Best of the Best -- TGIF!

Welcome to this week's edition of the Friday Blog Log!

Let's get started with a good, all-around link. Dean Rieck's Direct Creative Blog post on "How to add Oomph to your Offer," provides us ideas on how to tweak your offer to make it resonate with more people. He also provides a document on proven offers that you can use when pondering your next great direct marketing campaign. In addition, if you sign up for his monthly newsletter, you'll get a plethora of great thoughts and ideas. In this month's newsletter edition, Dean comments on everything from balancing your life to great books covering a myriad of topics to helpful advice on increasing your direct marketing effectiveness. Dean provides so much valuable information in each edition -- and I look forward to reading it each month.

Next, I found a new (to me) blog out there that I really like by Ed Lee. It's called Blogging Me Blogging You, and the post I'm featuring today provides some of Ed's interesting research on measuring the effectiveness of both e-marketing and direct mail campaigns. He discusses some recent work that he and his colleague have done for a client and the resulting metrics in terms of response rate. He promises to share more as time goes on, so this is a good blog to subscribe to as Ed continues to update it. His net net is something that we've discussed a bunch, and that is that no one tactic can reach all of your audiences. I'll stay tuned to this blog to see Ed's future findings for sure!

Finally, here's my absolute favorite post of the week. It comes to us from Portland's Finest Advertising Blog and our friend, Phil Bernstein. I'm not going to give away the story because he tells it so well, but suffice it to say that it makes really good sense to be creative in looking for new opportunities that come out of a faltering economy. This is a great post!

Have a great weekend . . . and Happy Mother's Day to all of you Mothers out there!