udging by their award-worthy strategies, the winners of EXHIBITOR Magazine's 17th annual All-Star Awards each took a page straight from French philosopher Voltaire. For it was their inventive thoughts and strategic visions – as opposed to whiz-bang multimedia systems or expensive agency-based "concepting and realization" – that ultimately solved their companies' marketing conundrums and scored them a coveted All-Star Award to boot. Take Noelle Luchino Feist, event marketing manager for Mindbody Inc. Challenged to devise a new audience-centric exhibit-marketing campaign, she "insourced" everything from brainstorming and collateral creation to graphics and exhibit design. Together with her internal brain trust, Feist conjured a "Bold-themed" campaign that had already exceeded annual lead projections by 7 percent by the end of the company's third financial quarter. Plus, the idea was so perfectly suited to Mindbody's market that the firm adopted it as its new global marketing concept.

Along these same lines, Kathleen Gunderson, CTSM, assistant vice president at Wells Fargo Home Mortgage (a division of Wells Fargo Bank N.A.), used her noggin rather than her pocketbook to improve the attendee experience in her exhibit. By focusing on experiential activities as opposed to the exhibit structure, and trimming costs on everything from labor to shipping, she created a smart, integrated campaign that increased attendee engagement and exhibit effectiveness in one fell swoop.

Similarly Donna Castillo and Tina Kruse used little more than their heads to craft award-winning strategies. Castillo, the senior global event marketing manager at Atmel Corp., reallocated her company's event-marketing dollars to create the Atmel Tech on Tour Mobile Trailer, an event-marketing vehicle whose more than 180 tour stops across the country helped ratchet up Atmel's visibility without increasing the marketing budget. Meanwhile, Kruse, the global exhibitions and events manager for FMC Technologies Inc., restructured nearly every organizational aspect of her company's exhibit program – a complex undertaking that saved hundreds of thousands of dollars over a five-year period.

So please join us in congratulating our four newly crowned All-Star Award winners. Their stellar strategies and inventive campaigns prove that you don't need a multimillion-dollar budget, 4,000-square-foot exhibit, or a 30-person creative team to generate hard-core results. Rather, if you're smart and strategic, an assault of ideas can be a deadly weapon.

PANEL OF judges
David Althaus, manager of events and promotions, John Deere Construction & Forestry, Moline, IL; Jan Aument, CTSM, trade show and event coordinator, BASF Corp., Shakopee, MN; Steven Marchese, CTSM, manager of corporate events, Fujifilm Medial Systems USA Inc., Stamford, CT; Susan Shuttleworth, exhibit-marketing consultant, McKinney, TX; Judy Volker, marketing director, Iatric Systems Inc., Boxford, MA