E-Tailer BigStar Launches Separate Marketing Division

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 email 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 email 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 email 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.