Corporate EVENT magazine - Article: 2009 Corporate EVENT Awards, Fall 2009

Mark Erwin
is currently the senior manager of Intel Corp.’s Intel Developer Forum program, and is based in Hillsboro, OR.

Stuart Gold,
vice president,
field and partner marketing, at Orem, UT-based Omniture Inc., has more than 23 years of worldwide marketing experience.

Angeline Grace
Close, PhD,
is a marketing professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and conducts consumer research in event marketing.

Brad Hogan is a 15-year veteran of the events industry and is currently the head of global events at Aruba Networks Inc. in Sunnyvale, CA.

Kirk Hover is the director of productions at Encore Productions Inc. in Las Vegas, where he oversees operations, post facilities, and live events.

Allison Saget,
an event marketing consultant based
in San Francisco, is the author of “The Event Marketing Handbook.”

awards

imes are tough for event marketers. With the industry under scrutiny and budgets and jobs being slashed, many event-marketing professionals have decided to play dead, assuming that if they don’t twitch a single marketing muscle, maybe their programs will go unnoticed by the corporate machine and both their events and their butts will be saved.

Meanwhile, smart marketers — those who understand that face-to-face event marketing delivers value far and above what individual sales calls and most other marketing tactics offer — are quietly marching along with their heads held high. Of course, most of them have been forced to streamline their spending, ratchet up their events’ effectiveness, and prove their programs’ worth again and again. But rather than being frozen by fear, they soldier on, not only generating leads and sales for their companies — but avoiding the economic hacksaw in the process.

The winners of Corporate EVENT Magazine’s Sixth Annual Corporate EVENT Awards were born of this latter group of plucky event marketers. Despite increasing costs, diminishing budgets, and the public’s negative misperceptions, this year’s four winners developed innovative strategies that proved their programs’ worth and garnered bottom-line results in the process.

Holed up in a Las Vegas boardroom for the better part of nine hours, the panel of judges (a team of six event-marketing experts) eventually settled on four winners, which they lauded as “surprising,” “brilliant,” and “totally on target with the market, not to mention the state of the industry.”

So please join us in congratulating this year’s Corporate EVENT Award winners. Here’s hoping their courageous execution will help you ignite the fires of imagination for your own program — and help squelch your fears in the process.

The Winners:

War Games Losing the battle for recruits, the U.S. Army tracks attendees’ behavior in a virtual-reality mobile exhibit that generates more than $3 million worth of publicity.

Dream Job Global Events ID Corp. S.L. revisits a 12-year-old private client showcase and morphs it into a sold-out theatrical performance that generates 10 new contracts — and recoups all of its costs to boot.

Fashion Fiesta To generate sales and awareness for Spanish fashion designers, the Spain-U.S. Chamber of Commerce Inc. hosts a multi-store SoHo shopping spree, luring 600 New York fashionistas to visit all participating stores and increasing same-day and post-event sales by 20 percent.

Engineering an Efficient Event Daimler Trucks North America generates 16 million media impressions with a bare-bones press event that puts its alternative-fuel vehicles front and center.