Anderson Marketing Blog

Have you experienced the new Gmail inbox updates?

When Ted Tietge, Anderson’s CEO, bought Anderson Mailing Service in November of 1985, the company had just seven employees and the business had yet to establish a strong culture. “It was chaos,” remembered Ted. “When we started, the equipment was dirty, people were coming in late, and the pieces weren’t getting out on time. People just threw the bad samples on the floor and no one cared. It wasn’t a good company to work for until we changed the standards.” Together, Ted and Gary Batchelder (who have both been at Anderson for close to 28 years!) completely reformed the way Anderson was run and created a culture of hard work and integrity.

In today’s world, everyone has access to the same stock photography. So how do you choose it better, and use it better, to help make your marketing efforts unique and have your message cut through?

For 28 years, Anderson has been hard at work creating and producing the best direct mail(DM) in the business. We are an ever-evolving organization, committed to staying fresh and providing our clients with the best services possible. As a one-stop shop, our people do it all— strategy, creative, data, interactive, production—you name it! But what is the bigger picture? How exactly does a DM piece go from start to finish?

Super powers aren’t just possessed by comic book characters and actors in movies—you can discover and cultivate them in all of your employees if you give them the opportunity. At Anderson Direct Marketing, we take pride in our high-quality relationships, products, production processes and services, which can only be achieved by having superstars within our organization. Starting in 2013, we began a new program to recognize and reward our Quality Superstars!

Big Data is a term that both inspires and confuses many of us in the marketing industry. We hear about it at our conferences and in the boardroom on a daily basis. But what does it mean? And more importantly, what does it mean for your business?

Does brilliant design inspire exceptional copy...or the other way around? Or, are they inextricably intertwined? And what role does the medium play in what takes center stage?

On April 24, 2013, Anderson Direct Marketing participated in its first Google+ Hangout. Creative director Carlos Perez represented ADM in the second episode of Xerox’s “Ask the Experts” series. Joining Perez were Gordon Kaye, editor and publisher, and Ilana Greenberg, creative director from the magazine Graphic Design USA. The question that brought these experts together was, “Is print dead?” All of the experts answered confidently with a resounding no. Kaye started the conversation with the subject of tangibility. With print, you can touch, hold and feel a piece. Other mediums cannot connect to us in this way.

We’re all familiar with the formula—the success of a direct mail package is 40% list, 40% offer, and 20% creative. So why do we spend 90% of our time on creative—edits, revisions, etc? Oh wait, that’s another blog topic. Today, let’s talk about direct mail offers—when they work, and when they don’t.

1) You know the difference between a hyphen, an en dash, and an em dash, and how to use them.