Archive for March, 2008

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Overdrive Interactive Wins 2007 Internet Advertising Competition Award for Best Online Events Campaign

Monday, March 31st, 2008 by Harry Gold

Overdrive Interactive, a Boston-based full service search engine marketing and online media agency specializing in lead generation, brand building and customer acquisition, announced today that the agency has been awarded the Best Online Events Campaign Award in the 2007 Internet Advertising Competition (IAC).

Overdrive received the award from the Web Marketing Association for Outstanding Achievement in Internet Advertising for the online media campaign that was designed and developed for client, Las Vegas Motor Speedway. See the creative here.

Now in its 11th year, the IAC Awards are produced by the Web Marketing Association (WMA) and is the premier event for web developers and marketers each year. The Internet Advertising Competition (IAC) Awards are produced by the Web Marketing Association to honor excellence in online advertising, recognize the individuals and organizations responsible, and showcase the award winning Internet advertising. This is one of the only competitions to recognize only online categories of advertising. IAC Award entries are submitted by advertising and interactive agencies or corporate marketing departments worldwide.

“We are delighted to be recognized with the prestigious IAC Award. To be recognized by a jury of your peers is definitely validating and an acknowledgement of the great work that Overdrive is doing on behalf of our clients,” commented Ty Velde, Director of Client Services.

The online banner campaign utilized eye-catching imagery from previous, memorable races and was accompanied by straight-forward, witty copy. The goal of the campaign was to target NASCAR fans to buy tickets to the Spring Cup Weekend at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

For more information on Overdrive’s online media services, click here.

About Overdrive Interactive:
Boston-based Overdrive Interactive (http://www.overdriveinteractive.com/) is a full service online marketing firm that specializes in branding and lead generation services using search engine optimization, paid search management, online media planning and buying, email marketing, and web and application development. The agency serves a wide range of consumer and B2B Fortune 500 companies.

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Using Meta Search to Make Intelligent Travel Choices

Friday, March 28th, 2008 by David Gibson

Everyone who has ever spent any time traveling for business or for pleasure has an airline horror story:

“They lost my luggage and I had to buy all new stuff when I got to the hotel!”

‘We sat on the tarmac for three hours and then they canceled the flight!”

“My plane was so small you couldn’t even stand up in the aisles!”

What if you could find out which flights were almost always late? Or see the type of aircraft you were going fly? Or access what the load factor was for a particular flight before you purchased that non-refundable ticket?

You can get this information now if you’re willing to spend a fair amount of time on multiple web sites to ferret it out but wouldn’t it be nice to find everything related to the speed, comfort, and ease of your flight in one spot? Take a look at InsideTrip.com (http://www.insidetrip.com/) when you’re planning your next flight.

The site is still in Beta so there are limits on the carriers listed and the type of passengers (adults only for now) but the real value here is in the depth and breadth of useful information available to the average airline traveler. The interface is simple and very familiar to anyone who has ever booked a flight on any of the major travel sites or through an individual carrier’s site. Pick your departure and arrival cities, enter your travel dates, and decide on the time of day you want to fly. Click on the search button and in addition to seeing the results of your search in a listing of carriers, flight times, and connecting flight numbers you get a flight dashboard that assigns a quality score to each flight.

The quality score is determined by a dozen preset variables you can modify to ensure that the flight you choose matches your preferences. Always carry on your bags and never check anything? De-select the “Lost Bags” variable and ask InsideTrip.com to recalculate the trip quality score. Know that you get habitually get to the airport more than an hour ahead of the time the airline recommends so security wait time isn’t an issue for you? Again, a simple mouse click removes that variable from the quality score calculation.

This redefinition of meta-search for the travel industry has implications for search marketing as well. The move away from simple text listings and toward more all-inclusive results for searches is already well underway: Google’s Universal Search now includes images, videos, and other items in their search results while Ask.com and other search engines provide site thumbnails as a standard part of their results listings. This expansion of types of data in search results means sites need to implement a consistent approach to tagging their site content because being “search-friendly” now applies to more than text-only keywords.

Imagine you’re searching for a software tool to help make your sales force more productive and when the results come up, one company’s listing shows only a few of lines of text describing their product while another company offers not only the few lines of product text but also access to their deployment metrics, pricing matrix, and a few customer testimonials relevant to your industry?

Which site do you think you’d click on first?


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Overdrive Interactive Receives MarketingSherpa 2007 Email Award for Webinar Campaign

Thursday, March 27th, 2008 by admin

Overdrive Interactive, a Boston-based full service online marketing agency specializing in lead generation, brand building and customer acquisition, today announced that the company received a 2007 Email Marketing Award from MarketingSherpa, a research firm that publishes how-to information for marketing, advertising and public relations professionals, for the email campaign that promoted Symmetricom’s three-part webinar series on precise timing and synchronization for Next Generation Networks with the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS). The email campaign received a Silver [B-to-B] Award in the “Best (or Most Dramatic) Test You Learned From” category.

The 2007 Email Awards were presented at a gala awards ceremony on Monday, March 5 in Miami. This is the second year in a row that Overdrive Interactive has been recognized for its marketing campaigns for Symmetricom. Last year, the company received a 2006 Email Award from MarketingSherpa for the campaign that launched SyncServer® S200/S250, high-performance GPS (Global Positioning System) network time servers for Next Generation Networks.

“We are delighted to be recognized with the prestigious MarketingSherpa Award. To be recognized by a jury of your peers is definitely validating and an acknowledgement of the great work that Overdrive is doing on behalf of our clients.” commented Ty Velde, Director of Client Services.

For more information on the MarketingSherpa Email Awards, visit: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/.

About Overdrive Interactive:
Boston-based Overdrive Interactive (http://www.overdriveinteractive.com/) is a full service online marketing firm that specializes in branding and lead generation services using search engine optimization, paid search management, online media planning and buying, social media marketing, email marketing, and web and application development. The agency serves a wide range of consumer and B2B Fortune 500 companies.

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