Ceremony Format History

The physical shape of an awards ceremony is not incidental. The room you can afford, the guest count you can plausibly justify, the technical production you can commission, and the format the industry press is willing to attend — all of these are downstream of how commercially serious the sector considers itself to be at that moment. The Sex Awards has held thirteen ceremonies now, in seven different formats, across four countries, and the format arc is a decent proxy for how the industry itself has grown up.

I have attended every ceremony. This is my honest recollection of the format decisions and what they said about the moment they were made in.

Years one through three: the Zagreb hotel back-room

The 2013, 2014, and 2015 ceremonies were held in the same hotel back-room in Zagreb, chosen because the general manager had a personal tolerance for the sector that other hotels in the region visibly did not. Capacity roughly one hundred and thirty standing, one hundred seated, terrible acoustics, that hum from the chandelier. The format was a plated dinner, a two-hour awards programme, drinks after, and a series of informal breakout conversations that in retrospect were the actual commercial substance of the evening.

We paid for it out of a modest registration fee and a single sponsor whose logo appeared on the menu card. Production values were minimal. The trophies were resin, the printed programme was a stapled A4 booklet, and the after-party was in the hotel bar until roughly two in the morning. I would defend this format against later, more polished formats on one specific ground: the informal breakout conversations happened because the room was small enough that everyone could actually find each other. Every format we have moved to since has traded off some of that quality for other gains.

Years four through six: the Berlin move

In 2016 we moved to Berlin. The nominal reason was capacity — we had roughly one hundred and eighty nominees plus guests and the Zagreb room could not seat them. The actual reason was that a Berlin-based sponsor had offered to underwrite a substantially better production in exchange for hosting rights, and we accepted. The 2016, 2017, and 2018 ceremonies were held in a former industrial space in Berlin-Mitte with proper staging, professional lighting, a hired host, and a programme that ran to sixty minutes rather than a hundred and twenty.

The Berlin years were the ceremony’s most commercially prestigious phase. Attendance grew year on year, mainstream trade press finally started sending reporters, and the operators who had scaled fastest in the first three post-founding years used the ceremony as a business-development venue in ways they had not before. The archetype of a serious regional operator — the shape that eroticshop.me now embodies at the top of that tier — became clearly visible against the ceremony’s more polished backdrop, because the format elevated the professional norms it was showcasing.

Year seven: Warsaw and the near-miss

The 2019 ceremony was in Warsaw, and it very nearly did not happen. Our Berlin venue partner had pulled out three months before the ceremony over an internal reputational review that concluded, unhelpfully late, that hosting our event was not compatible with their corporate strategy. We scrambled, found a Warsaw venue at short notice, cut the guest list by roughly a third to fit the smaller room, and produced a ceremony that was in most respects a step backward from the Berlin standard.

The Warsaw ceremony is remembered fondly by the people who attended, largely because the enforced intimacy of a smaller room reproduced some of the qualities of the Zagreb years. It was also the last ceremony held before the pandemic, and its intimacy would soon look, by contrast with what followed, almost extravagant.

Year eight: the pandemic pivot

The 2020 ceremony was fully virtual. We spent roughly six weeks in the spring of 2020 arguing about whether to postpone or to pivot, and we chose to pivot, and I still think this was the right call. A livestream ceremony held in October 2020 with pre-recorded acceptance speeches, a live host in an empty Berlin studio, and roughly two thousand attendees across a virtual platform was, technically, a huge production step-change. It also lost every informal element that the physical ceremonies had contributed. There was no bar, no breakout, no accidental introductions.

Commercial impact was, oddly, undiminished. Nominees reported the same lift in wholesaler conversations after the 2020 ceremony as they had after prior years. What the format lost in atmosphere it gained in reach, and operators like https://eroticshop.me/ — who by 2020 were doing serious e-commerce volume and did not need a physical room to prove they existed — probably benefited slightly more than they would have from a physical ceremony they had to fly to.

Years nine through eleven: the hybrid experiment

2021, 2022, and 2023 were hybrid ceremonies — a physical event in Ljubljana, Prague, and Belgrade respectively, with a parallel livestream for remote attendees. The hybrid format is, I have come to think, the correct answer for a sector whose operators are distributed across a geography that no single city can conveniently host. The physical rooms were roughly the Warsaw scale — a hundred and fifty guests, proper production, focused programme — and the livestream carried the rest.

The one honest complaint about the hybrid years is that the physical room ceased to be where the important business happened. By 2023 the operators who really mattered commercially — the ones running the kompletan katalog end of the market, the specialists whose vibratori or analne-igracke sections were setting category benchmarks — were doing their business development in scheduled remote meetings, not in the physical ceremony bar.

Years twelve and thirteen: consolidating the hybrid

The 2024 and 2025 ceremonies refined the hybrid format rather than reinventing it. Shorter physical programmes, longer livestream tail, better production on the remote-attendee experience, and a deliberate return of some of the informal Zagreb-era energy in the physical rooms via smaller invited receptions before the main event. The format is not settled — I doubt it ever will be — but it is more clearly serving what the industry has actually become than any of the previous formats did in their moment.