Our opening keynote speaker this morning leaned over to me at breakfast and said, "Who puts the database guy as the opener?!" The good news is that we got to listen to Ted Wham, VP, Database Marketing of Orbitz. He's talented, experienced, fabulously geeky and passionate about using data intelligently to improve the customer experience. Ted generously walked us through how the Orbitz business works and some of the unique challenges of being an online travel agency, like the fact that they don't own the inventory and do not control pricing (or know it in advance). Despite the huge …

Six Flags Media Networks, part of the Six Flags amusement park company, has unveiled a new digital out-of-home media division that will be selling packages including an array of place-based digital media. Six Flags' parks reach 25-million visitors annually. As part of this expansion, Six Flags Media Networks is adding “Menu Board TV,� a new network of 220 digital menu boards in its busiest in-park restaurant venues, and has hired media veteran Adam Oliveri as vice president of the new division. The digital media menu boards initially were tested on a limited basis in 2009.

Under Armour marketing analyst Kris Zimmerman just mentioned at the MediaPost Email Insider Summit that the 3,000-person company has two copywriters. The writers do all communications for the company from in-store to email. That can bring a conistent tone, but a lot of work.

Amber-Marie Jacquez, a marketing communications manager at CareCredit, just unleashed a seemingly new marketing acronym: WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?). Email readers care first and last what the message can do for them. They ask WIIFM? And that's something email marketers need to keep in mind. “If they don’t feel it’s relevant, it’s done,� she said at MediaPost’s Email Insider Summit. “They’re not going to read my email.� CareCredit is a health care financing business that’s part of GE Money.

Kris Zimmerman, a marketing analyst at Under Armour, says the company is trying to refashion its image as an apparel provider for muscled, well-shaped, “sweatyâ€� athletes. And it’s increasingly targeting the “young competitor,â€� and his or her parents. “It’s the aspiring athlete … not quite as burly anymore,â€� she said on a panel at MediaPost’s Email Insider Summit. Baltimore-based Under Armour has redesigned the look and feel of its emails, partly to advance the new image. Zimmerman said the company began emphasizing email marketing as a customer retention tool about three years ago and recently invested in building …

SearchIgnite released Tuesday SearchIgnite 4.0. The upgrade supports several major enhancements aimed at making the process of managing high-performing paid search campaigns easier. One addition includes return on investment (ROI) forecasting. The company says the ROI Forecasting feature lets marketers create their own forecast charts to predict campaign ROI at varying budgets, accurately predicting how much revenue search campaigns will generate at different levels of spend.

Day 2 of MediaPost's Email Insider Summit began with a keynote by Orbitz CRM chief Ted Wham. Online travel company Orbitz hopes to find a way to use a customer’s social media behavior to generate email marketing targeting them. Perhaps if there’s a run of Twitter discussion about going to the World Cup this summer, Orbitz can then send emails with hotel deals in South Africa to soccer fans. “Social has to be incorporated into our system and we’re still struggling with the strategy around it,â€� Wham said. Orbitz uses Reponsys as its ESP and Smith-Harmon as …

I was delighted to hear both Yahoo! and Hotmail strike a very cooperative and collaborative tone for working with marketers and other senders today, as the two major global mailbox providers discussed plans to expand their inbox products and spam filtering. Carlo Catajan, Product Manager for Yahoo! Mail and Daniel Lewis, Sr. Product Manager for Microsoft Windows LIVE Hotmail, both said at their Email Insider Summit panel today that priority number one is to make sure that only messages that are welcome and valued by end user subscribers reach the inbox. That is very different from the early days …

Marketing budgets are up this year, but the email channel may or may not see the benefit. It will depend on the tenacity of email marketers and the level of integration with both customer acquisition and retention innovation. This is my take on this morning's opening keynote from Bruce Biegel, Managing Director of Winterberry Group, here at the Email Insider Summit in Captiva Island, Florida. If 2009 was the year when the inexpensive and high ROI email channel was expected to carry a larger share of retention and customer up selling, even with no new budget, Biegel seems …

Google’s PR team could be in for a long day Tuesday. That's when regulators from Canada, France, Israel, Netherlands and Spain will meet in Washington in order to "share their growing concerns about the privacy practices of Google Inc. and other online companies," according to an announcement circulated to the press on Monday.