There is a poster boldly displayed on one wall of Dynamic Digital Advertising’s new digs that proclaims, “Don’t be afraid to be different.” I think that is the common thread that binds all who work here; we are each very different. Not weird different, but creatively, healthy, believe-in-ourselves different. 

A specific example would be our Programmers. David says our Lead Programmer,  Amy, can solve any problem to do with code.  She is also a whiz with an electric drill.  Tyler is our “Go To” guy for everything from small changes to clients’ websites to installing a complex phone system, while Reggie has become an expert at building gargantuan retail shopping carts, and Vinnie does a lot of action script work and helps with Coldfusion code issues and other language problems. If you put the four of them together, you would never mistake one for the other, and yet they are linked by this strange gene Programmers have for speaking little and spending hours solving problems. It is like there is a mind meld between them and their computers.  

Dynamic Digital, as an entity, is unusual too. There is no model we followed when David and I first started a decade+ ago. We grew organically, and David’s business instinct and vision helps shape what is our very complex organization today. But from those early days, we never lost the goal of providing marketing, promotional, and advertising services to businesses. Our old self-promotion brochures push digital photography, cd-rom development, graphic design, and print production among other things. We still do all that, but we just keep adding services. So many services that our Lead Designer, Carrie, wonders how she is going to showcase the new service. (P.S.-She always figures it out.)  Check out our website, the timeline graphically shows our growth, the changes, and the new services. And today, May 15th, 2008, I can promise you, there is real excitement planned for the coming year. Stay tuned. 

When I was a little girl, I was roundly scolded one winter morning because I took the blanket off my bed and gave it to a man knocking at our back door for help. He looked so cold, his lips were blue, and to a five-year old, it seemed getting him warm was more important than feeding him. Besides I was not allowed near the stove, and there were no grownups around when he knocked on the door. That was my dramatic introduction to random acts of kindness. I felt good about what I did, and the admonition “never talk to a stranger” soon vanished along with the angry words from my Dad. 

Today, as a business woman, I am often surprised at how indifferent and self-absorbed people can be. Surely, there is time to say “Good Morning” and “How are you?” and mean it. And surely, there should be more warm reactions to all the little gestures of kindness you encounter in your work day. Or is kindness missing where you work? Ah ha, the paradox. There are NOT too many work cultures that encourage kindness and cooperation among staff. Rather the norm is for everyone to out do the other with selfish agendas.

At Dynamic Digital Advertising, we have a very open door policy. We encourage teamwork among the graphic designers, advertising copywriters, and project coordinators assigned to a website design and seo content development job, we discourage  ”I” statements. Our more senior staff help guide and teach informally, and no one in that position be it our Lead Graphic Designer or our Director of Interactive Media ever behaves arrogantly with peers or clients. We have a very robust cc: system to keep all concerned in the loop.

A statement on our wall sums it up best “NO AVERAGE PEOPLE WORK HERE.” And by extension, no one unkind or petty.  Throughout our four-day work week, I hope each of us takes the time to practice kindness (even if we have to grit our teeth or pull our hair at some stupid occurrence). Let’s resist the temptation to be self-absorbed. Remember, it only takes seven muscles to smile.

I cut my teeth in the publishing and printing world. I started when I was in college, writing features for the school paper, and by the time I was in grad school, had done almost every job from typing original material for authors to proofing galleys, doing press checks, and then sending out press releases for print and radio on the new book or program.  I have worked as an editor for educational material, functioned as a production coordinator for a multi million dollar program, and manned many trade show booths selling the pamphlets, books, programs, and teaching manuals the company produced.

In those days, graphic designers and advertising copywriters did not have the luxury of computers. One had to approach a project with great thought because mistakes were difficult to rectify. Today, we have a delete button. In those days, it could be the kiss of death.  When you speced a manuscript, you knew how many headers would need 18 pt. type, and how much you could squeeze into an eight-page sig using 12 pt. for body copy. Today, a graphic designer has as many choices as he or she wishes to work with for originality and emphasis; a custom look and feel is oh so achievable.

In those days, there was justified left and right or ragged right, and no type in curves unless someone wanted to cut with an exacto knife. What client could afford that? The print brochures, sell sheets, and catalogs that a creative, passionate team produces today, can take your breath away. We have some samples to prove my point. At Dynamic Digital Advertising, nothing makes me happier than to see print projects, from a single 8.5″ x 11″ one-sided sheet to a four by eight trade show graphic, come through the door. Guess once you’ve worked in print, the ink never leaves your veins. 

May Mondays should be clear and vibrant, and we should all be recharged from a long weekend celebrating Mother’s Day, and weddings, and birthdays. But in terms of weather, this Monday is raw and the forecast is for rain nonstop. Most of us have stashed our winter clothes, so we have all the portable heaters whirling under our desks, and as l watch the wind whipping the tree branches outside my window, I think, indeed, it’s not a clear day.

Yet, right now there is a  clarity at Dynamic Digital Advertising that bodes well for the week. Only one person has reported sick, and the rest of us are going about the business at hand. The main Conference Room has been busy hour after hour with conference calls from companies interested in our many advertising and marketing services.  The Business Development team has its hands extra full for the day. After the initial calls, they now have to develop quotes for the interested parties on top of follow-up work from all the projects from last week.  The Video and Photography Studio has projects lined up to complete, plus a video shoot in New York City later this week.

Our graphic designers are equally busy with trade show graphics and web design. The copywriters and programmers are deep in thought as they wrestle with content development writing, and ColdFusion and broken code on a client’s site or “something’s wrong with my email” questions. As I write, Monday is almost half over, and again,  I realize as I do every Monday, that the DDA  staff will see clearly, and rain or shine the quality work we produce at DDA will make us all proud!  Whoever said the following was a wise person, “Most people don’t recognize opportunity because it is usually disguised as hard work.” Unknown Author  

ROI (return on investment) is a phrase used very often in business circles, essentially referring to the bottom line:  was this direct mail piece effective, or this product launch a success, or this marketing campaign profitable? However, from the perspective of a good business owner, ROI should mean are the employees and the company in sync? Does the whole team have similar goals? Is each and everyone happy to work at the company in spite of the long hours, intense days, price of gas? Compensation after all should be more than about money.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, we all need to have enough in our bank accounts to pay rent or a mortgage and have full gas tanks, with a little left over for fun things like going out to eat and vacations, and we should be able to depend on the weekly check, so money is necessary. But, earning a salary should include the realization that “I matter,” my ideas and skills and work ethic contribute to the greater good.  I work here because I can stretch my creative muscles, I work here because management empowers me, and I in turn produce. 

At Dynamic Digital Advertising, it is a business philosophy David and I constantly strive to maintain. An example would be the wonderful team in the video department, but it took several years to fill those chairs, and I am sure Laurence who is our Director of Multimedia Arts probably had his doubts about ever seeing his department become real.  If you walk into the new video and photography studios and see all the camera and video equipment, the sophisticated dolly system, the new sound booth, the special lights, the green screen on tracks, the double or triple monitors on desks, it is hard not to be impressed. And Laurence is still shopping for stuff! 

From my CFO position, I know there will be GREAT ROI from DDA VIDEO.  And our business development team, led by David and Toni will fill that pipeline to overflowing. The main conference room is constantly booked with scheduled calls from new inquiries. Our production team is very busy doing build out for projects, Vinnie and Rob have their hands full with flash and animation projects, so clients are finding Dynamic Digital Advertising, listening to our proposals and signing on. As a financial officer, can I ask for more? Yes. Let’s celebrate our busy days, and not get complacent. Have a great weekend all.

I loved being a college student. In those days, there was no Internet, and by extension no Google. So as an English major, I spent hours in the library and checked out enough books that carrying them from dorm to class and back to the library, and repeating this semester after semester had the added benefit of providing arm exercises! But I digress. Today’s students depend heavily on information gleaned through the web.  Instead of books, most carry laptops. Information is instantaneous and as I am discovering so is the urge to pilfer, copy, and violate copyrights.

Professors now have software to help them weed out the offenders. And in the business world, this is becoming a serious problem for companies that are on the leading edge of innovation, and who like Dynamic Digital Advertising showcase a lot of their work. Anyone can put up a website and call himself or herself a web master, but to make the site viable when that person has few skills, tempts the wannabe to troll and see “what’s out there” and then copy/paste images and content and pretend like it is theirs. Appalling, and Paul, who monitors our site for such thievery, finds that trollers come from as far as the Middle East and as close as Maryland. 

At DDA, we work to give the clients who select us, the best design be it for a trifold brochure or a trade show graphic. If the new client comes to us for a website, that company has the complete assurance that we start with a blank slate and build from there. The proof is in the looking. Check out our portfolio, where numerous samples of websites, trade show graphics, medical illustrations, video presentations for anything from a medical device to jewelry bolster my claim. If you study our website carefully, you’ll see we fit the classic Aristotle observation, “The whole is more than the sum of its parts.”  

This weekend I  spent time trying to control the many patches of enthusiastic weeds everywhere I looked in our yard. The magical thing about weeds is that they mimic the perennials they share space with effortlessly. It always amazes me that even with my practiced eye I can  yank out some prized plant. And so it goes, a pretty newcomer that is really a noxious weed, wild grasses competing with wilting daffodils for attention. You have to take the time to root out only the invasive newcomer and then the weedy grasses, and leave the daffodils to slowly return to their dormant state until next Spring. 

I learn a lot about business and people and working with potential clients from our yard. One recurring lesson is that things are never as they seem. As a full-service advertising agency, we have to work in layers. Our business development people have to distinguish between the “weedy” prospects and the serious searchers looking for the right agency to do their marketing and promotional projects, our writers have to know the specs of a project so they can budget their time accordingly and not eat into graphic design or programming time. Crystal, who wears a production coordinator hat among other hats, has to watch closely so we make deadlines.

We go through these steps over and over again throughout the week, in every DDA department and it never becomes routine. WHY? Probably because there are too many variables. There is the Dynamic Digital team and the client’s team. There are financial considerations, there are real and artificially imposed deadlines, there are days when one project coordinator has to do double duty. Many a Tuesday it feels like we just get started,  look up at a clock and realize lunch hour has passed unnoticed there is that much on our To Do list. The crucial observation in all this is that not a day goes by that we don’t meet the challenges before us with energy and enthusiasm. A well run company with its unique culture is very much like a well tended garden, healthy, thriving and  forward bound in spite of the weeds.     

The Nike slogan, “JUST DO IT” reminds me of our team because at Dynamic Digital Advertising (DDA), we share a set of core values that adhere to the concept of doing.  We arrive on time ready to tackle projects, we enjoy a quick cup of coffee or tea or hot chocolate, and on Mondays there can be a scramble for the asiago bagels, which the bagel place makes in very limited quantities. Then we settle down, find our groove, and work. 

It is vital to our success as a team of writers, web developers, videographers, programmers, and graphic designers that we embrace our tasks with efficiency, flexibility, and above all creativity. When I read one of the programmers blogs, I am sometimes met with what I call IT graffiti which even I, realize without understanding it, requires ingenious creativity to assemble. Same thing is true of the hoops our web developers often jump through to get the right balance between design, architecture, and usability for the client’s website.  

We make every attempt to understand our clients’ needs, and are confident that we can deliver the results they are looking for. To be the reliable advertising agency that clients think of when they have a project, we have to continuously push the envelope and be ahead of the technology and creative curve. We have become the GO TO advertising agency for many clients, and it is not unusual for clients to depend on DDA for all their print and graphic design and production, and their interactive media, which includes shooting video to add to their websites as well. Yes, day in and day out, at Dynamic Digital Advertising, we just do it! 

Moving an office with 21 people and not disrupting the work flow takes organization and juggling. As an experience, it is both traumatic and cathartic. It seems that at the old Dynamic Digital office, we saved everything that had to do with advertising. We filled a big dumpster with our throwaways.  I saved proofs of all our projects, as well as samples of brochures, postcards, and posters of companies - even those that are no longer in business. But most of all, we saved every marketing and promotional item about our digital services.

I came across one of our first letterhead designs that we used to sell our services to local businesses. It had seven thumbnail images stacked down the left margin and included digital photography (with a Lumina scanning camera) which today is obsolete. Since it scanned in three passes (RGB) the resulting image was a photograph. Today, if you go into our video and photography studio, the sophistication of digital cameras from that first clumsy Lumina is dramatic. The images our photographers and videographers produce with our up-to-date equipment are crisp, the color is very accurate, and the results are akin to film output.   

Since those early days, we have pushed the envelope constantly in all the areas of our services. Our clients, new and old, discover over and over again that there is nothing we cannot do at Dynamic Digital Advertising. We chose the road of complexity and steep learning curves so we could become a truly full-service shop. And we are proudly that, and pushing some more. Stay tuned. 

One of my favorite poets said it best, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I…I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” 

Some days the thought of facing that yellow pad with a long to do list is mentally unacceptable. You would rather do something fun and distracting, something mindless, but you are at work, so you shift gears, and…in my case, revert to my student days when one of my most admired teachers instilled in her class the concept of discipline. As a child, I thought that meant staying out of trouble so you would not get your behind walloped. Fast forward to senior year in high school, and I slowly started to understand from daily contact with my special teachers that discipline REALLY means being self aware, studying hard, finishing voluminous homework without excuse, not feigning a stomachache to skip class, trying hard every day to be better. Believe me there were rebellious periods my senior year, but the persistent example from dedicated teachers who believed in me obviously worked.

Entering the work force in college was not traumatic because I did not feel entitled but rather privileged to participate and learn from more experienced coworkers as I completed my studies.  My career development finally led to what I have done for over a decade, helping to run an advertising company. Today, Dynamic Digital Advertising is not a dream on paper, but a thriving, growing entity pushing the envelope of digital technologies in unique ways. We are where we are because of the determination to go on, to build from two people to a cohesive group of graphic designers, writers, videographers, programmers, seo specialists, and production support staff all based in house. We stress that everything we do is done here, our vendors are local, we do not outsource creative work, we are 100% made in the USA. 

Companies who come to us for any of our digital services realize after the initial conference call they are hiring an advertising agency with real depth… an agency they can rely on for all their marketing and promotional needs… an agency where, though often unspoken, the work force is imbued with passion and self-discipline… an agency that delivers what it promises, and never promises something it cannot deliver. My teacher was right when she said, “The more you discipline yourself, the less you’ll be disciplined by others.” Being hands on managers, working closely with clients and staff, David and I know we are truly part of a unique company, a place where you look forward to coming to work because everyone is focused on getting things done. And I promise, as we grow things will only get more exciting!