March Madness - BrightWave Wins Atlanta Marketer of the Year for Best Email Campaign

Not sure who you had in your AMA brackets but last Thursday night in front of approximately 300 corporate and agency marketers, I am proud to say we (BrightWave Marketing and our long time client, CoreNet Global) were honored by the American Marketing Association with the Atlanta Marketer of the Year (AMY) award for best email campaign, beating out Cox Enterprises (my former employer) and Intercontinental Hotels.

The picture above is an attempt to capture Eric Bowles, VP at CoreNet Global, as he was given the prestigious Red Pencil award on the Fabulous Fox Theatre stage.

The event was very slick and featured 30 second acceptance speeches (like the Oscars, music cut you off if you rambled), stage "models" handing out the awards and seated dinner. All in all a great event and made better by being recognized by our peers for our innovative remarketing campaign. You can download the case study here.

Again, congratulations to the many different people involved in that campaign, especially our head of Client Services, Brent Rosengren, who spearheaded the effort. A job well done by all!

Where Email Saved Lives

I thought this near horrific story of yet another campus security issue was a way to show email in a different light. Some excerpts:

...students on campus were alerted over campus public address systems and by e-mail. He (potential shooter) was locked down with other students in the campus' student union.

The lockdown came just hours after school officials sent a campus-wide e-mail to students updating them about plans for an emergency messaging service. Many universities are deploying such systems in a response to last year's shootings at Virginia Tech, where a student gunman killed 32 people and himself last April.

Schools have had to become proactive very quickly in terms of how they will communicate to their students, parents and staff since this seems to be an all too common occurrence. Why I hate to see anything like this happen, it is good to see schools ,which are traditonally slow to embrace technology, utilize smart messaging strategy for crisis situations like this. Sobering usage of email for sure.