Event Promotion: 2026 Excellence in Marketing Awards

promoting AMA Sf’s biggest night

 
 

Background

AMA SF’s Excellence in Marketing Awards (EIMAs) were held in September 2026 for the second consecutive year after a decade-long hiatus. The EIMAs were a mainstay in Bay Area marketing for over forty years, and the 2026 finalists were a blend of big-name brands (Apple, Google, Anthropic) and hometown favorites (Golden State Valkyries, San Francisco AIDS Foundation, Oakland Roots Sports Club). I handled social media copywriting, graphic design, scheduling, and strategy for the final six weeks of the 2026 promotional campaign; my colleague Rinita Datta handled promotion for the first half of the marketing cycle.

The marketing campaign for the 2026 EIMAs kicked off on June 8th, and continued after the ceremony with photos, videos, winner interviews, and more. The campaign was a success on and off the web: in addition to a 176% increase in LinkedIn impressions and a 274% increase in unique reactions (over the six weeks before the event, compared with the prior six), the ceremony was nearly sold-out and counted representatives from the Valkyries, Sofar Ocean, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, and Oakland Roots Sports Club among the attendees.

campaign details

Strategy

We started off with the timeline and the key dates:

  • June 8: Ceremony announcement

  • June 15: Nominations open

  • July 31: Nominations close

  • September 4: Nominees and finalists announced

  • September 24: Awards ceremony

There were about three and a half months between the announcement of the 2026 EIMAs and the ceremony itself, but AMA SF had more immediate events to focus on first. There were two Summer Social get-togethers, our Marketing Hackathon at Golden Gate University, and new episodes of the Misadventures in Marketing podcast that would all be competing with the EIMAs for space in our followers’ feeds. Rinita and I decided early on that she would lightly promote the awards show throughout the summer while I worked on the other events, and then I would take over when nominees were announced on September 4th and make a big social media push throughout the last three weeks.

Execution

Well before the initial announcement on June 8th, Rinita and I met with the event organizers to collaborate on the brand identity for the 2026 EIMAs. The organizers picked the primary color (deep blue), font pack, and logo, which stayed mostly the same for the whole marketing campaign. Rinita and I made our own small flourishes to give each piece of content a little uniqueness, but for the most part the style was uniform. Since this year’s ceremony took place on the Historic Klamath, a ferryboat docked at San Francisco’s Pier 9, I added subtle imagery of waves, anchors, and the San Francisco skyline to some of my graphics.

Marketing Timeline

When it came to setting up a promotional timeline for the 2026 EIMAs, the team followed a similar pattern to the Playmakers 2026 sports marketing summit:

 
 

This was a longer overall campaign than my Playmakers 2026 social campaign – three and a half months instead of five weeks – and we had other events to promote in the meantime, so it was important to keep the awards just top-of-mind enough in our followers’ feeds to maintain their interest over that long period.  

As with Playmakers (and my AMA SF social media effort in general), our highest-performing posts were the human-interest spotlights. In particular, my announcement of NVIDIA’s LaSandra Brill as one of the EIMA judges became our highest-performing LinkedIn post of the year – 213 likes and 17 comments – narrowly edging out our speaker spotlight featuring Edreece Arghandiwal from the 2026 Playmakers summit.

by the numbers

Although the 2026 EIMAs marketing campaign technically started in June, I’m using analytics from the six weeks leading up to the event, when it became the primary focus of AMA SF’s LinkedIn page.

Over the six weeks leading up to the 2026 EIMAs (August 10 – September 24), AMA SF’s LinkedIn engagement increased in every category compared to the previous six weeks. Here is a selection of key metrics:

 
 

I felt the serious responsibility of promoting AMA SF’s biggest event of the year, and I’m proud of the work I contributed to the campaign. While there were a few technical hitches on the day of the ceremony – there’s always something – everything ultimately went smoothly. Almost all tickets were sold out, we had seven corporate sponsors including Lyft and Life360, and many of the winners appeared in person to accept their awards.

In addition to the user-generated content from attendees and winners, we had photographers on site to take candid and step-and-repeat photos and videographers who conducted short interviews. This created a steady stream of post-ceremony content for me to post on LinkedIn and Instagram, including a blog recap, a photo carousel, a quote compilation, and video clips.

content gallery

I’ve selected eight of my own posts from the 2026 EIMAs campaign to include below. As you can see, the colors, graphics, and fonts are fairly uniform throughout, with small differences made here and there to keep the feed from becoming too monotonous. The posts are in chronological order over the three-month campaign.