Making The Complex Simple!
We had a very busy social weekend. Among other things, a long delayed “getting together for a quiet dinner” with very good friends finally happened after three cancellations. Not unusual for four very busy self-employed people trying to mesh schedules. Since it was our turn to host, I tried to plan a meal that did not entail long hours in the kitchen because I usually hear “why did you decide to make such a complicated menu?” from David. Nonetheless, part of Friday night, after we got home from a restaurant dinner, and more than half of Saturday went to getting ready and prepping and only about a two hour time frame for actual cooking! The end result was great and it was a simple meal:baked brie with honey and chopped cashews for an appetizer, followed by shrimp cocktails (US wild shrimp), a salad of organic field greens with raspberry balsamic dressing, rigatoni/spinach bake and roast pork with mango puree. Sun tea to wash it down with. Our friends brought the dessert, a lemon cake with lemon icing and fresh blueberries (if you like lemon cake, hers is to die for!).
The time spent in the kitchen reminds me of what goes on in our advertising agency Monday through Thursday. There is a lot of prep work. Conference calls with clients, endless emails between departments, internal meetings between departments, showing concepts to the client, making changes the client wants, more emails, looking for the right images, production concerns, more phone calls and emails, final menus and buildout for websites, fax approvals through the different stages of development, and always time checks, time checks and more time checks on our TRAC system. We use this process whether we are building a website from scratch, videotaping a medical training presentation, creating a CD ROM to replace a print catalog, adding complex forms to patient tracking forms, fleshing out a CME. You get the picture.
Just as a cook orchestrates a menu plan our different teams orchetsrate a marketing project. Even if you have done it more than once, there is always a wrinkle, there is always some surprise. At DDA, we know how to deal with those things through experience, and because all we do is custom, the wrinkles and the surprises are always new.
Still, we deliver some of the best promotional and marketing material anywhere, we do it seamlessly, we do it project after project. We make the complex, simple. The same way a good cook puts together a dinner for four.
Entry by: elizabeth