Speakers

Shar VanBoskirk
Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Shar serves Interactive Marketing professionals. She is a leading expert on how businesses can leverage interactive marketing channels and technologies to drive sales and deepen customer relationships. During her 12 years with Forrester, Shar has been instrumental in the development of many of the company’s interactive marketing program evaluation methodologies, training courses, and marketing planning tools and has also been part of Forrester’s sales and consulting organizations.

A popular speaker, Shar has been seen on stage at ad:tech, MITX, DMA, and the Email Service Provider Coalition events, among others. She is on the board of SEMPO — the search engine marketing professionals organization — and is also widely quoted in the press including such media outlets as BusinessWeek, Fortune, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal and is a frequent guest on CNBC and National Public Radio.

 

Ian Medlock
Email Marketing Manager, Virgin America

Ian is a marketing professional that joined the Virgin America team as an Email Marketing Manager. Ian comes from email service provider Acxiom, and has worked with large email marketing programs in the retail and financial verticals including Gap Inc., Wells Fargo, and Intuit. At Virgin America, his primary focus is on scalability of relevance in the email channel and maintaining a conversation with Virgin America guests through convergence with social and web channels.

 

Jeanne Jones
Email Marketing Manager, Alaska Airlines

One of two Email Marketing Managers at Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air, Jeanne Jones constitutes exactly half of the company’s email marketing program in its entirety – which is responsible for creating, deploying, and analyzing more than 25 million individual email each year. Leading the crusade of strategy, technology, and analytics, Jones has pushed the envelope of list growth and conversion, building out campaigns and implementing creative strategies and cross-channel pollination. In 2010, Jones implemented an abandon cart campaign that has seen conversion rates of over 16% and $12 RPE using these tools. Alaska Airlines’ email program has seen incremental growth of 19% in their channel and increased the number of email campaigns by over 100% in just one year.

 

Katrina Kithene
Email Marketing Manager, Alaska Airlines

Katrina took on the thrilling, high-stakes world of Email Marketing at Alaska Airlines in 2005, before bringing Jeanne Jones in on the scene in 2009, thereby doubling the workforce – and exploding campaign growth, strategic planning, technical infrastructure, and metric analysis into email hyperdrive. Also in 2009, Alaska Airlines implemented a new LEAN process into their email program, allowing them to integrate robust CRM and web analytic technologies; these tools have allowed the marketing team to build out targeted, relevant campaigns, built on a complex recipe of customer scoring and behavior, testing, and segmentation … with just the tiniest dash of creative genius. These improvements have not only seen massive ROI and unheard of open, click, and conversion rates, they’ve changed the way email is perceived throughout the company, garnering attention all the way at the top of the executive food chain.

 

Amy Norton
Director, Online Marketing at Costco Wholesale

Amy Norton is the Director of Online Marketing at Costco Wholesale, the world’s largest Membership Club Retailer. In this capacity, she is responsible for driving traffic and sales to Costco’s US and Canadian websites through email, print and search marketing, and general merchandising. Costco.com is currently ranked #16 in sales among Internet Retailers.

Mrs. Norton assumed these responsibilities in March 2007. Prior to her most-recent appointment, she was the Online Marketing Manager for US and Canada. Prior to that, she was a member of Costco’s Corporate Marketing Team for 5 years and has held various positions in retail for Costco.

Mrs. Norton is a graduate of Central Washington University where she earned a degree in Public Relations. She also attended and earned a degree from The Art Institute of Seattle. After graduation, she continued pursuing her career at Costco where she has been an employee since 1991. She is also a member of Journeys, A Network of Professional Women at Costco.

 

Peter Westerman
SVP Audience Marketing, Ziff Davis Enterprise

Peter has a proven track record of business growth and innovation. He has domain expertise in: marketing to software developers; platform evangelism and developer relations; software sales acceleration. He also has senior management experience in BtoB and BtoC software marketing, on-line community development, magazine publishing, and live events.He specializes in sales and marketing management, database marketing, brand management, mergers and acquisitions, strategic planning, product launches and line extensions.

 

Ryan Wernet
Director of Distribution, MSNBC Interactive

Since 2002, Ryan Wernet established and led MSNBC Interactive’s Partner Services, Release Management, and Performance Testing teams. As the Director of Distribution, he now drives the distribution strategy for all MSNBC Interactive sites, focusing on search engine optimization (SEO), social media implementations, proactive content management practices, and distribution channels.

MSNBC Interactive online brands include but are not limited to: MSNBC, TODAY, Meet the Press, NBC News, Dateline, Nightly News, newsvine.com, breakingnews.com, EveryBlock.com.

Ryan recently received an MBA degree from the Michael G. Foster School of Business at the University of Washington.

 

Tom Rowe
Director of Web Marketing and Creative Services, Visit Baltimore

Tom Rowe joined the Visit Baltimore in May 2007 as the Director of Web Marketing and Creative Services. He leads digital marketing, creative services and social media outreach for the organization.

Tom began his career at Weber Shandwick, a global PR agency with offices in Baltimore. There, Tom managed web development and marketing for clients including the Milk Promotions Board (got milk?), Sony Ericsson, McDonalds, GE, and GM.

Tom’s work on behalf of Visit Baltimore has received local and national media coverage from FoxNews.com, ABCNews.com, Baltimore Sun, and Mashable.com among others. A study released by Development Counsellors International named Baltimore among the “Tweet Elite” for destinations using the site.

Tom graduated from the University of Maryland with a BA in English.

 

Phil Davis
Managing Director of Marketing Services

Allen Nance
President & Founder, WhatCounts

Allen Nance is a leading authority on email marketing and digital communications.  From his rented house he launched Mansell Group and through a series of acquisitions grew it into one of the largest privately held email marketing firms in the world.  In 2010, Mansell Group partnered with a 3.0 Billion private equity firm to continue to drive Mansell Group to new heights. In 2011, Mansell Group was rebranded WhatCounts and today is the new leader in email marketing with a presence on four continents and emails being delivered in over 35 languages. Allen manages WhatCounts’ sales, marketing, and product development. A technologist with a marketing background, Allen focuses on helping organizations utilize WhatCounts’ email solutions to better communicate with their current and potential customers.

Mike Lynch
Vice President of Technical Services, WhatCounts

Mike Lynch is Vice President of Technical Services at WhatCounts where he manages the company’s technical account management team and is instrumental in the development and direction of the company’s messaging platform. His team is responsible for training, implementation and support of WhatCounts’ customers.

Prior to working at WhatCounts, he was co-founder and President of Sevista Technologies, a leader in email marketing technology and distribution systems. He worked as a Sales Engineer at IBM/Tivoli where he supported the company’s Network Monitoring, Software Distribution and Job Scheduling products. He also spent seven years at Sales Technologies where he developed and deployed the company’s sophisticated Sales Force Automation software. Mike received his B.S. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology with specialization in Databases and Software Engineering.

 

Doug Broujos
Vice President of Services, WhatCounts

Doug Broujos joined the WhatCounts team in 2011 as the Vice President of Services. His primary focus is on providing management support to the account management, technical account management, deliverability and professional services personnel that provide outstanding support to WhatCounts clients. His team is focused on delivering the best in client services including onboarding and setup, trainings, teaching best practices, platform support and guidance, deliverability expertise, and professional services assistance including strategic, creative and campaign production. Doug also oversees the Baltimore operations for the company.

Prior to joining WhatCounts, the 20-year online marketing veteran was senior vice president of client services at TIG Global/MICROS, a hospitality-focused internet marketing company. At TIG Global, Doug led client teams focused on client consultation, service, and performance. Before joining TIG Global, he was senior vice president of marketing and e-commerce at 3Di Technologies, an international GIS data management company with clients in the banking, telecommunications, and travel sectors. In addition to leading the company’s marketing strategy, Doug managed the operational integration for five acquisitions, and was responsible for creating national client-service teams and further enhancing customer relationships. Early in his career, he founded one of the first commercial Internet Service Providers in Maryland, later acquired by a CBS-TV affiliate.

 

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Strategy, WhatCounts

Christopher S. Penn has been featured as a recognized authority in many books, publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, BusinessWeek and US News & World Report, and television networks such as PBS, CNN, CNBC, Fox News, and ABC News for his leadership in new media and marketing.

Mr. Penn is the Director of Strategy at WhatCounts, an email marketing company based in Atlanta, as well as co-founder of the groundbreaking PodCamp New Media Community Conference, and co-host of the Marketing Over Coffee marketing podcast. He is an adjunct professor of Internet marketing and the lead subject matter expert and professor of Advanced Social Media at the University of San Francisco. He’s also the author of Marketing White Belt: Basics for the Digital Marketer.