January 2008

This is old news at PlattForm, but I now work in our Affiliate Marketing department rather than our Web Design department. (Don't worry—I'm still doing web design work. I'm just doing it for our Affiliate Marketing department now.) Right now, our Affiliate Marketing department brings in 79% of the leads we get for our schools and 32% of our revenue as a company. Pretty impressive for a team of 19 people in a company of about 260 (that's just over 7%!).

We failed – well, sort of.

Last month we encouraged responses to our direct mail blog by promising that our very own Michael Mackie (M2) would dress up like a chicken if we had 10 responses to the question that we posed. It didn’t happen. We ended up with six responses, which is six more than any other blog we have posted. So in a sense, it was a success to actually have some feedback, but how funny would it have been to see M2 in a chicken outfit for a day (as a side note, M2’s reaction when he read the blog was “Cluck Off!”).

I have a bold prediction to make: Vinyl records will outlive compact discs. Believe it or not, many people still listen to records - and I just happen to be one of them. There’s something about the warmth of those analogue tones that stand in such stark contrast to the sterile, digitally-coded bleeps produced by CDs. Many bands/labels still make their releases available on record, although most major retailers like Best Buy and Borders choose not to shelve them (for now).

It’s been said that the only constant at PlattForm is change.

One can see this in the small things like the weekly hunt for any given Client Services’ member’s new office, and big things like the semi-frequent promotions and continual process changes.

It’s everything from a battle over e-mail vs. email to taking on entirely new tasks and making them second nature. PlattForm and the people who work here are malleable. We work with challenges and step forward to affect changes that cause ripples elsewhere.

Did you know the average consumer uses the public bathroom 3.2 times per evening while out on the town? Imagine the product/service retention that a viewer would have after being exposed to the exact same advertising 3.2 times in just a few hours.