Spring is definitely my favorite time of year. My new office is great because I have really nice windows. A row of them to my left and a couple behind. The first time I saw the office, I was concerned because the windows, throughout the building, are high up and not really a direct view outside. Turns out that, whether seated or standing, the view through every window is one of trees from their mid point on up. Breathtaking!

It occurs to me that during spring the trees are in transition. Early on the seemingly dry branches and twigs blossom with life, color, and attitude. Later in spring the blossoms fall, coloring the ground, and the now very much alive branches and twigs become adorned with leaves of complex shapes in limitless shades of green.

What is most compelling and interesting is the way the windows frame the trees as if to feature each grouping as a picture frame would. Each window becomes a work-of-art, combining the best qualities of renaissance, impressionism, and realism. Rich, beautiful, and alive.

At DDA, we believe advertising and marketing is similar.  It is our goal to provide glimpses of reality that feature and highlight the best qualities of our client’s products, services, staff, and capabilities. Framing each with the proper information, aesthetic, and presentation to provide the viewer with a perspective that helps our client’s organization radiate the aura of quality and success.

Websites, photography, videos, 2D animation,  3D animation, CD-ROMS, DVDs, programming applications, illustrations, brochures, sell sheets, catalogs, training portals, copy writing, virtual spins, and virtual worlds… each and every one is a little window shining light in, but also reflecting all the best that our clients have to offer.

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.”  

They say bad habits die hard. It should also be said that good habits are a laborious birth. At DDA, doing the right thing is NOT a matter of unlearning bad habits, but rather the articulated and dedicated practice of doing the right thing.

Most advertising agencies are born of deception and subterfuge. Example after example abounds of new agencies being formed by one or two account representatives who steal a few clients and set up a business of their own. The ease of doing this is enhanced by the fact that almost by definition, advertising agencies often don’t really do the marketing or advertising design and production themselves. Outside design and production houses, like DDA, serve the advertising agency industry by providing in-depth graphic design, photography, video production, 2D and 3D animation, programming, search marketing, copywriting, website design, ecommerce and other services. DDA provides them all.

Guaranteed, immediate clients and a readily available source of design and production make for an easy advertising agency business start-up. What is difficult is servicing the clients well over the long term and sustaining growth. What is wrong is the perpetuation of all of the bad habits the founders of the breakaway agency learned at their former place of employment and integrated into their new work process and client relationship procedures.

In this way bad habits not only die hard, they are perpetuated and spawned. Some of the bad habits may have actually been more benign at the original advertising agency due to the large size, or specific nature of the clients and industries they serve. When transferred to a smaller, less capable environment, they can mutate and become malignant.

Here’s the irony; the backgrounds of the founders at DDA are an organic mix of corporate marketing, B2B and B2C advertising, retail store and manufacturing ownership and general business management and consulting. NO advertising agency experience, no breakaway business start-up, no mutated process and poor client relationship habits.

After fourteen years of steady and sustained growth, innovation, and pioneering processes and procedures, DDA has all but reinvented the advertising agency. After fourteen years we are still fresh, eager, energized, and creating new habits daily by always striving to do the right thing.

Since we work a four day, forty-hour week at Dynamic Digital Advertising, Fridays can prove very interesting. New clients express concern that their needs or questions will not be met or answered because they can’t reach a human. When they find out that not only are the project coordinators answering emails on Friday, there is someone at the office to field calls (usually David or I) and when necessary emergencies occur from (”my email can send but not receive” to” I’m getting an error screen” to something more drastic like “my site is down”), someone knowledgeable will contact them within the hour and resolve the issue.

Everyone who works here, writers developing content for a website, support staff doing build out for a website, animators doing Flash, programmers and their everlasting code design, strive to make the relationship between us and our clients a WIN-WIN. Not easy to do for a full-service advertising agency, because there are so many layers to our projects, and because everything we do is custom not borrowed or lifted from some other source. For example, our taglines in postcards and brochures are tailor made for the specific product, the architecture of all our website work is carefully thought out to be user friendly, technically sophisticated and Google minded. I could go on, but you get the point.  

And also on Friday, when I answer the phone, I often get a surprised response from an old client that I am physically in the office. At the same time, that person is delighted to know the request won’t be shuffled off to Monday. In other words, our regulars don’t call on Friday unless it is something that cannot wait. And to them, I say thank you for your thoughtfulness! On Fridays, I also often get a request to come work for DDA from a supplier or a telemarketer or a delivery person. Flattering really, but when time has become as precious as it is today, I know we are blessed to have three-day weekends. Let’s not ever take it for granted by doing our best to tie up loose ends before the close of business on Thursdays.

DDA subscribes to several business practices and principles that directs everything we do. They are transparency, ethical conduct, and doing the right thing. The practice of these are both just good, sane, logical and practical approaches to client and vendor relations and emotional, cerebral and feel-good-about-yourself practices and beliefs that allows one to look himself or herself in the mirror each morning and sleep well at night.

Some definitions through the eyes of DDA:

Transparency. I like to think I am a good communicator. I know I am a lousy listener. My other career path might well have been as a history teacher and I sometimes wonder if the excitement of the advertising and business world overwhelmed my common sense.

Despite my best efforts, I recognize that four people in a meeting or discussion will leave with four slightly or largely different understandings of what just happened, what information was shared, what conclusions were drawn, and what the next steps are. Since we believe strongly that good process is at the core of all efficiency, somehow each successful advertising, branding, or marketing meeting must result in common understanding, shared goals, and a focused unified vision of the end game.

Transparency tools are woven into and heaped upon every advertising, branding, or marketing project we undertake. DDA TRAC (Time Resource and Accounting) is an in-house developed, Internet-based time tracking database tool. The result is that every hourly billed project including programming, logo design, graphic design, copywriting, photography, video, 2D and 3D animation, illustration, trade show displays, large format graphics, print design and print production for sell sheets, catalogs, brochures, flyers, direct mail, business cards, training portals and tools, CME design and development and even search engine optimization (SEO) is invoiced accurately. No time, not one minute is rounded up or added on, and every invoice is accompanied by a detailed minute-by-minute description of how the time was spent. On time, On budget, On TRAC every time.

Additional tracking and reporting tools abound. DDA’s search engine optimization (SEO) work has a series of metrics that perpetually report website visitation, usage, pathways, experience-based mapping, rankings, and much more. Website analysis means corporate websites can be better understood, improved, and managed.

Online proofing development websites are assigned to each client and each project. Our clients see every project unfold, improve, and take shape and their input is welcomed, requested, and insisted upon every step of the way.

Transparency is as much an attitude as it is a report or tool. At DDA, we believe that direct communication is the hallmark of a truly professional service-oriented vendor. We answer the phone, have project coordinators for each client, welcome questions and love client interaction. Every project is a blend of skills, expertise, information, and point-of-view provided by both the client and DDA.

Call us anytime. At DDA, the Transparency is clearly better.

Ethical Conduct to follow Monday.

Doing the Right Thing to follow Tuesday.

A few years back there was a very successful turnaround CEO that had some awful sounding nickname like the meat cleaver or hatchet man or butcher.

As evidenced by his awful sounding nickname, his MO was to takeover or be installed at the head of a troubled company and to slash payroll and every corporate budget across-the-board in order to restore solvency and make the company a viable platform from which it could grow. When asked directly about his budget slash-and-burn methodology he said that there was one exception to his across-the-board approach. While slashing payroll and every other corporate budget he would also always double the marketing budget.

Ironic isn’t it that many less savvy corporate managers and leaders choose to slash marketing budgets during a slowdown or recession.

Metaphorically, sales are the lifeblood of every business. After a heart attack, keeping the blood flowing is the first and sometimes only goal of the attending EMS worker or clinician. It is an admittedly gruesome analogy, but slashing the marketing budget during a downturn is like fixing a heart attack by slashing the throat.

Let DDA help you increase your sales,  restore vitality to your organization, and regain full health with results-oriented advertising and marketing across a wide range of media. From website design and development, with or without ecommerce capability, to graphic design, photography, illustration, logo development, branding, 2D and 3D animation, video, CD-ROMs, DVDs, custom programming. professional search engine marketing, content development and copy writing, DDA does it all in-house, under one roof, and with an experienced and dedicated staff of degreed professionals whose only goal is to build sales, impact bottom lines and build long-term relationships with our clients.

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.