WDIV has been honored with two Digital Innovation Awards from the Local Media Association: A first-place win for the station's "Vote 4 The Best" campaign, and second-place honors for "4Frenzy."

The LMA contest recognizes the best in local digital media in 15 categories, such as best local website, best virtual event, best branded content strategy and more.

"Vote 4 The Best" and "4Frenzy" were honored as contests/promotional campaigns.

"Vote 4 The Best" was a highly anticipated contest that turned out to be not only successful but award-winning. It allows locals to nominate and vote for all different kinds of their favorite Michigan businesses. It builds in a bit of free advertising for area businesses, with a spot on the website and the ability to share a direct voting link.

The voting ballot remains a go-to guide of local businesses all year long. Additionally, "Vote 4 The Best" provides window clings to storefronts, and digital graphics to the top five winners in each category, which totaled about 940 in the main contest alone.

Here's a judge's note: "They took a yearly contest and added categories that were specific to the pandemic, to honor businesses that were doing great work, like (in) customer safety. This inclusion of categories that recognized added challenges of the past year led to more engagement and revenue."

As for "4Frenzy," these traditional campaigns have always been about celebrating high school students' hard work and passion surrounding sports, academics and school spirit (with a nomination and voting period each season), but this year, they needed to do something different because the pandemic changed the lives of so many seniors.

Here's another judge's note: "This news (organization) made the effort to change their yearly promotion/contest to highlight seniors who had not gotten their usual chance to sign through graduation and events."