Happy New Year

Click to view our online card.

From all of us here at Affinity Express, we wish you and your loved ones a wonderful year ahead.

Designs of the Year: 2010

We asked our designers to submit their best work this year and awarded the winning entries.  Let me tell you, the judges did not have an easy job!

Embroidery Digitizing

Happy Holidays!

Our designers created this piece of embroidery for this season, based on the painting Toronto Street, Winter Morning by Lawren S. Harris. For previous years’ designs, see here.

4 Tips on Typography in Ad Design

I work with ads all the time, and want to highlight an aspect of good ad design that is sometimes overlooked. Apart from the copy and the image, the type also dictates the personality, tone and overall effectiveness of the design. Here are a few simple tips to get started.

Selecting the Font

With literally thousands of fonts to choose from, how do you know which one is best?

Change Management Is Essential to Outsourcing Success

I loved this article on managing outsourcing processes. With my experience in new client implementation, I definitely agree with Upadhye’s advice to client organizations that they “understand from the service provider what inputs they need to deliver satisfactory results.” (I’ve said this before, and Upadhye makes the same point: the best outsourcing arrangements are partnerships between two companies.)

At Affinity Express, we encourage clients to work on changing their processes right at the beginning of their relationships with us, so that it is easier to get their systems and people ready for outsourcing. This makes it easier on their sales and production personnel, as well as our team.  It  goes a long way toward making these projects successful.

Meet Noel Bedayo, Managing Director of Philippines Operations

Noel Bedayo was recently promoted to managing director of Affinity Express Philippines Operations. In this role, he is responsible for building a high-performing team and overseeing day-to-day operations.  He will also work to expand our interactive, editorial and newspaper teams.  Noel has joined the Senior Business Team and reports directly to CEO Ken Swanson.

Noel started with Affinity Express in April of 2008 and has built a strong rapport with colleagues locally and globally.  As the head of S.P.E.E.D. (Services and Products Engineered for Excellence and Development), Noel mentors and consults with our business leaders in the area of process planning, pricing, and metrics-driven strategies and improvements.

Noel is glad to have been part of the growth of our Manila office, and says:

3 Reasons Why Display Ads Are Catching Up

eMarketer says display ads are growing faster than search ads. While search ads are often extolled by marketers because they are targeted specifically to users who are searching for information about those product/service, the rapid growth in display ads makes sense to me. Here’s why:

Display ads are vastly more customizable.

Search ads offer you so little space for your message, no way to design your ad to stand out from others (and remember I wrote about how important design is for advertising). You can use rich media or videos. eMarketer’s article mentions that video ads are predicted to grow at least 34% every year through 2014, driving the growth in display ads.

Joanna Grant One of Industry’s Most Powerful People

I am very happy to announce that my colleague Joanna Grant, VP of Graphic Production and Support Services, has been included in Stitches magazine’s Power List. This makes her one of the most powerful people in the decorating industry, “influencing the direction the industry will take in 2011 and beyond”.

According to Stitches, she’s on the list because:

What Does Facebook Mean for Newspapers?

Having established our own Facebook page earlier this year, Affinity Express is well aware of the site’s incredible popularity.  In fact, Facebook is the most visited site in the U.S., with more than 500 million users worldwide.

One of our key market segments is newspapers and multi-media publishers.  We’ve been providing print and online ad production for several years and, more recently, launched social media services.  The implication for our clients and prospects is that Facebook might already have more reach in the community than any other media outlet, including local newspapers.  But rather than competing, Facebook can be used by newspapers as a very viable (and affordable) short-term solution to boost traffic and page views for their websites and generate new revenue from advertisers).

6 Tips for Working “Virtually” with Remote Offices and Clients

I have been marketing to U.S. customers for the last few years. Nothing unusual in that, except that I live in India. And for the most part, my bosses and many of the other people I work with have been based in the U.S.

With the increasingly flat world we live in, many people (especially those of us who work in the outsourcing industry) work with clients, teams or managers who are based in different offices and often different continents. This brings a whole different set of challenges to working in close proximity to your team with your boss sitting in the next room.

The biggest disadvantage of not communicating face-to-face is that you lose out on the non-verbal cues in a conversation. The same statement, without the context of tone or body language can be interpreted as an earnest suggestion or sarcasm, an honest apology or a defensive excuse.

Here are a few suggestions I have for how those of us in such a situation can communicate and work effectively. These are by no means exhaustive, and I’d love to know what you would add to the list.

Summing Up 2010

As we enter the last month of 2010, I have been thinking about what we have achieved this year and how we can do better next year. 2010 was particularly good for Affinity Express. I’d like to share with you some of what we have accomplished.

1. We celebrated our ten-year anniversary. We have grown from a 125-person embroidery digitizing company to an 800-person advertising and marketing production company. This year, we celebrated our success, but also set our sights on what we want to achieve next.
2. We added several of the largest clients in our history in the category of multi-media publishers and on-boarded them in record time.