D – The Promotional Gift Award organised and executed by the Cologne publishing company, WA Media, is currently undergoing a relaunch. As a result, in 2024 the communication prize for haptic advertising won’t be awarded for the first time in 20 years.
“The Promotional Gift Award is very popular on the promotional products market, as a benchmark for suppliers and distributors and as an orientation tool for users,” explained Daniela Dragunova, Project Manager. “Over all of the years we have worked intensively on the further development of the award and have established an elaborate judging process in order to achieve the most objective results possible. Now we would like to carry out an even more comprehensive relaunch to align the award even more closely to the market needs and further increase its prestige among the promotional products users. We are allowing ourselves the time necessary to achieve this.”
The presentation of the winners of the Promotional Gift Award at the HAPTICA® live is taking a time-out next year and will be back in 2025 with a new look.
In addition to a diversification of the jury, the categorisation and the points system are to be adapted and a new award brand image is to be created. The latter “goes hand in hand with a new concept of our brand world for addressing industry customers,” Dr. Mischa Delbrouck, WA Publishing Director, stated. “In future, all of our channels that promotional products suppliers and distributors use to reach users with – print, live appearances, online and the award – are to be more closely interlinked and their overall presence is to be aligned with each other in order to further increase the effectiveness.”
The Promotional Gift Award always has a fixed place at the HAPTICA® live in Bonn. This is where the winners were presented with their trophies in a festive ceremony on the stage in the pre-COVID years. Project Director, Till Barth, noted, “The award ceremony of the Promotional Gift Award winners at the HAPTICA® live was and still is an important element of the ‘Experience of Haptic Advertising’. The relaunch gives us the opportunity to extensively redesign this programme item.” While waiting for this to be completed, the visitors can already look forward to new programme items that put the spotlight on haptic advertising in 2024. For example, in the new exhibition area, FACThibition, which aims to convey background knowledge on special topics of the promotional products industry, the focus is going to be on the theme Ocean Plastic. The HAPTICA® live is being staged at the World Conference Center Bonn on March 13, 2024.
Photo: Bernadett Yedouh
