United Adworkers bowling is back. We have a new President. And the 2022 ‘99 Show’ will be bigger and better than ever.
🎳 United Adworkers Bowling Returns
The league starts January 27 at the legendary Landmark Lanes.
The United Adworkers Board of Directors has been keeping our eye on the latest Coronavirus trends and has made the decision to reboot the bowling league. However, in accordance with CDC and City of Milwaukee health and safety guidelines, we are instituting a few league guidelines of their own.
Until otherwise stated, we will require the wearing of masks by anyone who is actively bowling, or congregating in the area near the lanes. If you feel the urge to eat, drink, or converse for long periods of time with your mask off, we ask that you do so in other parts of the venue away from the lanes. Treat the bowling lanes like an airport terminal: only pull your mask down briefly to take a sip or a quick bite if necessary. United Adworkers will continue to monitor the latest trends and guidelines and will alter our policies accordingly as the bowling league season progresses.
We will also provide masks for any bowler, member, or guest of the league who needs a spare. And no, that’s not a pun. Expect fewer puns in 2022. Additionally, we will also provide hand sanitizer for all lanes, and sanitizing wipes will be available for anyone who wants one.
Please note: we will not require proof of vaccination or proof of a negative test.
📨 Sign Up for Our Newsletter, Win Prizes
Stay informed, and help us share updates with other members regarding future news and events.
Inter-agency communications regarding United Adworkers have fallen off in recent years. We suspect the shift to remote work and lack of face-to-face water cooler conversations is likely the culprit. In other cases, some agencies buy bulk memberships for their employees, but this means each employee does not necessarily have direct access to the latest updates coming out of our organization because their personal email addresses aren’t a part of our newsletter list.
So, in an effort to improve communications, United Adworkers is giving away prizes to the first 50 individuals who sign up for our newsletter in person during the opening night of the bowling league on January 27. You could win free drinks for you or your team, United Adworkers swag, and more. We’ll have a sign-up table near the lanes and a United Adworkers volunteer ready to take down your email address and dole out the goods.
🤝 Meet the Board: Cory Ampe, President
From former mascot to President of United Adworkers, Milwaukee marketing pro Cory Ampe proves America is the land of dreams.
Cory Ampe has worked in advertising, marketing, and communications for nearly 25 years. She got her start in advertising working for an agency in Baltimore during the internet bubble. Despite witnessing some wackiness, she fell in love with the business and has never looked back.
She worked as an editor for a hot B2B magazine covering the sanitary supply industry, hosted a press conference during a nearby sniper attack, sweat her tail off as a mascot dog, and fell in love with a suspicious Creative Director who lured her back to the best city in the world. Along the way, she’s worked for agencies in Milwaukee including Fullhouse Interactive, Trivera, and Jigsaw. Her professional passions include brand strategy, content marketing, SEO, and business development.
In her free time Ampe volunteers for Girl Scouts Southeast Wisconsin, serves on the board of directors for Sculpture Milwaukee, is a contributing writer for Commonstate, and is extremely proud to be the President of United Adworkers. She and her strange husband are parents of two kids who also like to talk about advertising.
🚧 Revamping the ‘99 Show’ for 2022
New rules, more agencies, a more-level playing field.
The United Adworkers’ Ninety-Nine Showcase has been a staple of the Milwaukee advertising community for nearly 20 years. However, like many organizations over the past two years, we’ve had to scale back on large public gatherings. Because of this, our marquee event lost momentum in 2020 after going virtual-only.
The rules for the ‘99 Show’ have also evolved from year to year, typically in an effort to keep up with industry trends, similar award show standards, and to garner more participation from the community. But if there’s one piece of feedback we’ve heard over the years from the agencies who don’t participate, it’s that smaller agencies feel like they can’t compete with larger agencies and their larger budgets.
This was evident in the 2021 ‘99 Show.’ Despite having over 400 submissions, there wasn’t as much variety in participating agencies as we would have liked. The rules, submission guidelines, and judging criteria were changed again to accommodate remote judging and virtual submissions, but this too was likely a reason for the fairly homogenous pool of winning entries.
So, in order to achieve a wider variety of winning work, a wider variety of participating agencies, and a true sense of friendly competition, we will be overhauling the entire submission process for 2022’s show and will be re-evaluating the judging criteria as well.
One of the biggest changes our board of directors is considering is breaking up the entries and handing out awards based on agency size. Our hope is that by doing this, smaller agencies will feel like they have a better chance of placing in the show and receiving an award because they’ll be judged against peers of a similar size and projects with more comparable client budgets.
We understand this would be a big change for the ‘99 Show,’ so it’s a decision we don’t take lightly. We know many of our members are fond of the current format and its unique ties to the Milwaukee area’s creative and advertising industries, and how vital it has become to our organization year after year. We promise to be transparent during this process and to communicate any changes clearly leading up to the call for entries this Spring.
🙋 What Else to Expect in 2022 …
2021 proved there’s still an appetite among our members for professional and social networking events.
We didn’t have many events to showcase in 2020 or 2021, but the turnout we did have for last year’s ‘99 Show’ and the desire expressed by our members for more events this upcoming year has the United Adworkers Board of Directors feeling reenergized for 2022.
To ensure we provide the type of events and resources our members will appreciate and find truly valuable, we are currently working on developing a member survey we intend to send to as many industry professionals throughout the Greater Milwaukee area as we can to get a better sense of how United Adworkers can best serve its members in 2022 and beyond.
United Adworkers will always put the health and safety of our members first, but our organization lives or dies based on our membership numbers, along with the revenue generated from our headline events throughout the year. We will take every precaution to ensure our events are safe for anyone who wants to attend in person, and we will update our standards and approach to COVID-19 based on CDC guidelines in real-time.
Comments