EIBTM announced the winners of the EIBTM 2005 Awards, with the Grand Prix prize going to Dia “D” Marketing for ABCrossing, a hugely successful event designed to promote reading amongst Madrid citizens.  
 
This year saw an outstanding quality of entrants, with the 2005 EIBTM Awards encouraging creativity and rewarding excellence in the meetings and incentives industry. Winners were selected from entries by event organisers and marketeers all over the world.
 
The international panel of judges included consultants from the incentive travel and meetings industry, together with editors of the supporting media partners.
 
Judges were looking for truly outstanding events/campaigns that were highly imaginative in concept and execution. Creativity, innovation, effectiveness and over delivery on the brief were all key factors in the judges’ final decisions.

Due to the high quality of entries, the judges’ decisions were hard, but finally an overall winner for each category was decided as follows:
 

• Grand Prix: Dia “D” Marketing for ABCrossing
• Best Conference: Winner, Interactive Africa for Design Indaba; Highly commended, The Event Company for Meetnight 2005
• Best Product Launch: Winner, Comunicazioni Multimedia Srl for Citroen Ricc1one.
• Best Incentive Travel Programme: Winner, Meta Consultoria de Incentivos for BFGoodrich Around-the-World Tour; Highly commended, People and Places Worldwide for MTV/Sony Ericsson ‘Sleep Tomorrow’ and also highly commended, Nicko Travel services for Marvel
• Best Event in Spain: Winner, Dia “D” Marketing for ABCrossing
• Best Destination Marketing Campaign: Winner, Accucom Corporate Communications for The Incentive – Toronto; Highly commended, Grazer Congress for Meetingraz
• Best Venue Marketing Campaign: Winner, Grazer Congress for Convention Center Graz.

Jeremy Garbett, Managing Director of Jack Morton Worldwide and Chairman of the EIBTM 2005 Awards judging panel comments:
 
“The standard of entries this year was exceptional, and it was a hard choice to choose each category winner let alone the overall Grand Prix prize. Dia “D” Marketing for ABCrossing, submitted into the Best Event In Spain category, came out on top because the campaign, designed to promote reading among Madrid citizens, demonstrated a truly effective launch coupled with clever thinking, which engaged the interests of over 100,000 members of the public!

It was a truly inspiring venture, really making a difference to the participants and bonding the folk of Madrid in an unusual, selfless and memorable manner. It demonstrated everything that we were looking for in a successful launch.”
ABCrossing’s campaign was a joint venture between ABC and the Madrid City Council who teamed up to create ABCrossing, a series of events to promote reading amongst Madrid citizens. Using the slogan ‘Read me, Swap me, Give me away” the campaign was broadcast on different radio channels and advertised in newspapers to encourage citizens to read.

Aimed at the broadest audience spectrum, ABCrossing encouraged citizens to swap books by creating exchange platforms scattered across Madrid, offering free books to boost the reading circle and exchange system.

The launch event was spectacular and welcomed over 35,000 people to the Casa de Vacas across one weekend. In total over 100,000 books were given away and the platforms were established as a place to meet weekly to swap books.