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Honda from April 21 to May 12 hit six of the PAC10 schools during final exams to help students take a much-needed study break while learning about the new Civic. At each stop, Honda provided lunch while students took part in an SMS scavenger hunt designed to teach them about the cars in the Civic lineup and sign them up for a sweepstakes to win a 2012 Civic Si Coupe.

Char-Broil, the outdoor cooking company, in April launched the 10th edition of its annual mobile grilling tour. The campaign this year has been expanded to 30 weeks and will travel to 27 states as part of an integrated campaign that also is measuring the effectiveness of its marketing strategies.

“In the past, when we did experiential marketing, we would send the tour off on its way,” Michelle Zeller, vp-marketing at Char-Broil, told Buzz. “This year we are trying to knit and weave it all together.”

Anyone who has ever worked a trade show has seen his or her fair share of glassy-eyed corporate presenters, reciting their pre-rehearsed spiels along the aisle with plenty of energy and polish, but little in the way of genuine conviction. The presenters, who are often fed a script via an ear prompter and a micro cassette they control with a remote control in the palm of their hands, have been a trade-show standard for decades now. But their role is evolving as companies look for new ways to make more authentic connections with attendees.

In our Then and Now series, EM revisits old event marketing trends to find out where they’ve gone since we first reported on them. Are they old hats and has-beens? Or is that past up-and-comer a future best practice that’s now an industry standard? In this eco-installment, we re-examine green-friendly trade show booth materials, which we began covering in our earliest issues.

Photo marketing is a valuable tool for a variety of reasons. It’s an incentive to get consumers to interact with your brand, it captures data, it serves as a long-lasting memento and generally drives eyeballs to your website during the photo retrieval process. But what’s next on the horizon for photo marketing? Once that photo lands in the inbox or on the Facebook page, how can event marketers get the photo activation past the point of distribution? EM checked in with the experts to find out how they’re using photo marketing to inspire consumers to take action.