EXHIBITOR Magazine's 15th Annual Sizzle Awards

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JUDGES

Kevin Walters, marketing
communications project manager, Texas Instruments Inc., Dallas

Jeannine K. Swan, president and owner, Global Exhibit
Management, Fort Worth, TX

Susan Shuttleworth, director of corporate marketing communications, TransCore, Carrollton, TX

Jim Dawson, president,
Dawson Marketing Group, Southlake, TX

Andrea Lamarsaude, principal, Lamarsaude Communications, Dallas

ack in Biblical times when merchants first began offering their wares at trade fairs, exhibiting was a piece of cake. The folks selling frankincense and myrrh, for example, could draw a crowd by doing little more than just standing in their stalls and displaying their products. After all, when demand exceeds supply, consumers flock to your space like land-loving animals to the ark.

Fast forward to 2012, when supply typically exceeds demand, and yesterday's frankincense and myrrh are currently available in 45 different varieties offered by 300 retailers, most of which have both brick-and-mortar and online outlets. Today, exhibiting is more of a trek up Mt. Sinai than a casual cake walk. Even if you have a stellar exhibit, a unique product, and an in-your-face exhibit location, the likelihood of attendees making a beeline to your booth is about the same as a politician escaping the hellfire of Sodom and Gomorrah.

These days, then, exhibitors' salvation - and any hope of a solid return on investment - rests in marketing promotions. Via traffic builders and mailers, giveaways and presentations, savvy exhibitors can enlist a host of tactics to generate show-wide awareness, and garner more attendee attention than a burning-bush sighting.

To offer exhibitors a bit of inspiration, EXHIBITOR hosts its annual Sizzle Awards. Now in its 15th year, the competition honors exhibit-promotion strategies that provide the perfect marriage of inventive ideas and killer results.

Our 2012 panel of judges, comprising marketing and promotions experts, met this summer in Dallas to scrutinize entries in nine categories. While temps soared outside, jurors coolly perused the candidates, ultimately searching for those that rivaled a walk on water in terms of unexpectedness, and that offered more hard-core returns than those magical baskets bearing an endless supply of loaves and fish.

After a full day of analysis, judges settled on five winners. Each had a bit of attention-getting creative genius - such as an 18-foot-tall, traffic-building human effigy fashioned after Burning Man, and real grandmothers posing as exhibit staffers. But they also cooked up sweet results as well, generating 3 million social-media impressions and attracting 48 percent of the show's target audience. So all hail this year's Sizzle Award winners. May their inventive, not to mention successful, promotions be your inspirational exhibit-marketing salvation. E