This week, the Méribel Ad Festival announced the winners of its 6th annual advertising awards, and we're proud to say that an eStara-powered campaign (Sporting's Gamebox campaign) was among the winners for best cyber/viral marketing campaign. 

Here's a summary of the event and of the campaign from Alvaro Alves. 

Congratulations to Sporting and to the folks at DraftFCB who put together the creative for this campaign, which took Portugal by storm with more than 200,000 calls in two days and fans showing up the stadium in droves.

ATG, eStara's parent company, announced a very cool competition this morning where they plan to award $60,000 to innovators in the field of e-commerce and online business.  According to this release, ATG will award the winner a prize of $50,000 in cash. A second “People’s Choice” winner will receive $10,000 in cash as a result of a public vote on the company’s blog, “e-Commerce Insights,” http://www.ecommerceinsights.com. Submissions, which must include an e-commerce element as a business-critical component of the success of the plan, will be judged on the inventiveness and creativity of their proposals, as well as on long-term business viability and likelihood of execution. The winner will be chosen by a panel of software and technology experts, influential industry leaders and business executives to be announced at a later date. All entries must be received by 5:00 pm ET on Wednesday, January 30, 2008.

The ATG e-Commerce Ingenuity Business Plan Competition is open to individuals or teams of e-commerce entrepreneurs, as well as seed or early-stage companies. To qualify as seed or early-stage, annual revenues or monies raised to date must be less than $100,000. Employees of ATG or its affiliates, volunteers, and their immediate family members and/or those living in same household of each are not eligible.

Examples of encouraged submission concepts could include:

• New technology offerings to attract and retain specific customer segments
• New solutions for creating loyal communities of e-commerce consumers
• Visionary user-interface developments or approaches to personalized e-commerce experiences
• Vehicles to deliver cutting-edge e-commerce experiences to new industries

To enter the competition, each individual or team must submit a completed “Competition Submission” form as found at www.atg.com/ingenuity/.

Sebastien Provencher at The Praized Blog offers a wrap up to the Webinar eStara hosted last week with Superpages.com.  According to Sebastien, "Superpages has to be commended for sharing some ROI information around pay-per-call..."

The 1to1 Blog posts an interesting profile today about an online brokerage, Scottrade, that has discovered that providing access to live customer support is not only good customer service, in some cases it's a competitive differentiator.  Even more impressive in this age of cost-cuttong via self-service options and IVRs, is the fact that the company routes every single call directly to local branch representatives rather than have customers sit through an automated menu.  According to this article, the results for taking this approach speak for themselves...greater revenue and no doubt much more loyal customers.

All too often, companies view customer service initiatives as a cost, but do so at the expense of their customers' loyalty.  However, as the article points out, "The value of an individual transaction might not be worth the price of the customer's call, but the long-term value of the relationship is well worth it."

Providing consistent, personalized attention from a live human being can do wonders for boosting the bottomline.  As this example proves, companies should realize that not every contact is a burden, but an opportunity.

Combining strategy and technology to improve contact efficiency and still deliver high-quality customer service is the key to taking advantage of these opportunities. 

Today is the 20th Annual World No Tobacco Day, which was started by the World Health Organization to promote the dangers of tobacco use worldwide.  To mark this occasion, eStara is announcing a new partnership today with Free & Clear, a leading tobacco cessation program that works with corporate employers, healthcare providers and government agencies to put people in touch with phone-based counselors to help them quit using tobacco.  Here's the scoop.