We Won an AAPEX Award for Our Plastic Postcard. Don't Buy Anything Because of an Award.
Should a trade show award change what you buy?
No, and I say that with our own trophy sitting on my desk. In 2023 our plastic postcard won the Business Tools & Services category of the AAPEX New Product Showcase. I'm proud of it. I still think the auto service chains, parts retailers, and dealer groups walking the AAPEX floor in Las Vegas next month should treat every award, ours included, as a reason to ask for a test and never as a reason to sign.
I've spent more than 15 years selling for Triadex, and the buyers I respect most never took a sales pitch at face value. They asked what happened when our piece ran next to the one they already had. That's the standard I'd hold every booth to this year, starting with ours.
What did the judges actually look at?
The details are worth knowing, and they come straight from the AAPEX announcement. To qualify in 2023, a product had to be new and debut at the show. AAPEX says 183 products and 23 packaging entries qualified, and entries were judged through the digital edition of its Product Plus magazine, which went to more than 23,000 registered buyers.
New Product Showcase, Business Tools & Services. Triadex Services Inc., Plastic Postcard.
That's a real signal. Judges compared new products side by side, and a large audience of buyers saw them. What it can't tell you is how a mailer performs in your trade areas, against your current piece, with your customers. No product award can.
When is an award a fair shortcut?
The other side has a point, so I'll make it. A single-location shop owner with no marketing team doesn't have the volume to run a clean test, and an industry-judged award is a reasonable filter for narrowing the more than 2,500 exhibitors AAPEX expects this year down to a handful of conversations. Awards also help when a format is new to you. If you've only ever mailed paper, knowing a plastic piece earned industry recognition is a decent reason to look closer.
The case weakens with scale. Once you run 20, 50, or 300 locations, a bad buying decision gets copied into every store. At that size you have enough locations to test properly, so you should.
What does an honest test look like?
The two results I'd point any buyer to are our own, and they're the reason I trust the product more than the trophy.
A franchise group of a major national pizza chain, with just shy of 1,000 locations, ran our plastic mailer against USPS Every Door Direct Mail using identical artwork, offers, and ZIP codes. The plastic postcards produced double the redemption rates of the all-paper EDDM pieces. The setup is laid out in the EDDM comparison.
A national restaurant chain with 38 locations split its program, mailing 110,429 paper postcards from five locations and 143,563 plastic gift cards from five others, with the same two offers. The plastic gift card pulled 35% more redemptions than the paper postcard with the same offer. The numbers are in the gift card A/B test.
What made those useful wasn't a judge. It was a comparison group, and that's what every buyer should ask for.
Why does this matter more in automotive right now?
The aftermarket's customer base keeps getting older and larger. S&P Global Mobility reported in May 2025 that the average age of U.S. light vehicles had reached 12.8 years, with 289 million vehicles in operation, and it expects the heavy registration years of 2015 to 2019 to create more maintenance and repair work as those vehicles come off warranty.
More demand brings more vendors chasing your marketing budget. AAPEX 2026 runs November 3 to 5 at the Venetian Expo and AAPEX Forum, and in its post-show poll of 906 attendees, AAPEX found 86% met their goal of discovering new products. Discovery is the easy part. Proving a product works in your own bays is what protects the budget.
That's also why our automotive marketing work reports results location by location. A blended number across a dealer network or service chain hides the stores where a new piece is losing.
How do you run the holdout question?
This takes an afternoon before the show, and you don't have to buy anything from anyone.
- Pick one piece you already run across most locations, like a service reminder or an oil change offer, and pull its last 12 months of results by location.
- Choose two locations with similar sales, car counts, and trade area size. That's your test pair.
- Write down the one number you'd need to see before switching, such as redemptions per 1,000 pieces or new customers per location from your own POS data.
- At every booth that pitches you, ask the same question. Will you run your product in one of my locations while my current piece runs in the matched one, with the same offer and the same dates, and report the results back by location?
- Note who says yes, who changes the subject, and who hands you a case study with no comparison group instead.
Here's how to judge the answers. A vendor who agrees to a matched, same-dates test with results reported by location earns a pilot. A vendor who can only offer an award, a testimonial, or an average across all clients gets a polite thank you and nothing more.
Where do our own numbers fall short?
I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't hold our evidence to the same bar. Both tests above come from restaurant chains, not auto service, and both are several years old. In the EDDM comparison, the plastic pieces were also delivered three months before the paper ones, so timing could have played a part. And the award judged our product in a magazine, not on results in anyone's stores.
That's exactly why I'd want an aftermarket buyer to test our plastic postcards in their own locations before rolling them out anywhere.
Redemption tracking has limits too. A redeemed card proves someone came in with the offer. It can't tell you whether they would have come anyway, which is why a matched holdout location tells you more than any single redemption rate. Where clients opt in, our closed-loop attribution follows redemptions through to revenue, and where they don't, we say plainly what we can and can't prove.
What's the one thing to do before Vegas?
Pick your test pair today. Two matched locations and one number you'd need to see. Bring that to the show, and every booth conversation, ours included, gets shorter and more useful.
Sources
Ryan Mogged
Vice President, Sales, Triadex
Ryan Mogged is Vice President of Sales at Triadex, where he leads national sales strategy, new client acquisition, and enterprise-level growth for multi-location brands. With more than 15 years at Triadex, he has risen from Account Manager to Director of Sales, National Accounts and now VP of Sales, building trust-based client relationships grounded in data-powered marketing. He holds a BS in Business Management from the University of South Florida.
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