Volume 1, Issue 8.

Concept: Marketing expenditures for the future

According to a 2005 Veronis Suhler Stevenson Communications Industry Forecast & Report published in a recent issue of Marketing News Magazine, U.S. advertising expenditures will more than double in two of the eleven types of media listed. Internet and Videogame ads expenditures are expected to increase significantly within the next four years. The expected expenditures growth percentages from 2005 to 2009 are listed below:

Broadcast TV – 21 %
Cable & Satellite TV – 54 %
Newspapers – 15 %
Broadcast & satellite radio – 19%
Yellow Pages (includes internet listings) – 21%
Magazines – 28%
B-to-B magazines (includes b2b e-media) – 30%
Internet – 123 %
Out of home – 24 %
Movie screen ads – 65 %
Videogame ads – 349 %

Recipe: Email Etiquette

With emails being one of the most common forms of contact these days, it is vastly important to maintain certain etiquette conventions.  Would you yell in a business associates face?  How about claiming your work is more important than others by staking an oversized red flag on their desk? Certainly not! Here are few things you may want to consider before sending out your next email:

1. DON’T WRITE IN CAPITALS – It is a form of passive-aggressive shouting that can be annoying for the recipient. If you are going to shout, at least have the civility to do it face-to-face.
2. Do not overuse the priority option – This email feature leads to ‘the boy who cried wolf’ scenario. You can cry out how important your emails are only so many times before the little red flag is ignored.
3. Get to the point – Overly wordy emails can be an insult to the recipient’s intelligence.
4. Always, check your emails for proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation! – Before you send anything out, always read through it at least once.  Don’t let the spell checker be your final editor. Mistakes are made and you might "right some thing the spill chucker does no cache."
5. Answer Swiftly – People are busy and send emails for a quick response. As a rule, answer every email within 24 hours, or if possible, that same business day.  If an email requires time and preparation, email back to the sender saying that you will get to the issue when possible. This will generally ease the person’s mind and you may find that they become far more cooperative. 
6. Delivery requests and receipts? – Don’t do it.  It leads the receiver to believe that you don’t trust them and often comes off as an invasion of privacy.  Instead, ask the recipient to let you know when your email is read and/or being dealt with.
7. Always type something in the subject bar – The subject bar is what the recipient will see first.  This little bar is the precursor, or title of your email.  If you put nothing, someone might browse past it or even more commonly, consider it spam.

Before you send out your next email, remember this recipe as a rule of thumb.  Be conscious of what the tone of your typed words is saying about you.

Client:Kidding Around Preschool and Day Camp

Kidding Around Preschool and Day Camp needed a professional site redesign to handle the large amount of traffic they receive daily.  The facilities are equipped with video cameras that stream up-to-date footage, so parents may login online to view their children during the day. The new site comes equipped with an administration panel, webcam login with individual passwords, and an online calendaring system that can be regularly updated by selected staff.  This was a fun site for the crew to work on with a lot of flexibility for design. It brought out the kid in all of us.