Friday Evening Personal Notes

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• Allow me to toot my own horn... The trade magazine advertisements that I make for our company received the highest awareness ratings in our size category (1/4 page) for 2005. We even beat out some 1/2 page and 1/3 page advertisements from companies ten times our size. All of this without using an outside marketing agency! It helps that we advertise our prices in big huge font, and follow lots of Ogilvy rules.
• That being said, work has been pretty slow for me these past two weeks. I think it might be because I am eating so much - trying to gain weight. It makes me very, very tired in the afternoons - hard to focus.
• Last Monday, US Helicopter launched service from New York City Wall Street heliport to the American Airlines terminal at JFK Airport. The less-than-10-minute trip in an S-76 costs $139 one-way (increases to $159 on May 1) and allows passengers to bypass traffic and security procedures at the airport.
• A few facts about Direct Mail will follow.
• Direct mail returns an average of $12 for every dollar spent.
• 98% of consumers bring in their mail the day it's delivered.
• Postcards are 8 times more likely to be read than letters.

These notes are a few days early, because our family is going on a cruise next week. We will be aboard the Carnival Miracle, a fairly standard huge cruise ship with an upgraded balcony room. I'm excited, because I have never been on a cruise before, but I have also heard that cruises are a little ... how do you say ... crowded and tacky. So I read a great book about the cruise industry called Devils on the Deep Blue Sea and it really helped me to understand how much of a cash cow this industry is. I can't wait - I am really excited to check out the money machine first-hand. And, even if it is tacky and filled with drunks, I can't complain because the 'rents are paying for it, right?

Happy Spring Break, y'all!