This week I spoke with Covario’s VP of marketing and product management, Craig Macdonald about the interactive marketing analytics firm’s partnership with Neo@Ogilvy, Ogilvy Worldwide’s search marketing division. The companies work together with clients like Intel Corp and Adobe Systems to optimize and manage global search. Neo works on search strategies and Covario provides the technology to monitor the initiatives across various languages, business units and product lines. Craig discussed the challenges facing global search.

Craig said that the trick to launching a new product globally is combining online and off-line campaigns. “Consolidating and monitoring search programs is very complex,” he said. “You need to be able to track performance on all of the different platforms, both paid and organic, to see how you can drive additional performance.”

“With global campaigns, many assume that 50% of the total resources would go towards data aggregation. That’s not an insignificant amount of money,” Craig said. “You’ve got to be as automated as possible.”

He also said that data collection, as of late, has been “pretty atrocious.” He said, “Having different formats and information coming from various sources is a problem. We need to identify where something isn’t working, whether it’s the landing page, the creative or something else.”

He continued, “With search, you need to maximize the speed in which we get the performance information back to the client so you can see where you’re doing well or poorly within 24 hours and then adjust strategies your strategy accordingly.”

Times are hard, budgets are tight, yet the storied Cannes thoroughfare La Croisette is throbbing with DM creatives (among those of other channel persuasions) hotly debating the work up for contention.

The results are out for the Direct and Promo Lions; JWT Mumbai snapped up the former for the Times of India Newspaper entry “Lead India,” and New York’s BBDO triumphed in the latter for the HBO entry titled Voyeur Integrated Campaign. The Cyber Lions winners will be announced on Thursday.

Meanwhile, for local flavor, I highly recommend Matt Shirtcliffe’s blog. A judge at Cannes this year, Matt is the executive creative director of Proximity Canada – and a truly splendid fellow. Yes, the entries are funny, but there’s also some great insight about the state of creativity in various markets.

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