VideoEgg of San Francisco, California, was awarded the Stevie Award for Best New Company in the 2008 American Business Awards. Here we review their achievements in the run-up to that award.

Since its launch in 2005, VideoEgg has been at the forefront of the online advertising revolution, launching multiple new market-leading ad technologies and programs. VideoEgg was the first to commercialize interactive advertising overlays onto video, an approach that is now being widely adopted by the industry.

In February of 2007, less than two years after the company was founded, VideoEgg announced it was hosting over 3 million video files, demonstrating it had become the leading video solution for online communities. Its video ad network, the EggNetwork, had become the largest ad network of its kind, including more than sixty online communities such as AOL, Bebo, hi5, myYearbook.com, and Tagged.

By late April of that year, VideoEgg announced that the EggNetwork had powered sixty online video campaigns in a three-month time span, including campaigns from General Motors, Ford, L’Oreal, Puma, ABC, Canon, Electronic Arts, and Nestlé.

Monetizing Applications
In August of 2007, as the popularity and usage of widgets on Facebook grew, VideoEgg began enabling Facebook developers to monetize their applications through the newly launched EggNetwork Advertising Platform (EAP). The platform allows developers to earn money with the applications they develop for Facebook by leveraging the EggNetwork’s international sales team and innovative approach to online advertising.

Two months later, in an effort to foster a dialogue around the open application environments associated with social networks, VideoEgg hosted their first “AppCamp,” a one-day event that successfully engaged developers and industry insiders in a conversation around monetization and understanding user behavior for advertising in social environments.

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Eulogy! PR in London, England, won a Stevie Award for Best Communications Campaign in Europe in the 2008 International Business Awards.

Eulogy! was formed in 1996 by CEO Adrian Brady and is made up of talented individuals working across business-to-business and consumer accounts such as Royal Mail, Virgin Media TV, Moneysupermarket.com, Virgin Mobile, Pearl & Dean, the Audit Bureau of Circulation, and Brown-Forman.

Eulogy!’s award-winning, global publicity campaign made the opening of the Hard Days Night Hotel the most talked-about hotel opening of 2008.  With extensive print and broadcast coverage spanning the globe and an international audience of over 900 million, the hotel launch publicity put Liverpool back on the international style map, coinciding with the city’s tenure as 2008 European Capital of Culture.
 
On winning a Stevie at the 2008 International Business Awards in Dublin, Eulogy! CEO Brady said: “We’re thrilled to be the proud winners of a Stevie Award.  The competition was fierce.  This global award is fantastic recognition for the great work the Eulogy! team delivered and for the hotel.  It proves that PR can play a huge, if not leading, role in the marketing mix.”

There’s A Place
Hard Days Night Hotel is a four-star boutique hotel in Liverpool featuring Beatles-inspired artwork. The hotel is situated in the Beatles quarter of Liverpool, on the corner of Mathew Street, just yards away from the Cavern Club where the Beatles first rose to fame. The Grade II listed hotel has 110 guest rooms, two
penthouse suites, two restaurants, two exclusive bars, two conference rooms, and a wedding suite.

Each room features one unique piece of artwork by American airbrush artist Shannon, who also decorated public areas of the restored five-stor y building in Liverpool’s commercial district.

Please Please Me
In late 2007 the hotel’s management team asked Eulogy! to launch the hotel using public relations as the sole marketing activity. Eulogy! was briefed to ensure that the hotel was not portrayed as a tacky, themed venue. It was imperative that all press activity communicated the key message that the hotel was a four-star boutique residence characterized with Beatles artwork. 

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Thumbplay, Inc. is defining the mobile entertainment experience for U.S. consumers and is the nation's largest and fastest-growing provider of mobile content. Thumbplay.com features licensed music, video and games from some of the world's largest entertainment companies, including: EMI, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Pictures Television, as well as several independent labels and artists and video game companies.

Michael Biondo is Thumbplay's VP-Customer Support. Michael won the Stevie Award for Customer Service Leader of the Year in the 3rd annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service, which were presented at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas on February 9.

We recently spoke with Michael about how he got his start in business, how customer service departments can succeed in an environment where they are expected to do more with less, and his advice for anyone building a customer service operation in these challenging economic times.

		Listen to the Podcast Interview...

		Read Michael Biondo's Stevie Award-winning Nomination ...

Blogs, or web logs, are all the rage these days. Each month in this space we'll point you to several blogs that we think might be of interest to you.

Gruntled Employees : Advice on how to keep employees "gruntled," and on imaginative alternatives to layoffs.
Jobless and Less : The site for the employmentally challenged.
Television Without Pity : Time on your hands to make snarky comments on TV shows? Here's your site.
Perez Hilton : Prefer to read someone else's snarky comments on celebrities? Go to this site.