Hammered on Wall Street like other B2C e-commerce companies, video e-tailer
BigStar Entertainment Inc. on Thursday
made the leap to the business-to-business arena, launching a marketing
division called Advaya Inc., and
spinning it off as its own separate company.
So far, the nascent e-mail marketing service has attracted six clients —
MediaBay Inc., fashionmall.com Inc., BigStar.com, Flirt Inc., iGain and The Wall Street Transcript.
The new company will concentrate on sending personalized e-mail messages to
consumers, and tracking results. BigStar (BGST) decided to split off a marketing
entity to meet the current demand for online marketing alternatives to
banner ads. The division grew out of BigStart’s own e-mail marketing
division, which it used to communicate with its customers
“This technology developed by BigStar allows Web sites to target, segment,
track and report sophisticated information about their users,” said David
Friedensohn, chief executive officer and chairman of BigStar Entertainment.
“At bigstar.com, we have found that this targeted marketing service has
resulted in sales conversion results that are significantly better than
those of banner ads.”
Through its marketing division BigStar said it intends to offer its B2B
clients the ability to manage their subscriber databases, build, schedule,
test, send and analyze targeted messages to their users. Whether those
companies find the ultimate truth as its Advaya Sanskrit name implies
depends on how well the service actually performs.
“We spent well into the seven figures from all rounds of funding to develop
personalized online direct marketing,” said Friedensohn. “With banner ad
click-throughs averaging only about three percent we developed a way to get
the message through the clutter.”
The company employs eight software engineers and is currently beefing up
its marketing initiatives.