San Francisco’s primo e-mail marketing and DM service provider, VerticalResponse, won Blog of the Year at the 2006 Stevie Awards for Women in Business, presented March 8 at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, NYC.

VR’s “Email Marketing Blog” is penned by CEO/Blog Babe Janine Popick. AND I WUZ HER DATE! Cuz hubbie John “Footloose” Hingley of Crush Direct took Stanley to Tahoe for some recuperative snowboarding. Dress code…me: Dolce suit, white-stitched YSL shit-kickers and bowtie. JP: resplendent as ever, in a matte-black pilgrim-belt-buckled Ted Baker number that could be the new uniform for Christmas elves…if they worked for Satan instead of Santa.

The Stevie Awards honor women executives, entrepreneurs, and the companies they run, worldwide, and have been hailed as “the business world’s own Oscars” (New York Post, April 27, 2005). Nicknamed the Stevies after the Greek for “crowned,” more than 180 nominated women executives and entrepreneurs from the U.S. and several other countries attended. Finalists were chosen by business professionals worldwide during preliminary judging last fall.

Winning the Stevie, Popick’s blog was included with “The Budget Fashionista” and “eMoms at Home.” Janine was also named a finalist in the “Entrepreneur of the Year” category, and VR was honored in two additional categories: the “Best Overall Company of the Year” and “Fastest-Growing Company.” The elegant Stevie trophy was designed by R. S. Owens, the same company that makes the Oscar and the Emmy. But I noted to Janine that it was rather flat-chested. No boobies on an accolade for females? What a bust.

“We’ve built VerticalResponse to help businesses communicate with their target audiences easily and effectively, from traditional direct mail to e-mail marketing,” said Popick. “Blogging is another step. Our newsletter has become the ‘teaser’ for our blog posts, letting our users know that we’ve updated the information on our blog.”

2006 was a good year for VR. They placed #402 on the Inc. 500 List, which ranks the fastest-growing private companies in the country, and came in #37 on the San Francisco Business Times List of “Top 100 Fastest-Growing Private Companies.”

Oh, and small world…found out that, growing up, Janine hung out in MY birth-town of Hamden, CT. Home of the Sleeping Giant. And Thorton Wilder. And the now-defunct-but-legendary Bimonte’s Pizza.

–DM News Associate Publisher/Bon Vivant/Raconteur/Ombudsman Robert DiGioia

AOL today has entered into a two-year alliance with rich media services firm PointRoll.
Under the agreement, PointRoll (http://www.pointroll.com) will work with AOL (http://www.aol.com) to create ads that are dynamic, interactive, and that can feature video and audio elements.

AOL will become PointRoll’s preferred portal partner and in doing so, AOL will get an exclusive window to use several new media formats, including video roll in banner ad space.  PointRoll will also give AOL rich media team.

Specific financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

-Dianna Dilworth

Webloyalty.com, the online marketing services company, markets only through other web sites. But this hasn’t prevented the firm from continuing to grow at breakneck speed.

In a recent meeting at the company’s Norwalk, CT headquarters, our DM News contingent was provided a glimpse of why the company increased its sales by almost 50% in 2006.

As CEO Rick Fernandes put it, “You would imagine FTD.com sells its clients millions of bouquets of flowers per year. Well, they all see offers from Webloyalty” – which, by the way, has also learned their buying, retention and conversion factors.

But it’s not only on FTD.com’s site where Webloyalty.com induces customers to join its seven membership services. The company’s 130 partners include the likes of Priceline, Redcats USA and U.S. Air. Last year alone, 43 new e-commerce partners were signed up, according to Mark Negley, VP of Business Development (and once upon a time, a sales representative for DM News).

The key is Webloyalty.com’s marketing database, built on software algorithms, that markets online to consumers after they’ve completed a transaction. The software takes into account the general demographics of each site and what the customer bought, along with the customer’s buying history as stored in cookies.

Webloyalty.com now has over 2-million paying members in its membership clubs. The company launched in Canada in 2005 and also plans to launch this year in Europe.

In a new service, the company has been named the exclusive online marketer of the Official Nascar Membership Club (ONMC). This has been made possible by the growing recognition of Webloyalty’s expertise in direct marketing, membership management and technology development, including database management and fulfillment for online marketing.

According to Rick Fernandes, who is one of three founders of the company, there are two very distinct sides to the business – the product and content side, which brings compelling and valuable content to consumers, and the e-commerce revenue-generating partnerships.

It did not come as a surprise to us to learn that Webloyalty.com was selected by AlwaysOn Media in January, 2007 as one of their Top 100 private companies. Or that it was named as Connecticut’s fastest growing technology company in 2006.

–Posted by Adrian Courtenay

At today’s Fifth Annual Marketing Forum hosted by the Economist Magazine, I met up with executives from Landor Associates, an interactive branding agency that was sponsoring the show. The firm handles clients like FedEx and the NFL and focuses on both design and the customer experience. The best way to increase this experience is through engagement, according to almost everyone here today including executives from cereal cafe Cereality, eBay and organic cleaning products manufacturer Method.

According to Lori Rosenwater, executive director of brand engagement at Landor Associates, the best brand engagement program involves two elements, an engaging and inspiring dimmension combined with a practical component that grounds the brand in day-to-day activities.

And this rang true at the conference, as the panels hosted marketing stories intended to motivate audience members, while the tables were peppered with Cereality breakfast bars, Method cleaning products and the book “Brand Simple”, by Landor Associate managing director Allen P. Adamson, to keep marketers in attendance satisfied.

Practical meets informed.

-Dianna Dilworth

YouTube users have been blocked access in Turkey because of videos “insulting the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.”

Turk Telekom, Turkey’s largest telecommunications provider is already enforcing the ban.  This comes during a year-long US TV campaign promoting the Mediterranean country led by the Turkish Tourism Ministry.

We will have to see how YouTube and Google will respond to this.  It is interesting how Google fought against China’s censorship laws, but caved in to keep from shutting out the emerging market.
-Dianna Dilworth

The New York Times reported today that the Department of Commerce had a positive report about personal incomes, which rose 1 percent in January. “The extra income helped support a better-than-expected rise in consumer spending,” read the piece and “In January while consumer spending was up by 0.5 percent. The income advance was the largest since a 1.3 percent jump in January 2006.”

This is good news for retailers, as the  falling national housing market have curbed consumer spending.  We’ll have to see if the stock market drop this past week will affect February and March spending, but the strong holiday sales season saw strong growth of sales online.  So as online continues to grow and marketers continue to shift efforts into the virtual world, the outlook is positive.

-Dianna Dilworth