Director’s report for the period ended 31 December 2008

Principal activity
The company’s principal activity during the period continued to cluster around the two primary business units of supplying training services (under the ‘Digital Training Academy’ brand) and consultancy services (under the ‘Digital Strategy Consulting’ brand). This is to firms at the cutting edge of the digital media as well as those making the transition into the digital networked economy. With our publishing business growing to include weekly newsletters as well as the portfolio of websites, we formalised this as a third key area at the start of the year. The publications feed both consulting and training activity as well as creating new services in their own right.

Review of the year
The switch to digital marketing continues to grow in every country and with social media moving into the corporate mainstream, our services have expanded and flexed with the needs of our markets. Country by country industry attitudes continue to change and firms need expert consultants and business coaches to ensure this change works well. Organisations large and small are increasingly, and rightly, moving digital to the heart of their communications and in both the consulting and training businesses we are changing our products and services to support those who are highly advanced in the use of digital channels as much as those who are relative newcomers.

For seventh year running, international business has been strong with activities in the UK accounting for less than half our output. World class business advice means we have had to develop approaches that allow us to work in multiple countries without significant overheads and stronger online platforms as well as new working practices enabled this to grow without increasing the cost base proportionally. We ran projects from Shanghai to Sydney, Singapore to Caracas, New York to Mexico, and closer to home in many European capitals.

Anticipating a softening of the economy, we actively repositioned into higher margin sectors and those that would be more resilient when markets contracted. As part of this we migrated our focus away from the media sector where we began back in 2000 to a broader mix of consumer brands, with new services designed for global brands that could need us in many national markets. Another part of the repositioning was to move away from supporting agencies which had been the lowest margin part of our business, and to begin winding down the public access training programmes which had also proved low margin.

We actively grew the publishing business with additional content and stronger publishing tools as well as creating niche online services for different market sectors. The company invested in building its own IP around our consulting methodology and increased the amount of training material. We introduced a new brand identity introduced for all activities in the Spring of 2008.
Digital Training Academy: Building stronger digital teams

Digital Training Academy: Building stronger digital teams
Investment in the creation and delivery of Digital Training Academy courses continued, with the company meeting its targets for the second year of developing one new lesson every week or upgrading an existing lesson. Again we ran Digital Training Academies in more than ten countries. The number of Academy courses in the portfolio swelled to 40, with the Acceleration Academy becoming the most popular of the three levels. In line with the strategic repositioning we began to wind down public access training so only continued partnership courses for a few of the European trade associations such as the BPCC Chamber of Commerce in Poland, the International Newspaper Marketing Association in Belgium. In-company coaching for whole marketing teams became the major growth area, with Digital developing Academy programmes that could be deployed by corporate clients across many markets.

We completed the consolidation of courses into a new modular system to allow for more flexible course design changes and upgraded our online learning and support programmes. The competency assessment models developed in 2007 for benchmarking performance were expanded and the graduate programme was extended with more content and services for a longer time period. By increasing our distance learning, the blended programmes became stronger and better placed to scale.

Digital Strategy Consulting: accelerating digital brands
The management consultancy continued to transform the firms it touched, helping change direction of the business, engineer new online product strategies and new growth plans for firms from Western Europe, Central Europe, Asia, and North America.
With our work to accelerate the internet sector's trade associations complete, we began looking at the challenges for regulation and how we could help industry create stronger structures for moving forwards. This led to our CEO’s appointment as one of five inaugural Commissioners for the direct and digital media industries to police direct marketing practices to ensure UK companies worked with their customers in ways that were legal, honest, decent and truthful.

In the strategy practice we focussed heavily on developing models for successful online services that straddled entertainment, applications, media and content. Activity in Central and Eastern Europe was particularly intensive with programmes for Agor’s Gazeta Wyborcza in Poland, Goldbach Media in Switzerland and the Styria Media Group in Austria. Later in the year we started bringing more of these skills to consumer brands and business services that needed online product strategies for creating powerful consumer engagement, or building web-centric marketing models.

Digital Strategy Publications
The monthly Digital Intelligence news service was increased in depth and frequency with specialist publications developed for key client sectors. The IFRA Association invited us to author a report about the skills crisis in the digital publishing industry, which we delivered at their global congress in Germany. The INMA association invited a similar analysis of best practice in digital publishing which we delivered in Belgium. Website content publishing grew significantly with the DigitalStrategyConsulting.com/intelligence acting as the hub for daily content publishing.

New Digital Insight Reports were authored for sectors as diverse as the online advertising, social media, website audience and product development and online media planning.

Digital Strategy Events
We managed or supported more than 50 events throughout 2008 ranging from supplying speakers to conferences to running our own programmes. Until now the events business has been behind the scenes within the training company, but with growing skills in event management this is something that will be reviewed in 2009.

Key performance indicators: Summary scorecard

Digital Training Academy KPIs
Number of countries training courses delivered in 15 including China, USA and Australia
Average satisfaction rating from management training 4.2 / 5
Number of Digital Training Academy courses in portfolio 40
Most popular Digital Training Academy Acceleration Academy

Digital Strategy Consulting KPIs
Most prestigious clients Diageo, Intel, IFRA, Metro International, The Marketing Forum (Richmond)
Average satisfaction from consulting Very high

Digital Strategy Publishing KPIs
Number of publications produced 52
Google indexed pages for DigitalStrategyConsulting.com 1230
Google indexed pages for DigitalTrainingAcademy.com 890
Update frequency (days) for website content throughout the year 300

Group Marketing KPIs
Number of talks and speeches 28
Google rank for ‘digital strategy’ 1
Google rank for ‘digital training’ 1
Web links to ‘DigitalStrategyConsulting.com’ 103
Web links to ‘DigitalTrainingAcademy.com’ 85

CSR
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) award recipient (£10k) Direct Marketing Commission

Operations
We completed the recruitment of a small network of support staff in Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific to support the new markets we were working in. We increased our staffing as the volume of projects grew but maintained low overheads. We increased the resilience of our infrastructure further to support business growth in 2009 and 2010. This included additional IT systems, online learning tools, relationship management and database architecture. Our intern programme grew, as did the scale of its finance and administration resources to create a stronger back office.

Trading outlook
The longer term outlook for our services is robust because as firms shift their focus they need guidance in how to make this happen effectively and how their teams can make effective judgements about how to progress using digital and integrated channels. Companies transiting into the digital networked economy as well as those increasing the scope of their services are easily seduced by the opportunity, but can equally easily misread the landscape, exposing themselves to huge commercial risk. The models and approaches we developed have been proven to provide the right frameworks to achieve this, and have been successfully built upon, with new layers of ideas, structure and analysis. Many firms reported an ROI of more than 50:1 for the investments they made with us, continuing to use us more extensively on new projects.

Although the macroeconomic outlook for 2009 is very downbeat, the core overheads of the business remain small, allowing us to contract with the market and then expand without difficulty when growth returns. Because our services provide a compelling proposition for organisations to get the right approach in one of the most critical areas, we’re confident that the demand in the medium term will remain strong. Having focussed on product development last year and this year we enjoyed the benefits of stronger turnover.

Strategic plan
Expecting a contraction in demand, the plan for 2009 is for us to retain low overheads and invest in our content, training resources and marketing to build longer term relationships for when the market expands again. The focus is changing to higher margin products and services, and in all areas there is a strong shift away from supporting marketing services agencies and public access programmes in favour of longer term in-company activities with big brands that deliver higher ROI to both the client and Digital Strategy.

Alongside the traditional consultancy business model, we have began exploring the potential for taking equity positions in young digital companies, making tactical investments in firms we see have significant potential. This is still in the evaluation stage, but will grow in 2009 and could become significant in the future. In parallel with this Digital Strategy is looking at potential acquisitions in the publishing or events sectors to strengthen our existing portfolio.