“You know what college does for you? It makes you really smart, man.” –Kanye West

It pleases me to be referred to as a degreed professional, as it makes me feel less like the recent college graduate I am, and more like the savvy young professional I am no doubt becoming. It is a term I remember from when, as a prospective employee, I was reading DDA’s impressive and somewhat intimidating website and imagining what my potential coworkers and bosses would be like.

What would a website designer, copywriter, animator, programmer or search engine marketing specialist act like and look like? What would the office environment be like? I drew more on my repeated viewings of workplace movies (”Working Girl,” “Nine to Five,” and to a lesser extent, “Big“) than on my actual workplace experiences.

It turns out everyone was younger and less intimidating than I had pictured, and while my bosses haven’t taken me to FAO Schwartz (yet), they are still great people to work for, and they have taught me so much in the time I have been here.

Working at DDA has required me to learn new skills, but they have largely been a marriage of the skills picked up at previous office jobs and the research I did in college. If I have to write about a product, service or industry I am unfamiliar with, or even one that I am familiar with, I have to find out as much as I can about the subject in the shortest amount of time, just like I did in college. I learned so much there, and I know I owe my position here to the brainy, debauched gold-digger called college. She gave me so much, but I’m still paying for it.

“Goodbye, Blue Monday” was the alternate title for Kurt Vonnegut’s sour, clever and bleak novel “Breakfast of Champions.” Either book title would be relevant for today, since Monday is the day of the week on which DDA gives its employees breakfast. And not some motel-quality continental breakfast, but genuinely mood-altering bagels which make it possible for DDA to continue its tradition of excellence, even on rainy Mondays.

Things didn’t bode well for today. Rob and I (well, I pluralize it to share the blame–one could say that as only Rob drives, the wrong turn was all on him) took a wrong turn, and ended up getting stuck behind garbage trucks, buses and unimpressed pedestrians down the circuitous one-way streets and crowded boulevards of North Philadelphia. This was followed by a traffic jam on 95, which was the road we were supposed to be on all along. Also, it had gotten cold and rainy since the glorious weekend, and I, like the rest of the professional world, had to reconcile myself to the upcoming week of uncomfortable shoes, prompt responses, scheduled meals, and wearing pants. What could convince me that this day held any merit?

For one thing, it was Mariah Monday on 98.9 FM. If a client were to ask me what keywords they should include in their search engine optimized content, I would recommend they sneak in some search terms like “fantasy”, “emotions”, “one sweet day”, and just to keep things current, “touch my body (remix)”. But I am not a search engine optimization specialist, like several of my co-workers are. They would probably suggest keywords that were more relevant to the client’s products and/ or services. I suppose this is why I’m just a writer.

And the other thing that saved the day was bagels. I actually haven’t had mine yet, as I’ve been sidetracked by my duties in project coordination and copywriting. There’s a lot riding on this bagel–my day’s happiness. However, I’m not worried, because I am as assured of my Monday bagel’s deliciousness as you should be of DDA’s excellence in advertising.

At Dynamic Digital Advertising, as at my previous jobs, I have a non-Friday which I refer to as “my Friday.” This always struck me as one of the sadder parts of working in the service sector, that we were on separate, individual calendars.

But there is nothing sad about double Fridays at DDA. I get one Friday on Thursday, and then another the next day. It’s like Groundhog Day, if it were about a Friday that keeps happening. The greatest thing about real Friday for me is that it’s a warm-up for Saturday. I’m already fully relaxed by Saturday, and able to accept the advent of Monday by Sunday afternoon.

The trade-off is that we work ten hour days, and never take big executive lunches. Also, we get bagels on Monday. I feel like our bosses may be motivational geniuses, because it is like a preemptive strike on a case of the Mondays.

There’s lots of other great things about Thursday at DDA. Let’s go through a list of things I’m looking forward to on this particular Thursday:

• a meeting with a client regarding a trade show display to be used at three major trade shows, and designed to appeal to all of the client’s intended audiences (investors, franchise owners, colleagues, and more)

• visiting a friend from college, who thinks my job writing search engine optimized content is awesome and wants to hear all about it (maybe I’ll just give her a link to my tell-all blog)

• continuing an internal project on corporate and medical training materials; conducting research on workplace etiquette by watching 30 Rock (on tonight!)

• taking a meeting with the head of programming to learn all about our programming capabilities—which are extensive, so I don’t know how she’s going to condense and simplify it for a big Luddite like me.

• the coming of Fake Friday (it’s here!) and real Friday (it’s going to be so good).

That’s it for today. Enjoy your Thursday as much as I am going to enjoy mine (a lot).

I wish I could link to an mp3 file or a video of Janet Jackson performing the song referenced above (a classic from “Control”, which I actually prefer to her eponymous 90’s comeback “Janet”), but I know that’s pushing it. Forget Janet. Let’s talk about Dynamic Digital Advertising, and what we’ve done for you lately.

If you’re a client, chances are we’ve made your website user-friendly, searchable, and good-looking, which counts a lot for users. An outdated or difficult font can put off potential clients, although not as surely as malfunctioning shopping cart applications or dead-end links will.

Perhaps we’ve provided a spokesperson video or webcast to your site, giving it an interactive element that site visitors can’t resist. Maybe we designed fliers for an event sponsored by your company, or created a logo that’s cemented your brand in colleagues’ and clients’ minds.

If you’re not a client yet, the most we can honestly say we’ve done for you is raise the bar within the advertising industry, making our competition work as hard as we do. Well, we’ve also created some excellent advertising over the years, which you have probably seen. If you’re a person who appreciates technical skill and artistic talent within commercial applications (I’m thinking the ads of Norman Rockwell, Maxfield Parrish, and even R. Crumb), then that’s something else DDA has done for you lately.

But what more can we do for you? Pretty much whatever you want. That’s the beauty of a full service advertising agency, and the beauty of DDA.

• The prospect of writing pages of search engine optimized content on any subject gives you the same feeling as starting a crossword puzzle, Jumble, or other time-killing word games that were contraband at your old jobs—which is to say, pumped.
• You find inspiration within repetition
• You have only good things to say about everything
• You can find synonyms for everything (except the word “everything.” What’s a synonym for that?)
• You can find a euphemism for anything (or invent one)
• You love proofing other people’s work. (I do! It’s like getting to collaborate on their work, in a minor but extremely important way, because typos and grammatical errors can delegitimize any respectable project. Like that word I just made up, “delegitimize.” Only it sounds real to me, and I think spellcheck needs to check itself, because how is delegitimize illegitimate? It’s too legit to quit!)
• You find ways to incorporate the things that are stuck in your mind into your content, like album titles of obsolete rappers who wore parachute pants.
• You wish that anagrams comprised a larger part of your duties, because you can’t stop coming up with them.
• You also wish that coming up with alternative meanings for acronyms was part of the job, because you could be an industry leader were this a marketable skill. For example, DDA: Daredevils Defying Authority, Dangerous Dames Anonymous, Debriefing Defendants Affably, Ducks Depreciate Annually, Debauched Delegates Association, Dynamic Digital Advertising, Draining Deluges Anew, Dynamos Don’t Ask, Dogs Don’t Answer, Dolls Dragged Around, Donald Duck’s Avowals, Defending Dried Apricots, and so on. If your business could ever use an alternate name with the same initials, call DDA. I know I can’t be the only copywriter with this hidden (no more!) skill.

DDA has the drive to succeed, which is why they have not only survived but thrived in their fourteen years as an innovative, full-service advertising agency. Another reason for DDA’s success is that they hire the best candidates for any given position–not necessarily the most local candidates. The parking lot is always filled with employee cars (with a few spaces left for clients, of course).

You won’t find my car in the company parking lot, because it’s a black IROC-Z with tinted windows that exists only in my mind. My actual car is Rob’s. Rob is an animator here, who lives down the street from me; we carpool together every morning and evening. Before I started getting rides with Rob, my car was a SEPTA bus that took me on a scenic tour of the Great Northeast before we went through the various suburbs of Bucks County. The ride gave me lots of time to think of new and different ways to write search engine optimized content, and to compare the advertising I saw on billboards and fellow buses with the print advertising we do at DDA. Needless to say, I usually saw design flaws that DDA could have fixed in a second, or slogans that could have been less awkward. I also saw some that were pretty good, of course, but I never saw anything better than what we’ve done in the past and continue to do.

Why do I ride with a co-worker/ the good people of Philadelphia? Because I can’t drive. I have metaphorical “drive”: I got through high school and college like a champ, and have been working most of that time. Like the rest of DDA, I work hard at a job I do well, and take pride in the finished product. Unlike the rest of DDA, I have to use bizarre forms of ID to get into bars, and rely on public transportation to get places that are over a mile away. I’m learning to drive this year, though; my cousin’s going to teach me. I hope you’ll be there (client, potential client, or casual reader) the day I debut my sweet, sweet ride. You could probably take a test drive if I’m feeling nice (which I usually am). It’s just another reason to take your business to DDA.

Search engine optimization services from DDA involve several steps: keyword research to find the most searched keywords relevant to your site’s purpose, composition and editing of optimized content, and implementation of the new content by our optimization specialists/ web designers.

The advantage to using DDA for this, as opposed to using another ad agency or doing it yourself, is the amount of experience we have. Site design and site updates are second nature to us after fourteen years in the game, and implementation of these services is a streamlined process involving members from different departments who function as one unit.

If you’d like to see your site on the first page of a search engine query’s results, consider Dynamic Digital Advertising search engine optimization (SEO) services. We’ll upgrade your feelings about your website from “content” to “ecstatic.”

Dynamic Digital Advertising has provided corporate and medical training materials to businesses for a long time, but only recently have we begun to market those services as a distinct from our other offerings. Like DDA Video and DDA Medical, divisions of DDA Corporate, DDA Corporate and Medical Training is simply a specialized set of services within the whole. We still do everything in-house, and we market it separately more to advertise our abilities to clients who might not be aware of our range, and to make it easier for prospective clients to find affordable, impressive, and technologically cutting edge training tools.

Currently, the writers are working on developing content pages for DDA Corporate and Medical Training (in our time not spent writing content for clients and coordinating projects). In writing about previous training tools we created, I am learning about what we have done, and what we can do. It goes so far beyond advertising. Every day I am learning how far we take the concept of a “full service” advertising agency–farther than I ever thought to go. I guess that’s why DDA has continued to grow, in times of economic growth or stagnation: because we never stop thinking of ways to serve our clients, and to help them serve their clientèle, employees and peers.

Because DDA is a full service advertising agency, it follows that our services interact. If a client wants DDA to work on every aspect of their corporate, medical, trade show, instructional, etc. video, that means the writers stay involved in the video making process, especially for storyboarding and scriptwriting.

Scriptwriting involves a lot more editing than regular content writing does, because people read much faster than they can talk. We have to time ourselves, and make sure the content of the script is informative, entertaining, and as brief as possible (to attract and keep the audience’s attention).

My dream is that a client would ask us to write and produce a virtual reality instructional video modeled on R. Kelly’s serial hip-hopera “Trapped in the Closet.” It would pose a challenge, because we would have to  approximate how long it would take the actors to sing their lines, and intuit the changes in tempo. Additionally, writing the script for videos released in small pieces, a la Dickens’ novels and Kelly’s musical opus, would allow the writers to really put our creative talents for plot twists to work.

I enjoy writing search engine optimized content for websites and video scripts for product launch videos and webcasts. But I wouldn’t complain if any clients out there wanted to take the next step in digital advertising and incorporate storytelling through song. DDA is more than ready for that kind of challenge.

Wherever I go, I see things that Dynamic Digital Advertising has worked on. Last weekend, I was in New Jersey visiting a friend, and she had this really nice glass and wood door with a handle that locked in a way I’d never used before. I was commenting on the unique design, and then I noticed that it was made by a company we advertise for–particularly, a company I had been writing search engine optimized content for just that week. “Man, I was right when I extolled the virtues of their air-tight windows,” I thought. “These doors and windows are high quality.” He apartment was nothing to write home about, but honestly, her door was. It made her basement apartment look like something bigger and nicer than a basement apartment.

Just yesterday, I was out walking with my sisters, and we passed a house that was having major renovations. The house was covered in a white plastic wrap that you see on homes under construction or renovation, and I pointed out to my sisters that DDA does advertising work for that particularly popular brand of weather barriers.

I haven’t been hanging out in healthcare facilities or drug stores lately, but the next time I go, I am sure I’ll see some medical devices or pharmaceutical products that DDA has done website design, logo design, branding and marketing, or another service (or combination of services) for.