Best Green Event/Trade Show Campaign

Program Name: Aquarius Spring! Road Trip
Client: Coca-Cola Co.
Agency: ignition

It ain’t easy being green. Just ask Kermit the Frog. But that didn’t deter Aquarius Spring!, a natural spring water brand from The Coca-Cola Company, from embarking on a mission to promote watershed conservation and encourage people to take action in their local communities. With the help of legions of green-minded volunteers and a hefty $500,000 in grants to community watershed organizations to facilitate consumer education and clean-up events in 10 markets, Aquarius helped clean and remove 37 tons of trash from rivers, creeks, lakes and marshes.

The effort tied in with Coca-Cola’s priority on water stewardship and its goal to return to communities and nature an amount of water equivalent to what is uses in its beverages and their production. Coke continually works to improve water use efficiency in its operations, recycling water used for manufacturing processes and replenishing water in communities and eco-systems through locally relevant projects. And that’s where Aquarius Spring!, which was founded on a platform of Hydration, Donation and Participation, and its tour came in.

Beginning in June 2009, Aquarius Spring! embarked on a 20-week road trip aimed at inspiring consumers, retail customers and community organizations; providing funding and mobilizing volunteers for local watershed efforts; and introducing Aquarius Spring! as a unique proposition with a meaningful cause. The tour traveled to Atlanta; Boise, ID; Charlotte, NC; Los Angeles; New York City; Philadelphia; Phoenix; Pittsburgh; Raleigh, NC; and Tampa.
Each week during the tour, Aquarius Spring! was involved with cleanups. Local non-profits were enlisted in advance to participate. Donations ranging from $12,000 to $75,000 were made to the organizations to assist in the efforts and to continue work directly benefiting their local communities. Aquarius also sponsored in-store events in which bottles of water were sampled and consumers were educated about water conservation and recycling issues. A vegetable oil-powered school bus with solar panels on the roof served as a backdrop for media events, cleanups and retail activations and provided environmentally friendly market-to-market transportation for tour staff.  An intense p.r. outreach brought out local communities as well as state senators, Coca-Cola veeps, local Coke Bottler reps, mayors, councilmen and media.

Despite its lofty goals, the program far exceeded expectations: Aquarius Spring! enlisted 13 nonprofit partner organizations and the campaign engaged 33,954 people through one-on-one interactions. More than a million bottles of water sold while the tour was on the road and 12,000 consumers participated in cleanups, making it a little easier to be green.

Program Name: Supercomputing 09
Client: Cray
Agency: Derse

Cray, a global leader in supercomputing, wanted not only to reinforce its position as an industry leader in the high performance computing category used by scientists, engineers in academia, government and others; it also wanted to highlight its eco-friendly products and sustainable business model at the SC09 conference.
With the goal of integrating green materials wherever possible, the brand built an inviting eco-friendly environment using sustainable materials like bamboo tabletops and 100 percent non-woven polyester textiles, Bio-PDO carpeting, repurposed white panels and rented lighting and A/V. The result was a clean and simple environment that spotlighted the company’s products while adhering to its green standards.

The exhibit won the first place in the SC09 Green Exhibit Contest and achieved 90 percent of its internal green exhibit environment goals. In terms of business, the company captured three highly qualified leads for its XT line, sold a CX1 Machine on the show floor (the first time in 20 years) and doubled the number of CX1 machine leads over SC08.

Last year the company also leveraged the power of social media to extend its message beyond the show floor and well after the event. Cray tripled its Twitter followers from 30 pre-show to 112 post-show.

Program Name: Meet Saturn Tour
Client: General Motors
Agency: Performance Marketing Group

For its Meet Saturn summer tour, General Motors created three environmentally friendly displays inside Airstream Basecamp trailers powered entirely by solar panels and pulled by Saturn Outlook vehicles. Both the Outlook and Basecamp were designed in silver with vibrant sunflowers etched into the metal. The energy-conscious vehicle fleet traveled to fairs and festivals where it spotlighted the brand’s efforts to be greener while demonstrating the Outlook’s features and capabilities.

Inside the Basecamps, consumers could sit down with a product specialist to custom-build a virtual Saturn. The displays were run on iMac computers (known for their low environmental-impact characteristics) and low-energy consumption flat-screen LED monitors to help extend the life of the battery cells. Outside, four Kyocera 130-watt solar panels permanently installed on top of the trailers captured then transferred solar energy into a battery bank located along the bottom of the trailer. Based on about six hours of peak sunshine, the panels banked an average of 4,600 watt hours per day.

The tour generated 35,367 leads and 391 Saturn sales. Here comes the sun!