Sparks has two wins to celebrate in EXHIBITOR magazine’s 23rd Annual Corporate Event Awards — including the program’s top honor. ServiceNow’s Knowledge 2025 conference took home the Judges’ Choice Award, and Workday Rising 2025 was also named a winner in the Customer Conference/Event category.
Now in its 23rd year, the program judges entries primarily on overall strategy and measurable results, with creativity and innovation assessed as secondary criteria — a bar that rewards events that can prove their impact, not just describe it.
ServiceNow’s Knowledge 2025 Takes the Judges’ Choice Award
Sparks served as the creative and production agency behind Knowledge, ServiceNow’s annual customer conference, which drew nearly 20,000 attendees across the Venetian, the Sands Expo, and the Wynn in Las Vegas for its 2025 edition. Working with Sparks, ServiceNow built its pre-event campaign and on-site experience around the idea that “Knowledge is where AI gets to work,” organizing more than 550 sessions and nine tailored learning journeys around four distinct audience segments, from technical platform architects to business decision-makers.
The results were substantial: a 12 percent jump in attendance over the prior year, including nearly 900 attendees from companies that had never come before, a 20 percent increase in meetings that ServiceNow credits with contributing to several multimillion-dollar deals, and a 40 percent expansion in media coverage. On-site, an AI Agent Hub let attendees build and test their own working AI agents — more than 1,000 were created over three days — while interactive case study walkthroughs replaced traditional executive panels.
EXHIBITOR credits the win to the discipline behind that segmentation strategy: rather than one blanket message for a skeptical, AI-fatigued market, Knowledge built a distinct case for each audience it needed to reach. Pappas points to the AI Agent Hub as the clearest proof point, where AI stopped being a subject of “staged demonstrations where it’s set up to do anything but fail” and became something attendees could build and test themselves. Full coverage of the win, “Know Doubt,” was written by Charles Pappas for EXHIBITOR magazine.
Workday Rising Wins for Turning a Fragmented Campus Into One Unified Experience
Workday Rising 2025, held across San Francisco’s Moscone Center complex, was also named a winner in the Customer Conference/Event category. The event spanned multiple buildings that don’t typically operate as one campus, unified into a single, cohesive attendee experience — including Rising Plaza, an open-air activation built on a closed city block, and The Core, an intimate, guided installation designed to make Workday’s AI capabilities tangible rather than abstract. Sparks served as one of the agency partners behind the event.
The event drew more than 33,000 attendees, an 8 percent increase year over year, alongside a 96 percent overall attendee experience rating and measurable gains in the trust and satisfaction metrics Workday set out to move.
EXHIBITOR points to restraint as the defining choice behind the win. In an event built for 33,000 attendees, Workday’s signature AI installation, The Core, was made deliberately small — a decision Porter frames as a statement of philosophy rather than of design, since, as she puts it, “anyone can hang a massive LED sphere from the ceiling.” The feature on Workday’s win, “Human to the Core,” was written by Cynthya Porter for EXHIBITOR magazine.
Congratulations to the Teams
Two wins in one awards cycle, including the program’s top honor, is a meaningful marker for the work Sparks put into both events this past year. Congratulations to the ServiceNow and Workday teams, and to our fellow agency partners on both programs, for helping bring these experiences to life.
