It never fails to amaze me how malleable and fragile time is. With only a few appointments today, a never-ending backlog of bookwork and a group of twenty plus twenty and thirty somethings to facilitate and be a resource for, my days never fail to fill and more often than not, overflow.

I am not alone, and in fact many in America fare far worse when it comes to controlling their own day moment-by-moment. We have become a nation of not workaholics but rather a nation of taskaholics. A “to do” list never becomes a have done list.

I am sure it began with downsizing, productivity gains, reduced staffing, and all of the other excuses to get five people to do the work of ten or fifteen or twenty. DDA has never downsized, reduced its workforce of measured productivity gains by the amount of services sold divided by the number of hours worked.

However, with every digital advertising and marketing service under one roof, DDA is constantly growing, pushing, offering more, doing more, meeting challenges and creating, conceptualizing, defining, explaining and selling…always for our clients, always on the leading edge, always with the best intentions.

So what am I complaining about my endless work, our endless task list at DDA is probably, in great part, MY FAULT.

Many years ago (at least ten), we included a feature in the DDA website called DDA Dare. Dare stood for Digital Agencies Requesting Exposure. It offered a listing on our website, to any other agency worldwide that offered all of the digital advertising services that we offered.

Due to the significant amount of traffic that our website receives, the DARE feature was exposed to thousands of competitors. Over the years a small number of design and advertising companies across the world have applied for the honor and advertising exposure the DARE program offered.

When researched by us, not a single one offered anything approaching the spectrum of advertising services offered by DDA. Further emphasizing this distinction is the fact that every one of our advertising and marketing services is done in-house. Branding, logo design, website design, trade show graphics, programming, copy writing, research, search engine optimization and search marketing, illustration, CD development, photography, video, DVDs, 2D and 3D animation, and more is all done by degreed, experienced, professional, full-time, year-round DDA employees.

As with all advertising and marketing projects, it is the results that are most important. DDA’s extreme capability and combination of services results in innovation, the development of hybrid technologies, and in products and services that outperform our client’s competitors in their respective industries.

Anyone can build a website. Find another organization that can build, in-house, a website like http://www.chains-and-charms.com/ that is professionally scripted, video integrated, e-commerce enabled with powerful proprietary programming, copy written with search engine optimized product and marketing content, monitored for usability, hosted, maintained, and tracked and I will…..give them free advertising in DDA DARE.

Corporate culture can be defined as that diverse set of intangibles that tie individuals together with common business approaches, goals, processes, and values. The strength and uniqueness of these intangibles often determines the cohesiveness and competitiveness of the business organization.

Corporate culture intangibles can determine the level of success and even assure or threaten the survival of each business organization.

This is why DDA is proud to say we work four ten-hour days, celebrate each team member’s birthday, and pass out a beer to all staff and clients in our offices and studios at 5:00 on Thursday evening.

It can be argued that making sure one of our Coldfusion or PHP Programmers has his or her birthday celebrated with a cake, gift and song, or having a search marketing specialist pass out beers to the graphic design or website design staff, or DDA choosing to never allow unpaid overtime for the entire team including copywriters, video production crew, flash animators or photographers, can assure the success, growth, and survival of the Corporation, but we are not taking any chances.

So, the hundreds of DDA-centric corporate culture idiosyncrasies that permeate everything we do, including beer night, will always be encouraged, facilitated, and cherished.

The green grass of spring is finally here. The landscapers are visiting for the first time and the bushes, lawns and even the rocks are being pruned, pared back, raked and mounded in preparation for growth. Hope springs eternal and spring brings eternal hope for the promise of growth through good weather and hard work.

So it has been for thousands of years and so it will be.

At DDA, the growth is as much a personal one as it is corporate or financial. The human condition does not allow for stagnation. We are all either learning, and striving, and growing or we are ignoring lessons, slacking, and dying.

Every day I see our photographers learning, our programmers improving, our website designers testing, our search engine marketing specialists tracking, our artists illustrating, our writers illuminating, our video production crew stretching, our flash artists animating, our branding team clarifying, and our ecommerce technicians polishing and presenting.

The weather is not always great, the world is not always perfect, but it seems the growth comes not from the results but rather from the effort. Spring is here, again!

I looked at the calendar for this week when I got in this morning and realized there are fewer appointments scheduled for today and tomorrow than I can ever remember. A moment of panic entered my mind, my fight-or-flight instincts took over and stress hormones flooded my body. Every business owner’s dark side took over and my mood plummeted. Is the recession really here and no one wants to do any branding, marketing, graphic design, video production, or advertising of any kind ever again, anywhere in the world, for any industry, service, or product? Is all that we have built in jeopardy?

Thankfully the voice of reason, of common sense, of objectivity and logic and peace and joy whispered in my ear, David, it is April 14th and Tax Day is tomorrow. It will return to normal on Wednesday. It was my wife and partner, Elizabeth, and of course, as usual, she is right.

Wednesday, the tempo will pick up and my life will once again be filled with controlled chaos, too much to do, incessant meetings, lots of questions to answer, and oh the uncontrollable phenomenon of time flying by way-to-fast.

Actually, the quiet and calm of today is kind of nice!

While DDA has offered hand drawn illustrations of the DDA Staff at the “Meet DDA” link on our website for quite some time, it is only recently that we established a blog for each member of the team.

The early results are in…while we have five professional, degreed, full-time copywriters on staff who write beautiful and engaging content for websites, manuals and brochures, and scripts for educational and medical training video productions, content for CD-ROMs, DVDs, CMEs, intranets and portals of all kinds, sales copy for products and services, and of course poetry and prose for the love of the written word, we also have seventeen others who CAN WRITE.

In this day-and-age when barely half of all teens across America graduate high school, it is great to know that the DDA team is not only great at what they do, but literate as well. For years we have had a sign on a wall that says, “No Average People Work Here.” Of course the usual jokes and mental gymnastics took place that rearranged the thought into sayings such as: No People Work Here, Average People Work Here, No People Here, etc.

We are proud to say that when Elizabeth and I hire the wrong people, and we have had our share of mis-hires over the years, they don’t stay. More often than not they cannot keep up and they know it.

Most of this is self-explanatory.  All one needs to do is read the blogs for yourself. The programmers, video production crew,  graphic designers, search engine marketers, website developers, animators, IT staff ,and copywriters have not only obviously mastered their chosen field, they have also mastered the English language.

DDA’s recent move into a great new facility is the culmination of a year long search that taught us a great many things about our strengths, opportunities, staff, and ourselves.

Ironically, after many building visits, in a quite large swath of Bucks County, PA and the Philadelphia Metro Area, we ended up with the most perfect state-of-the-art digital advertising facility imaginable just about two miles from where DDA has been located for almost fourteen years.

Things we learned:

1.) If you care more about keeping the staff you have, and accommodating their commute travel needs, than you care about the building itself, the universe will reward you with both the perfect location and the perfect building.

2.) You can’t have too much office space, video studio and photography studio space, or closet space.

3.) If you have never had a real, really big office kitchen before, then you won’t believe how wonderful it is.

4.) Really small bathrooms are OK, if there are enough of them.

5.) The phone system cannot be up soon enough or the Internet connectivity fast enough no matter what you do. Thanks Tyler!

6.) Really high ceilings are really nice.

7.) A beautiful piece of property with great trees makes coming to work more joyful…especially for Indie.

8.) A fresh coat of paint and clean carpets are small miracles.

9.) As close as all 22 of us are, and as well as we all get along, it is really nice to each have enough of our own space.

10.) We are very lucky!

When Elizabeth and I were first starting Dynamic Digital Advertising (DDA), we had an expression; “We are so used to doing so much for so long with so little that we think we can do anything, with nothing at all in no time flat.” Ah youth!

Well we are older and wiser now, sometimes a little tired and often a bit stressed, but we realize that it is the believing that makes everything possible. So thank you to our great clients for giving us the chance to be great, our wonderful DDA staffers for making the world we work in wonderful and the universal well stream of optimism and faith that helps us be optimistic and faithful.

We are enjoying all of the joy and benefits of having just moved into our great new facilities. Triple the size of our last digs where we spent 14 years.

Every day, every meeting, every advertising project truly is a new dawn!

America’s population is just over 4% of the world total. Americas economy is about 25% of the world total. Economic metrics more-or-less match the same period in 2007. Unemployment is about 5%. Inflation is under control. Real income is same as last year or slightly higher (up half  a percent).

OK, so the economy is not growing like China’s (which could be a blog post within itself), but things are stable and Americans are spending as usual. All a recession means is that there is not positive growth. This is not a depression and the sky is not falling.

DDA, DDA Medical, and DDA Video may truly be some of the nation’s best economic indicators. Business is steady. We continue to find new clients in all areas from website design, corporate and medical video production, photography, and custom programming, to animation, marketing and branding, illustration, graphic design, copywriting, and search engine optimization. We are growing. We are also preparing new ventures, new portals, and new business initiatives that explain, illuminate, highlight, and present who we are and what we do.

We are grateful for our long client list, and we are grateful for our new clients. Most of all, we are grateful for our country. The greatest country on earth that, while not perfect, is always trying to do the right thing.

David

Studies have found that Nursing is one of the nation’s most stressful occupations. No great insight there. The pace of work, pervasive understaffing and constant dealing with patients’ needs are all stressful in themselves. However, what makes it over-the-top stressful is that nurses tend to have significant responsibilities without the authority to act. That priviledge, of course, is often reserved for the doctors. We strive to offer Dynamic Digital Advertising (DDA) staffers as much responsibility as they want and can handle successfully, and hopefully, the information, guidance and opportunities to learn to handle them.

We strive to offer clients as much control and input as they want and can handle comfortably, and hopefully the information, choices and clarity they need to achieve the best advertising, marketing and sales resuts.

Transparency plays a role in each of these endeavors. DDA’s role as a pioneering digital interactive full service advertising agency goes way beyond creating and producing advertising and marketing materials and systems. We must educate, inform, illuminate, anticipate need, conceive opportunity and create success. It is a role we embrace daily and try to get better at perpetually.