ometimes the old saying is true: It’s not what you’ve got, but how you use it. Few people know this better than the winners of EXHIBITOR Magazine’s 10th Annual All-Star Awards. Facing seemingly insurmountable challenges — including everything from a new product launch to a complete program overhaul — this year’s winners didn’t plump up their programs with shiny new bells and whiz-bang whistles. Rather, they used their existing internal resources and solid marketing principles to sidestep their challenges, improve their programs, and increase their companies’ ROI in the process.

When one winner’s budget dried up, she didn’t look to exhibit vendors to solve her woes, she eliminated them. Using her company’s storage space and her own organizational skills, she brought her exhibit inventory and management in house, eventually decreasing per-show exhibiting costs by 90 percent.

Facing a 50-percent budget cut, another winner identified the most effective aspects of her program and successfully redirected her creative energy and remaining money toward them — a back-to-basics approach that also increased sales leads by 20 percent.

Please join us in congratulating this year’s All-Star Award winners. Hailed by judges as “resourceful” marketers with “big-thinker” strategies, our ingenious innovators have not only navigated their way through a checkerboard of challenges, they’ve also mastered the art of doing more with less.

Foot Traffic
Hotflops creator Linda Spann puts her best foot forward and develops a trade show promotion that nets $100,000 worth of orders at the 2007 Campus Marketing Expo.