Execs and Accounts for March 27, 2002

.Com Marketing has hired Kristina Ugalde-Flint as traffic and production manager. Ugalde-Flint, who was most recently marketing coordinator for Teranex, will be responsible for scheduling, budgeting and vendor communications for all client projects. She supports the client services team to ensure projects are delivered on time and within budget.

The marketing firm has also promoted account services manager Franchon Woodard to interactive media planner and buyer.

Research firm Reed Business Information (RBI), formerly Cahners Business Information, has selected DoubleClick’s DART for Publishers for serving of ads to its 135 online properties. Additionally, RBI will use DoubleClick’s DARTmail to deliver email newsletters to its 1.5 million unique subscribers. Up until now, Reed Business Information has used a variety of ad serving and email systems, which the company says made accurate and comparative reporting across all of its sites impossible.

“Internet marketing is a critical growth area for RBI, and aligning our business with DoubleClick puts us in a great position.” said Steve Reiss, senior vice president, RBI.

In advance of its pending relaunch, LastMinuteTravel has picked up four sales and marketing pros, including Amy Adams, who joins the company from her post as senior travel industry specialist at DoubleClick. The addition of Adams along with the other new hires, Mary Kay Bynan, Priscilla Valls and Alyssa Cohen means that LastMinuteTravel has doubled its marketing staff in 60 days.

Chief executive Alan Greenberg said the company is on track to fulfill goals laid out in January. These included building its sales and marketing team, relaunching its site, and introducing new technology to ease the transaction process easier for customers.

“We are on target with all of these elements and will be showcasing our new look and technology, as well as a host of strategic alliances, in the coming weeks,” said Greenberg.

Capital lender and investor CIT has tapped digital agency 360i to provide complete interactive media planning and buying, search engine marketing, rich media creative development, and campaign analytics. 360i’s creative team is developing a group of rich media ads that will be an extension of CIT’s new offline branding campaign. The campaign will run on Yahoo Finance, CBS Market Watch, Hoovers, and Bloomberg. 360i said it has already begun CIT’s search engine marketing campaign, which focuses on homepage and search engine optimization, as well as campaign analytics.

Advertising and design firm Methodologie has built a new brand strategy for WTS, an ASP focused solely on hosting J.D. Edwards enterprise solutions. Methodologie launched a new site and brand identity — not to mention a new name — for WTS, which was formerly known as World Technology Services.

“During the research portion of the project, we realized that key customers and partners already referred to the company as WTS, so it was natural to embrace where the brand equity lived,” said Mary Weisnewski, vice president of strategy and planning for Methodologie.

Ettain group has launched a new site for The Charlotte Convention Center as part of a custom technology solution for the 850,000 square foot community gathering place. The site caters to event planners researching cities to host conventions. Visitors to the site can view upcoming events, floor plans, menus and meeting planning tools. The site also features travel and tourism information about the North Carolina city.

For more breaking news on account action and executive moves, visit ChannelSeven.com.