Natural Resources
Welcome to the 2008 Promo Sourcebook: It’s stuffed and it’s not your same old Sourcebook.
This year, in addition to the extensive lists of promotion agencies and suppliers to the $342 billion promotion industry, we’ve added editorial content: The Pro Awards and The Promo 100.
First, we announce the winners of the 2008 Pro Awards, the industry’s most prestigious award program honoring the best and brightest in promotional campaign work.
This year’s winners comprise an exceptional body of promotional work. The Promo editors have re-created the winning campaigns across 23 categories in lively reports full of rich details: conception, creation, activation and results. We talked with both the agencies and brands involved in the efforts and got them to share an “Idea to Steal” from each campaign that other marketers may want to consider for their own work.
Images of the creative and live events fill the pages, depicting the wacky fun that sets promotion marketers apart from the rest. There’s Brodie Brockie, for example, the young man from Michigan who won a dream job in a Disney contest as Skipper aboard the Jungle Cruise at Disney. In another event, everyday Londoners were drawn out into the street to practice martial arts in a campaign for the Mini Clubman car.
This year, two campaigns won in multiple categories.
The Best Overall winner, the “Kwik-E-Mart Experience” developed by Freshworks for 7-Eleven, took the top award in five categories, the most ever won by a single campaign in recent memory. One of the judges said, “It exceeded the buzz factor.”
Another campaign, the “Meow Mix Acatemy” by Grand Central Marketing, won the top award in three categories and was cited by one judge as a campaign where the agency “worked the obsession to absurdity.”
In this issue you’ll also find the Promo 100, the annual list of the top-100 U.S. promotion agencies ranked by U.S. net revenue. This report also includes two-year growth rates, contact information and key services offered by each of the agencies.
Finally, there’s the annual Sourcebook Directory, a comprehensive guide to the promotion agencies and suppliers supporting the promotion industry. The vast array of contacts includes companies in channel marketing, promotional products, co-marketing, coupon processing and management services. There are also lists of direct mail and database services companies, as well as entertainment, experiential and event marketing agencies. Companies can be found that handle event staffing, field marketing, fulfillment, gift cards and in-store marketing programs. Others include insurance firms, specialists in kids and teen marketing, mall and mobile marketing, online contests, pop-up stores, and premiums and incentives, among many, many others.
