hat’s the difference between an exhibit promotion that sizzles and one that fizzles? According to the six judges of EXHIBITOR Magazine’s 11th Annual Sizzle Awards, it’s all about matching your product to your promotion.

Holed up on the 27th floor of a Chicago high-rise, this year’s judges — a wily crowd of marketers skilled in a variety of fields, including everything from advertising and direct mail to marketing academics — identified product and customer appropriateness as the overarching tenet of all good exhibit promotions. “Too many programs throw a race car or gambling promotion into the booth and call it a day,” one Sizzle Awards judge said. “But promotions should be inherently linked to their products and companies. They shouldn’t be random activities you could plop down in any exhibitor’s booth.”

Using that principle as a guide, judges selected seven winners from four different categories. Among them, the panel singled out MG Design Associates, a winner in the Integrated Program category, for its ability to develop an unexpected yet spot-on kitchen theme that was brilliantly executed throughout its program. “An Idea Kitchen is a radical departure from a typical booth theme — and yet it works,” one judge said. “A booth can and perhaps should be like a kitchen, where people gather for food and friendly conversation, not a hard-core sales pitch.”

Along these same lines, judges also honored Inquisite Inc. for its VIP mailer, which was a bull’s-eye hit with targeted high-level executives. The clever 3-D package not only made it past executives’ administrative gatekeepers, it lured 72 percent of recipients to visit Inquisite’s Web site and experience its product two weeks before the trade show even opened.

Judges also recognized Veka Inc. for the innovative in-booth product demonstration of its hurricane-proof windows, which consisted of a wind tunnel, sound effects, and visual aids to simulate a storm. “So many people would have simply stuck the windows on a back wall,” one judge said. “This exhibitor put the people into an experience with the product.”

All in all, this year’s seven winners developed hot promotions that not only rang true with judges, they also rang up big results for exhibitors, scoring everything from a four-fold lead increase to three times the number of expected RFPs received as a result of the show. So hat’s off to this year’s winners, each of which created sizzling (not fizzling) promotional concepts that generated red-hot results.e