2020 Willis M. Bywater Creativity Award

Steve and Bob Foxley met years ago at an Ogden Noon Exchange Club meeting. A mutual respect quickly evolved from their shared desire to deliver quality products and service to their customers, even though they were in much different industries. When the time came that , The S4 Group needed logo-ware for trade shows, pens, USB drives, and other promotional items, Foxley Marketing was the obvious choice.

Recently, S4 wanted to develop a unique promotional item to support our upcoming release 2.0 and our ecobee to BACnet integration. We gave the challenge to Bob and he came through for us yet again. It was an iterative design process that started with the basic concept of wanting something with bees or a beehive. Afterall, Utah is the beehive state, and our new product integrates the ecobee thermostats. We landed on a custom USB drive as something unique that would get our partners’ attention and would be useful at the same time. The process ended with a product that we can all be proud of.

Foxley Marketing represents Bankers Advertising Company products. They were so impressed with Bob’s design that they awarded him with the prestigious Willis M. Bywater Award. Following is an excerpt from the Bankers Advertising newsletter BACtalk Volume 125 Issue 10, edited to focus on Bob Foxley’s award.

Congratulations to BOB FOXLEY, the winner for the 2020 Willis M. Bywater Creativity Award.

We first presented the Willis M. Bywater award at our 2018 National Sales Meeting, held at Eagle Ridge Resort in Galena. Appropriately, the first recipient was Willis (Bill) Bywater, who won for a custom-shaped bust of the University of Iowa's 1939 Heisman trophy winner, Nile Kinnick. The second winner of the award was Glenda Stormes-Bice in 2019, with her USB drive in the shape of a soybean pod for her customer-Iowa Soybean Research Center. Runner-up that year was Abigail Brown, with her Louisiana-shaped, wall-mounted bottle opener for Louisiana Hot Sauce.

This year we had six entries. We asked four people from our organization to be on the committee to judge the projects. Each project had a promo sheet with information regarding the campaign, such as the objective of the campaign, the target audience, how the products were distributed, and any results that the sales partner could share, along with an image of the product. The judges then rated the entries based on Creativity (up to 50 points); Rep-involvement (up to 25 points); and 0bjective-of-the-Promotion-(up-to 25 points).

After five virtuals and several trips to see the customer in person, Bob and his customer had a workable USB beehive and order. This was such a fun project to work on with Bob. This would never have been accomplished without Bob's creative mind and tremendous patience.

We hope you enjoy our USBees!