Award shows are big business these days. With PVRs taking a bite out of ad revenues, event-style programming has never been more important to broadcasters’ bottom lines.

So the opportunity for the still relatively new Canadian Screen Awards is significant: more viewers benefits not only the talent and the industry at large, but broadcaster CBC and the red-carpet-show ecosystem that surrounds the event.

As such, new CSAs producer Rick Chisholm’s main challenge isn’t getting nominated Canadian film and TV actors to preen and pose at the 2015 Screenies. He needs people to tune in, stayed tuned and talk about it afterwards.

Chisholm and fellow producer Dan Cimoroni are the new team behind the CSA’s production. Both are major-sports-events veterans, with Chishom having overseen pre-Olympic and Olympic on-air broadcasts across platforms for Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium during the 2010 Vancouver Olympics and the 2012 London Games, and Cimoroni having worked with the Consortium on the sales and marketing side.

Their strategy for the 2015 awards is to amp up viewer recognition of, and connection with, industry talent.

“It’s about context,” says Chisholm of the guiding principal behind the revamped Screenies. “If you identify each performer as we go through the evening, you’ll get a lot of ‘wow, oh yeah, I know them.”

The show’s new packaging starts with the venue itself.

To dial up the glamour, Chisholm and Cimoroni have chosen a new awards show venue, the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto, an impressive glass and brick structure on the city’s boulevard-like University Avenue. With that alone, the CSA’s vaults into the city’s cultural core, where a procession of limos and gowns is sure to attract attention.

Second, the red carpet.

This year’s awards show will scrap the traditional red-carpet broadcast portion that counts down to the host’s entrance. Instead, they’ll let the conventional networks handle the step-and-repeat for them via entertainment show specials.

“Dan and Rick have convinced us that there’s a way to use our precious broadcast real estate to tell more articulate stories about who the stars of the night are and why they’re being honoured for their work,” explains Martin Katz, chair, Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television (ACCT) and president, Prospero Pictures.

And third, there’s the broadcast itself.

More on-screen supers and voice-overs will be used to identify talent in the show, in addition to slick clip packages to boost talent recognition.

“Every time someone comes on the screen, there’s either a voice-over narration or a bottom-line super to give just a little bit information,” Chisholm says.

They will only have two hours – and the same budget as the CSA’s first two years – to hook or lose Canadians with their national screen awards.

But the hope, and the goal, is to create enough impact to connect Canadians with the success of homegrown talent such David Cronenberg or Jean-Marc Vallée, and to showrunners for TV hits like Orphan Black and Rookie Blue.

After all, Canadian actors and directors may shine in Los Angeles, but it’s the overall performance of the industry back home that most encourages mainstream Canadians to choose to watch a homegrown TV show or film over Hollywood fare.

The Canadian Screen Awards success will in part depend on audiences making those connections. In 2013, the much hyped new Screenies earned 789,000 (2+) viewers but 2014 saw the audience dip to 545,000 (2+).

Absent an emotional connection, Chisholm says, viewers are likely to switch channels before the prize-giving gets to the night’s biggest categories. But they may not know what they are missing out on.

“That’s what we want to keep hammering home  to the Canadian public. Canadian TV and film production is on par with anyone else in the world. What it doesn’t have is the power of the American machine,” Chisholm explained.