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2011 JUDGES |
 Chris Bombarger, events manager, National Instruments Corp., Austin, TX
 Andrea Boos, events marketing manager, Siemens Healthcare, Malvern, PA
 Angeline Grace Close PhD, professor of marketing, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
 Allison Saget, event marketing consultant, author of "The Event Marketing Handbook," San Francisco
 Marc Wallis, events program manager, Intel Corp., Portland, OR
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n the midst of the Great Recession, few event marketers dared to believe Sam Cooke's promise that "A Change Is Gonna Come." And the
pessimists among us likely thought that change would take the form of even smaller marketing budgets and a more dismal industry outlook. But starting near the middle of 2010, change cautiously peeked over the horizon - and shined a bit of light on the exhibit and event industries.
Shortly after companies felt the first glorious rays of change - and budget purse strings started to slacken ever so slightly - they began looking for new and inventive ways to market their products and improve existing events that had been in "maintain and survive" mode for the last few years. Coming out of a "less is more" mentality, companies slowly began to think that a little more marketing might help procure precious sales, now that customers' and prospects' pocketbooks were looking less anorexic. But as one might imagine, management expected that a little more marketing cash would equate to a lot more return on investment.
Not surprisingly, then, the winners of the 2011 Corporate Event Awards are prime examples of marketers that burst out of the recession with increased optimism and inventive new marketing
strategies that garnered hard-core results. Judged by a team of five event-marketing experts, who evaluated this year's entrants from within the confines of a Las Vegas boardroom in March,
our award-winning programs feature not only inventive new tactics and sizzling-hot strategies, but also a touch of the "wow" factor that for the most part had been on hiatus since 2008.
Granted, the economy has a long way to go to
get back to pre-recession standards, and that "less is more" mantra is likely still running through our heads like a bad advertising jingle. But as our winners have proven, the grease to keep our new lean, mean marketing machines purring may just be a strategic dab of something more.
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