.