Vantage Communications of San Francisco, California won a Stevie Award for Best Communications or PR Campaign in The 2008 American Business Awards. Here's how they got their message across to tens of millions of people during the 2007 NCAA basketball tournament.

While the staff at Vantage Communications (formerly PR@Vantage) may not be basketball experts, the company claims a thorough understanding of the marketplace for the increasingly competitive high-technology industry.
 
The Challenge
When the company was asked to create buzz for Annapolis-based client eTelemetry with a budget of less than $10K, Vantage Communications rose to the challenge.

The Strategy
In early 2007, eTelemetry launched a bandwidth management tool, Metron, that measured network bandwidth usage by employee and was positioned as a useful network management product. Vantage Communications dug deeper and found that the tool had a very important feature—it could measure the Internet usage of employees, including sites visited, and time spent surfing. Vantage repositioned the product to focus on the employee monitoring aspect.

CBS Sports was streaming the 2007 NCAA tournament basketball games live over the web during business hours—an annual event known in the U.S. as "March Madness."  This provided a unique opportunity for eTelemetry since its new product had the ability to report on which employees in an organization were watching the tournament on the Internet during the workday.

Monitoring employee Internet usage is a controversial topic, so Vantage positioned the product as a tool to discover who was abusing company networks. It was made clear that the NCAA Tournament was only an example of what companies deal with all the time. This was important because both Vantage and the journalists it contacted knew that potential customers would not buy the product solely for the NCAA results.  It was therefore in the agency's interest to frame the tournament as just one piece of a bigger picture.

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Diversified Business Communications of Portland, Maine won the Stevie Award for Best Event Promotion Web Site in The 2008 American Business Awards.

Diversified Business Communications, a division of Diversified Communications, brings buyers and sellers together through its publications, internationally acclaimed trade shows, and online media. Headquartered in Portland, Maine, the company has more than 200 employees in offices in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and the U.K.

"Look the Biz!", first published in January, 2008, is the Stevie Award-winning microsite that Diversified Business Communications developed to generate leads and attendance at the Administrative Professionals Conference (APC) Canada, Canada's #1 conference for administrative professionals. 

With catchy graphics, relevant content, and a fun, interactive game, the site is accomplishing its mission: Since its launching on January 4, 2008, the site has had more than 1,000 unique visitors.  It also contains some useful information.  Below we extract one item from the site that is particularly useful in this stressful season.

Meeting Deadlines (Without Tearing Your Hair Out!)
Seven strategies to help you avoid missing deadlines or burning the midnight oil.

We all have deadlines, and if you've never missed one—or never burned the midnight oil in order to make one—you can skip this article. There are some planning techniques that you can use to help you stay on track; we've adapted these from professional project managers. And in the end if you do miss a deadline, don't feel the need to make excuses or apologize repeatedly. Keep working, and let people know when the project will be complete.

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The 2008 Stevie Awards for Women in Business were presented in New York on November 14. Among this year's honorees was Gloria Rodriguez, founder, president and CEO of Comunicad, a multicultural marketing communications company headquartered in the Washington, DC area, with a presence in Miami, New York, Los Angeles, Austin, Detroit, San Juan, Mexico, Argentina, and Spain. Gloria was recognized for Lifetime Achievement in the Advertising, Marketing, and PR industries.

We spoke with Gloria about how she got her start in business, how and why she founded Comunicad, and what multicultural marketing is all about

		Listen to the Podcast Interview ...
		Read Gloria Rodriguez's Stevie Award-winning Entry,,

Blogs, or web logs, are all the rage these days. Each month in this space we'll point you to several blogs that we think might be of interest to you.

Slacker Radio : Listen to a wide and eclectic choice of music.
CoolSavings : Holiday gift ideas, comparison shopping guide, coupons, and free stuff.
The Onion: Our Annual Year : The Onion's look back at all the things that happened in 2008.
Mo Rocca 180 : Humorous news and views from media celebrity and comedian Mo Rocker,including his own "Best Of" list for 2008.