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| ALL-STAR |
 Jan Aument, CTSM, started her career in trade show and event planning with BASF SE in 2000. In 2004 she took over responsibility for her division's program including approximately 50 shows each year, a national sales conference, and various meetings that include contractor training and customer roundtable events. |
oncrete. As the foundation - literally - of the construction industry, it is as essential to building projects as lumber and nails. So when the new housing market suffered its spectacular fall in 2007, it took some 5,000 companies in the cement, concrete, and construction-material business tumbling with it. And as state and local governments grappled with their own funding woes, not even road and infrastructure projects, which typically account for more than 50 percent of the demand for concrete, could prop up the sagging market during the housing decline. The effects on the $60 billion industry were nothing short of catastrophic, and by 2009 concrete consumption had dropped to half the level it had been at just two years earlier.
Nowhere was this backslide more apparent than in the aisles of World of Concrete, which had once been the world's biggest marketplace for the commercial concrete and masonry industries. In prerecession days, the show floor was filled with a vibrant mix of decision makers and work crews, but the trimmed budgets of many firms relegated attendance to managers alone.
It would seem that as long as the people making purchasing decisions were still attending, companies like BASF SE could justify continuing to exhibit. But Jan Aument, CTSM, trade show and event coordinator for the construction-chemical company, found herself struggling to convince company brass it was a worthwhile expense. For even with decision makers at the show, the lead counts had been declining, and several of BASF's competitors had stopped exhibiting.
Aument, confident that the industry would bounce back, was reluctant to pass on World of Concrete because it would mean giving up a prime booth location and potentially sending the message that BASF's position in the industry was soft. In addition, she served on an advisory board for the show, and believed that it would once again be a vital marketplace when the economy improved. She went to the mat for the show and won, but wondered how to restore its vitality and, with it, the value for BASF.
To better understand the dynamics in play, Aument reached out to some of BASF's customers to ask why they no longer attended World of Concrete. She found the same answer across the board - an invitation to the show was considered a reward for work crews, and companies pulled back the perk when business slowed. Managers she spoke to were regretful about the change and said they tried to find other ways to recognize hard-working crews, but funding trips to Las Vegas for workers was impossible in the hobbled industry.
The conversations confirmed what Aument suspected, but they also gave her an epiphany. Thinking back to earlier years and the multitude of construction crews on the World of Concrete show floor, she realized it was their rowdy presence that made the show come alive. And while they may not have been actual buyers, crew members were the hands-on users who benefitted most from demos
of BASF's joint sealants,
waterproofing materials, and other chemical products. Company managers relied heavily on their referrals for purchasing decisions, and though crew members didn't sign the checks, they rocked as purchase influencers for BASF. "If the workers love it and endorse it, they will get it from the decision makers," Aument says. So she set out to get those crews back to World of Concrete. The question was how.
Creative Inspiration
The answer came to Aument while she was on a flight in May of 2011, headed for the World of Concrete annual advisory board meeting. With the decline in attendees and exhibitors in recent years, she knew the group's charge was to brainstorm ways to somehow build the show back to its prerecession numbers. Thumbing through a magazine, she stumbled upon an answer.
The article she found was about a poultry show with lagging attendance in Atlanta. Organizers had come up with a contest that would fly winners to the show, and Aument's wheels started turning. What if, she wondered, World of Concrete could devise a similar contest that would recognize the hard work of labor crews and fly the winning group to Las Vegas for World of Concrete?
By the time she reached the advisory-board meeting at the offices of show organizer Hanley Wood LLC, Aument was bursting with a loosely formed but entirely brilliant idea to pitch to Hanley Wood and her colleagues on the board: The show and exhibitors could collaborate to sponsor a contest that would allow bosses to nominate their concrete crews for exceptional work. Each crew's nomination could appear on a website where people could vote for them, and the winning team would get an all-expenses-paid trip to World of Concrete. It would build enthusiasm
around the show, it would give managers a way to recognize their employees, and it would get at least a crew or two back on the show floor. It was, Aument felt sure, the answer World of Concrete needed.
Everyone at Hanley Wood loved the concept and believed it was just the kind of thing that World of Concrete needed. By mid-June, Aument and two Hanley Wood execs - Jackie James, director of World of Concrete, and Steve Pomerantz, senior marketing manager - were in full swing creating a promotion they had very little time to implement. The show was scheduled for January, and registration materials were slated to start going out by the end of August, so that meant the three had to work fast. But first, and key, in the brainstorming process was how to create an aura around the contest that generated excitement and made crews want to be a part of it.
What could be more exciting, the team decided, than depicting crew members as rock stars? The contest was dubbed Crews That Rock, and the team had a dramatic logo created that pictured an electric guitar shooting flames next to the silhouette of a concrete worker. It oozed cool and played off words in a way that cleverly wrapped in concrete and appealed to the inner rock star in everyone.
The contest was structured to offer trips for three crews based on the total number of votes received on a World of Concrete Web page. To gain visibility, voting buttons were also featured on the websites of BASF, the International Concrete Repair Institute, and the American Concrete Institute. Crews could self-nominate or be submitted by others, and each entry had to include a photo and a paragraph or two explaining why this was an exceptional crew that deserved to win. The contest was scheduled to be promoted in all preregistration materials as well as through a special email blast, and entrants and winners were to be splashed across banners at the show.
Unsure how much interest they could generate on the short timeline, the group set some modest goals: 20 entries, 2,500 votes, a 10-percent open rate on the e-blast, and, for BASF, a 25-percent increase in the number of leads over the previous year.
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Rock the Vote
Forty-nine concrete crews from across the country entered or were nominated by their supervisors for the Crews That Rock contest for a chance to win an all-expenses-paid trip to the World of Concrete show. Entries comprised photos of the crews and paragraphs explaining why they deserved to win. |
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A Chart-Topping Idea
The response to Crews That Rock was like a landslide, and it seemed Aument's idea had touched just the right nerve with crews and managers alike. The e-blast announcing the program in September had a 21-percent open rate among recipients, creating 42,000 impressions. Entries poured in, with 49 received by the time the contest window closed. And people cast a total of 13,344 online votes for crews.
A byproduct of the contest, Aument said, was that communities across the country were getting behind concrete workers by casting votes for their hometown crews, and the contest served to connect them not only to the show but also to people who appreciate their work. "These crews are in the trenches, and they deserve recognition for the hard work they do," Aument says. "It was a great way to honor them and get people involved. The contest brought attention back to the show whether the crews were going or not, but it also put the spotlight on them in their own communities."
Concrete Construction Magazine got behind the promotion as well, featuring information about the Crews That Rock contest in its e-newsletters from October through January for more than 88,000 brand impressions. Additional email blasts and printed pre-show mailings also promoted the contest to 185,000 companies, contractors, and workers. By the time World of Concrete was set to open its doors in January, its website, which prominently featured Crews That Rock info, had received 400,000 page views.
With such a resounding response in the months leading up to World of Concrete, Hanley Wood expanded its marketing of the contest at the show as well. It generated a 20-foot graphic to hang in the registration area that depicted photos of each team that entered, and produced a video about the contest that played on monitors throughout the venue for the duration of the show. An additional 20-by-8-foot banner hung inside the exhibit hall along with three towering double-sided signs featuring crew photographs, and stories about the winners were featured in the show daily. With such sweeping pre- and at-show promotions, there were likely few among the 48,500 attendees at World of Concrete in January of 2012 who were not aware of the contest.
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 "The contest brought attention back to the show whether the crews were going or not, but it also put the spotlight on them in their own
communities." |
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Attendance at the show was up, and Aument noted more work crews on the floor than the previous year. Other than the three winning crews that received trips, she can't say with certainty that it was the contest that spurred trips for crews to the show, but several that visited the exhibit were Crews That Rock entrants.
Fame and Fortune
Winning construction crews were
presented with their awards during
an informal ceremony in the BASF booth, where Aument and her team made a big production out of giving
winners their prizes. Each crew
received a plaque, and each member was given a shirt emblazoned with the Crews That Rock logo as well as a bag filled with goodies including BASF samples. A crowd gathered to watch the presentation and crews being photographed in front of an 8-foot-tall Crews That Rock banner in the booth. For BASF, it was an unprecedented amount of show-floor exposure.
Between the goodwill associated with BASF's name - thanks to the contest and the fanfare staffers created for crews - the 50-by-50-foot exhibit became the bustling space it had been in the past. More importantly, by the end of the show Aument's team garnered a 51-percent increase in leads gathered compared to the previous year. "The response was unbelievable," Aument says. "Having crews back in the booth gave them the chance to handle our products and recommend them to their bosses. The costs for this sponsorship were nominal compared to the return we got."
All-Star Awards judges admired Aument's tenacity and creativity when it came to improving her company's exhibiting experience and the show as a whole. "This is a benchmark on how to work with show management and develop a sponsorship that creates
consumer goodwill for a brand," one judge said. "To come up with a sponsorship that had impressive results and the full support of show management is a significant accomplishment in a down economy."
Aument believes the secret of the promotion's success was that it reached out to attendees on a more personal level. "It showed that World of Concrete and BASF care about attendees and the hard work they do," she says. "There is no us without them, and we let them know that our company recognizes the value they bring to the construction industry, and that we miss them when they are not at the show."
The Crews That Rock contest is in full swing for the 2013 World of Concrete, and BASF is once again the sole sponsor of the promotion. More than 100 online publications featured information about the contest when it was announced, and Aument expects the response to easily surpass figures from 2012. With additional time to plan, the contest has grown to include a reception where 2013 winners will be recognized, something that Aument
hopes will further the celebrity aura of Crews That Rock. "We will have a bar and some hors d'oeuvres and invite the press - we're going to really make them feel like rock stars," she says. Moreover, World of Concrete has established a Crews That Rock Hall of Fame on its website, where BASF's logo will continue to appear as the company that made their stardom possible.
But at the end of the day, the real superstar might be Aument, who found a way to make her trade show program rock even as the marketplace around her crumbled. By devising a sponsorship that not only boosted BASF but also was a win for the show and attendees, she earned herself a spot in a different hall of fame as an EXHIBITOR Magazine All-Star Award winner. E
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