J U D G E S
	Rich Butwinick is president and founder of MarketingLab Inc. in Minneapolis. He has more than 20 years of experience in sales, marketing, and promotions. In 2000, Butwinick created MarketingLab, which specializes in consumer promotion, shopper marketing, and field marketing and has been ranked in Promo Magazine’s Promo 100 for the last three years. Sam Thompson is president and founder of Minneapolis-based MetroConnections Inc., a destination-management company that offers conference, event production, and tours and transportation services. Thompson is also a past president of the Association of Destination Management Executives. Carol Wilkie, CTSM, is the director of administration and stewardship at the University of St. Thomas, in St. Paul, MN, where she is responsible for all aspects of donor stewardship and recognition. However, Wilkie has spent most of her career in trade show and event marketing, serving as director of marketing and advertising at Forward Technology.

ou might have a stunning booth, a killer product, and a spot-on location on the trade show floor, but without an effective exhibit-promotion strategy, you’ve got a Smoothie King’s chance in the Sahara that attendees will wander into your exhibit space, engage in conversation, and become potential customers.

To honor the powerful role promotions play in exhibit effectiveness, and to provide readers with proven ideas to inspire their own programs, EXHIBITOR hosts the annual Sizzle Awards competition and devotes its October issue to the winners. Now in its 10th year, the Sizzle Awards honor exhibit-promotion strategies that don’t merely look hot, they also generate cold, hard, quantifiable results.

This year’s judges gathered in Minneapolis in June to pore over entries in 12 categories, including the Best Promotion in 10 Years category, a one-time category to commemorate the competition’s 10th anniversary and honor some of the best programs launched since 1997.

After a full day of searching for the perfect combination of innovative strategies and measurable results, judges selected seven winners in three categories, and arrived at a single, overarching requirement of all effective promotions: a unifying purpose. Without a purpose — a central concept or idea that encompasses not only the needs of the exhibit, but also the needs of the trade show audience, product, and existing marketing messages — judges felt a promotional campaign became a string of pearls, minus the string.

This year’s winners not only understand the power of a single unified purpose, they understand how to string together individual activities to create a strong, stunning, and effective program. Hailed by judges as “edgy but smart” and “utterly on target,” this year’s winners include everything from a striptease with live, gyrating models to a candy Peep-themed program that literally silenced exhibit staffers. In addition to sizzling strategies, winners also served up impressive results, including a 550-percent increase in booth traffic and a 1,000-percent increase in sales directly attributed to the show.

The following pages feature the red-hot promotions crafted by our 2007 winners, along with two-page refreshers featuring our winners in the Best Promotion in 10 Years category (BASF AG, a 1998 Sizzle Award winner; and Derse Inc., a 2005 Sizzle Award winner).

Please join us in congratulating this year’s purpose-driven winners. May their award-winning promotions ignite the coals of innovation in your own programs — and spark a four-alarm fire of results. e