With the start of a new year, I like to pause for a
moment to reflect on the past year, to savor the good times and to learn something
from the experiences so that we can do better in the future. For Inprint, 2009
had its ups and downs. The year was filled with some of our finest creative
output ever. Our amazing team continues to fire on all cylinders and produce
consistently great creative work. Our work was recognized with local, regional
and national awards. In the spring we won a box full of ADDY Awards from the
Roanoke Valley Advertising Federation. All Gold ADDY winning entries advance to
the next tier, where a great project we produced for U.S. Foodservice won a
prestigious Third District ADDY Award. A few months later we received a Davey
Award, a national competition organized by the International Academy of Visual
Arts that draws over 4000 entries. This is the third year in a row that Inprint
has won at least one Davey Award.
It was also a year for meeting new people and forging
new relationships. We continue to be active and enthusiastic members of the
Virginia Association of Convention & Visitors Bureaus and the Southeast
Tourism Society. Some of the new friends we’ve made through these organizations
will undoubtedly become clients one day. Some are tourism industry leaders who have inspired us with their insights. Some are simply new friends, like the many
terrific people I met at STS Marketing College in Georgia.
The year was filled with interesting and fulfilling
projects. Early in the year we rebranded a 75-year-old family run business in Roanoke. We
developed a campaign for a heritage tourism trail through the Roanoke Valley
that was greeted with much fanfare when unveiled to the public at a press
conference in August. Then we created another wildly successful annual report for Goodwill Industries of the Valleys. Our annual reports for Goodwill have won multiple awards from the very first one we created four years ago so the bar is set pretty high. As the year drew to a close, we were in the midst of developing a brand for a new tourism initiative in nearby Botetourt County. We’re using our Facebook page to chronicle the development of the brand, the web site, the brochure and ad campaign for the Upper James River Water Trail and invite you to follow along. In between these projects we helped our clients with catalogs, brochures, posters and magazines. And we guided clients through the maze of e-mail marketing and social media.
Casting its dreary shadow over all of 2009 was an anemic economy. Some
clients wrestled with dwindling budgets, while a handful had the resources and the
wisdom to invest adequately in marketing in order to position themselves better
for the inevitable recovery (read a great article on the subject here). Two areas hit hard by the economy in 2009 were tourism and foodservice – Inprint’s two key areas of specialty. There are signs of improvement in both sectors as 2010 begins. We’re certainly optimistic. We wish you a happy and prosperous 2010.
