With DDA’s four, 10-hour day (Monday-Thursday) work schedule, today is our “Friday.” As I sit here drinking my usual morning tea and writing my blog, I’m thinking about all the projects that I will work on today as well as all the options that are available for this weekend’s fun. At our advertising company, I will need to work on search engine optimized content for a medical website design we are developing and for a new division of DDA called DDA Corporate and Medical Training. I’ll also need to proof different materials before they go to the client for review and oversee the development of about 17 different projects that I’m responsible for coordinating at the moment. At home, I plan to celebrate my mom’s birthday this weekend, go to a dinner party with friends, clean my house, do laundry, take my dog to the park, go shopping for a few household items that we are in tire need of, and take a little time to relax.

With my long work and home “to do” lists, I’ll need to prioritize myself. Today, within 10 hours, although I’ll strive to get everything accomplished, I’ll need to figure out what it most important to address so I can leave for the weekend knowing that nothing has slipped through the cracks or has been stalled or delayed. This weekend, although I’ll have high hopes to utilize every possible moment for fun, I’ll need to make sure that the chores that help our house run smoothly are handled (by myself and my husband) so we don’t have extra work around the house next week. Establishing priorities is important in and out of the workplace. But, enough for now… I’ve got much to do

Today I plan on dedicating the majority of my time to Corporate and Medical Training content development. DDA has set out to expand its website and highlight its ability to generate complex technology-based training methods that effectively inform. Through training corporate or medical videos, custom e-learning programs, intranets, or Continuing Medical Education websites, corporations large and small can exponentially cut down on training expenses with invaluable job training techniques generated by DDA.

This new extension of the DDA website will feature 90 plus pages of search engine optimized corporate and medical training content. The online and creative copywriters utilize a plethora of highly relevant keywords to draw prospective clients to our site to not only inform, but to engage. We must find the perfect balance of keyword utilization, content relevance, and readability. If any one of these elements is neglected, the effectiveness of the writing is compromised.

The process of SEO copywriting can be tricky. The goal is to include the keywords Internet users are searching, but in such a way that the objective is not obvious. It is almost like putting together a complex jigsaw puzzle. You may want to jam two pieces together that do not fit, but time and concentration is needed to find the correct combination of words. When the pieces are correctly joined, the final result is one that is appealing, useful, and informative to all.

“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).

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.

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.

A large part of being a writer at Dynamic Digital Advertising is new business development and project coordination, both of which are time consuming, but rewarding. If a company hears about DDA’s services, such as video editing, website development, logo design, print ad campaigns, search engine optimized content (the inexpensive and highly effective alternative to pay per click and paid online ads that DDA has mastered), they will send an inquiry via phone, email or fax, and from there one of our organizational masterminds will assign it to one of the writers.

The writer will then look up up from his or her mountain of content to be written (which we plow through with admirable speed and skill), and it is often a welcome change of pace to look stop writing copy and get on the phone with present and potential clients.

Once we have determined what services the client wants, and projected a schedule and price estimate, it is then the DDA writer/ project coordinator’s privilege to harangue the poor animator/ designer/ programmer assigned to the project. Currently, I harass over three coworkers via phone, email, and sometimes in person (just to shake things up). Any work done by DDA is going to be top quality; it’s the top speed part that the project coordinator has a role in.