As many of you know, this week marks ATG Insight Live, ATG's annual user conference, in beautiful Charleston, South Carolina.  It's a record-breaking year for the event with more than 600 participants in attendance.  The event will feature new technologies being rolled out by ATG in the coming months, as well as best practice examples from leading retailers, analysts and ATG/eStara executives.  Luckily, if you were unable to attend this year's event, our sister blog E-commerce Insights will have a day-by-day break down of the activity.  Enjoy!

Following up on yesterday's interview on Email Marketing Innovation, we spotted this new Forrester report released this week that looks at some best and worst practices in email interaction.  Here's a summary of the report, "Forrester applied its Email Interaction Review methodology to the email experiences at 16 firms — four of the largest credit card issuers, consumer electronics retailers, PC manufacturers, and wireless providers. Of the nine companies that actually responded to our emails, none passed...To improve email experiences, firms should follow a user-centric approach to designing email interactions."

In preparation for this week's ad:tech conference in San Francisco, last week we announced the launch of Click Suite for Interactive Marketers, which is a set of tools intended to help online marketers engage customers via voice and track results across both online and phone channels. Email campaigns are a natural fit for these kinds of solutions. This week, we spoke to one of the pioneers of email marketing, Jeanniey Mullen, to get her insight into some of the challenges facing email marketers and what they can do to create and track innovative campaigns. Jeanniey is executive director, senior partner, worldwide email marketing at OgilvyOne Worldwide, a global leader in customer relationship management and interactive marketing, and founder of the Email Experience Council. (Disclosure: OgilvyOne Worldwide is an eStara partner, and eStara is a member of the Email Experience Council) She is also a regular columnist for ClickZ.

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With ad:tech San Francisco just around the corner, we thought the timing of this New York Times piece by Stuart Elliot tied in well to what we were talking about yesterday...agencies are being tasked with being more creative, and more accountable. 

According to Elliot, yesterday at the management conference of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, "The creativity being celebrated by the speakers was not of the artsy, award-winning variety, but rather an accountable kind that is rooted in insights derived from hard data about customer shopping patterns."

In talking to marketers, one of the biggest challenges we hear about  is the lack cross-channel measurement in interactive advertising.  Few marketers believe they're getting a complete picture of campaign performance from Web analytics tools alone, and about half are unable to compare online and offline metrics. Today, we're coming out with a solution that helps address part of that challenge by empowering interactive agencies with tools to engage online customers with voice and track campaign results across the Web and phone channels.  Here's the scoop.