Webbys Ambassador

Maryrose Lyons of Brightspark has been appointed as the Irish Ambassador to the Webbys. Her role is to promote Irish entries to the most prestigious web awards in the world.

 

Exoftware

Beautiful design combined with clever copy strikes the perfect balance for this Agile development company. Design has been successfully carried over into this Fast 50’s email communications.

 

Saaspoint

A site revamp for salesforce.com partners in Ireland, saaspoint, saw Brightspark refresh the content and optimise the html/css.

 

Nurture

E-commerce microsite for sales of parenting e-book. Supported by global pay per click campaign.

 

Pay Per Click

Lots of activity in this area! New additions include global campaign for French real estate company; European recruitment drive for HR company, and campaigns in finance, travel, and gifts.

 

 

This season it's all about Awards!

And it’s an extra special one this year because we’ve been nominated in a number of categories and across both sets of Irish award giving bodies! If you haven’t done so already, please vote for us here. Internet Marketing, Web Design and Best Blog.

In this edition we thought it might be interesting to take a look at Web Awards around the Globe. See what’s hot from Sydney to Seattle and see how little old Ireland fares on the quality stakes.

Plus we have our regular features - Google Zeitgeist as well as Email Marketing News, but with an awards flavour. See what Marketing Sherpa rates as the best emails out there.

Probably the most famous web awards are The Webby's. Hailed as the Oscars of the web world, the 10th Webby Awards took place in June in New York with awards handed out in a huge number of categories. The main thing we noticed about the winners was that in so many cases, the people got it more right than the 'academy' did. Read more…

In Ireland, we have two opportunities for kudos and fame:

  • Net Visionary Awards, run by the Irish Internet Association. We're up for the web design excellence, blogging and the internet marketing awards.
  • Golden Spiders, run by Business & Finance Magazine. You will have your chance to vote in a few weeks. Don’t worry we’ll let you know!

Worldwide Web Awards

Click here for the winners from the UK, Spain, Canada, Autralia and New Zealand.

An interesting category in the UK is that of Internet Villain Award.

This year it was won by The UK Presidency of the European Union for "seeking EU wide data retention laws which will force ISPs and telcos to retain more data for longer without proper impact assessment."

In Ireland, there would be one Internet Villain ...guess who

Shock news! August 2006 saw RTE.ie drop to number 6 in the Google Zeitgeist. Number 1 is Ryanair, then Big Brother and Aer Lingus. Is it just because we livein Ireland that our searches seem so boring? Or are we a nation obsessed with television and cheap flights out of here?

UK’s continuing obsession with obesity/health sees "Mayo Clinic" coming in at Number 2. The ever brilliant bbc.co.uk sits in first place. August 2006 is the first month we see social networking sites dominate the top 10, taking 3 of the top 10 searches.

Meanwhile in India, linguistic challenges see "English German Dictionary" and "legal dictionary" as the top 2 searches on Google during the month of August.

Globally, we’re seeing Jessica Alba giving our old favourite Paris Hilton a run for her money in the top 10 searches around the world.

The Best Email Campaigns in the World

Marketing Sherpa is a highly regarded market research company based in the States. Earlier this year, the first ever Marketing Sherpa email marketing awards took place, with 38 winners in categories as diverse as "best automated response" through to "best trigger driven email". Below are 3 of our favourites. You can view the full list here.

Best Email Newsletter for Marketing Purposes

Compelling content, and easy-to-skim design. The winners in this category are good at brand building, educating the market, and creating sales.

Best Autoresponder Series

Want to see how to do that automatic series of messages right?

Best Viral Email Campaign

If you’ve always wanted to come up with a clever joke, a fun game, or a holiday card everyone forwarded to their Mother, here’s how!