Last night Comscore was a proud recipient of the Chicago Innovation Awards, which celebrates the creative spirit of the Chicago region by recognizing and honoring the city’s most innovative new products and services. Comscore was selected as a winner of the prestigious award, along with nine other companies from a pool of more than 250 submissions, for Ad Effx, an innovative tool for measuring the offline and online sales impact of online advertising – even if there are no clicks on the ads themselves. This solution is helping prove the sales ROI of online advertising campaigns and helping attract brand-building advertising dollars over to the digital medium.
The award ceremony was held at Chicago’s historic Goodman Theater and was hosted by the very entertaining duo and co-founders of the Chicago Innovation Awards Tom Kuczmarski, president of Kuczmarski & Associates, and Dan Miller, executive vice president of the Heartland Association. The two kicked off the festivities joining in a hip-hop dance routine with local dance group Stick & Move which met with raucous applause. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley also addressed the audience underscoring the importance of innovation in building a vibrant city and business community that creates opportunities and jobs for so many. With today’s economic headwinds and an unemployment rate of almost 10%, the jobs created by innovators and entrepreneurs are vital to the rebuilding of the U.S. economy.
The main program consisted of the awards presentation to the ten honorees, which included innovative companies across industries and disciplines: Groupon.com, EveryBlock.com, AirCell, RescueVac, Suncast, Tripp-Lite, Robotic Assisted Surgery @ UIC Med Center, Visible Vote and the Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago. The winners of the award were also recently featured in BusinessWeek.
The evening concluded with an illuminating keynote address by Leo Melamed, known as the founder of financial futures and Chairman Emeritus of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group, which highlighted Chicago’s unique history of innovation and global leadership.
The Chicago Innovation Awards was a terrific event that showed the creativity, brilliance and spirit of innovation that makes Chicago such a special city, and Comscore was honored to be a part of it.