CloserStill and Nineteen Group chairman Phil Soar details the winners of the industry’s two major awards programmes over the past 10 years in search of trends.
Last month saw a very successful EN Awards – and so this is the time of year when the grumbling starts: “How could that possibly have won?”; ” We are being discriminated against!”:” Oh no, not them again!”; “We must find out who they are bribing!”; “But they won last year!”
There are few occasions when our industry gets together en masse. So our two major awards ceremonies generate more emotion, heat and bar bills than anything else we do together.
This piece will probably evoke even more upset, but EN suggested I try to produce some firm (and hopefully informative) statistics about who has really won what over the years.
I have written here before about the nature of the awards ceremonies – above all else, how the method of judging has a tendency to reward the best produced entry rather than the best event or show director. But moving on and not commenting about the problems of remote judging panels…
The methodology behind the numbers
We have tried to research since around 2012 – a decade if we allow for the interruption of the pandemic.
In the case of the Exhibition News Awards, I have worked with Max Agostini to collate almost all the records (two years are incomplete) covering eleven years (2014 to 2024).
In the case of the AEO Awards, Sarah Scott created a historical summary some time ago and we can go back reasonably comfortably to 2012 – ten years if one excludes the pandemic.
The first AEO Awards I am aware of were in 2001 – but for the next decade the information is sketchy at best.
I should stress again that the records are not complete. Some are in summary form only; some details are missing, and a couple of years have only a limited list of winners. Added to that, in the Covid years we had only a tiny number of online winners. But overall, we have a record of over 320 winners taking home trophies in this period – so that gives us a reasonable database of around 30 a year.
We are only considering here the two main awards programmes (EN and AEO). These numbers therefore do not include any of the recent arrivals, such as The Digital Awards, The People Awards, The Marketing Awards, or the 30 Under 30.
And if you believe that you didn’t win seven Awards in the past decade, but actually eight – then I sincerely apologise. I’ll stress again that the records are not complete and we can only work with the information which is available.
In total there are 62 separate winners on our list – of these 11 come under the heading of Suppliers, 14 are Venues, nine are primarily Consumer Show businesses (though some run trade shows as well like Media10) and 28 are basically Trade Show organisers.
This might reinforce the simple truth that it is usually easier to win one of the big Consumer Awards simply because there are always fewer entries (though it is possible Lee Newton and Mike Seaman will disagree). The hardest ones to win – the ones with the most entries – tend to be Best Trade Show and Best Marketing Campaign.
Of the Top 20 winners over the decade, just two are suppliers (GES/Melville and Tembo), five are venues (ExCeL, BDC, NEC, RAI and ECO/Olympia), three are consumer show organisers (Media10, Raccoon and Brand Events) and the rest are trade show companies.
The largest attendance for an awards ceremony and the irony
This was the AEO Awards of 2009 (judging the 2008 events of course) when there were 1,280 attendees.
We were able to use the late lamented Earls Court 2 (now a hole in the ground), which allowed a far bigger attendance than other venues which have been used. Rob Brydon was the host.
It was a real irony that we should have had our largest ever awards in 2009, the year which saw the largest fall in sold square metres. The financial crisis hit the industry late, and 2009 was eventually to see a fall of 14% in net square metres and 11% in visitors in the UK compared with 2008.
In neither metres sold, nor visitors, have we ever returned to the levels of 2008, and the following year (2010 AEO Awards – I was AEO chairman both years) we struggled to reach 750 attendees.
Record performances and years for the ages
The only companies which have won an award at every one of the last 10 EN Awards are CloserStill and Media10. With its first ever show in 2009, CloserStill did not enter for awards until 2013.
CloserStill won seven trophies at the EN Awards (held at ExCeL) in 2014, the most by any company at a single event. On only four other occasions has a company won more than three Awards at any single ceremony – Media10 once and CloserStill on three other occasions (2015, 2018 and 2019).
Awards and size – an inverse relationship
There seems something of an inverse relationship between company size and winning awards. Relative to size and turnover, smaller companies win disproportionately far, far more.
When Media10, Easyfairs, Raccoon and Nineteen started winning awards they were small companies – but, along with CloserStill, they are all in our Top Ten of winners.
When CloserStill won the seven Awards in 2014, its annual turnover was just £12m – surely an unrepeatable evening. This might suggest that watching who is winning awards is a good clue to where one might usefully invest in the next decade.
It also suggests that small companies, which are starting to have success and can generate enthusiasm from their staff and customers, will put much more effort into applying for awards – and will reap the benefits.
While the three biggest companies worldwide – Informa, RX and Clarion – are represented in the Top Ten, relative to their size and their number of shows, they underperform. (Size and turnover change over the years of course – Informa has spent £5bn buying UBM and Tarsus alone in the last six years, while CloserStill is twenty times the size it was in 2014).
Nonetheless, you could debate the figures and point out that Informa has eight times the revenue of CloserStill, but has only one third of the awards. Or that RX is 33 times the size of Media10, but has won roughly half as many awards. I am not sure what that tells us – though it is fair to argue that the boards of our giant companies have other things to worry about rather than industry awards.
The unlikely story of the number one
It would seem odd if, as one of the founders and chairman of CloserStill since its birth, I didn’t comment on its record.
This was not intended to be a PR piece, although I obviously know how CloserStill and Nineteen go about the awards season.
The problem is that it is nearly impossible to explain, because it is a matter of comparatives. It doesn’t help to argue that the major award winners have the best people, or the best shows, or the best entry writers – though all these things may be true.
What we really need is to understand how the other 200 or so companies in our industry (62 of which have won awards in the past decade) approach the whole thing. What happens at Informa, RX, Clarion, DMG, ExCeL, NEC, Melville, Tembo, the BDC and all the others?
Do they have a centralised approach? Does the board encourage entries? Does anyone think about it at all? Do they pick and choose entrants? Do the show teams make their own decisions? Do they use PR firms to write entries (some do)? How important do they think the whole thing is? Hence what might make CloserStill and Media10 different?
Does size damage a company’s chances?
It is obviously the case that, the larger a company gets, the more remote are the show teams from the core (though CloserStill now has 760 staff and still won more than anyone else at the recent EN awards).
Maybe the core doesn’t recognize how valuable the psychology of winning an award and attending the ceremonies can be? It is perhaps helpful to look at the boards of our major companies and see how many directors were ever show or marketing or operations managers down at the coal-face.
To finish, this is just part of my mission to introduce some numbers, analysis and fun into reporting the business.
We tend to be numbers light and fact free as an industry – and I will write here soon why I think this is deliberate and not just by chance.
But, for the moment, I hope the headline chart gives some insight into the sometimes contentious corners of those strange lunch times and evenings.
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