Check out our new portfolio reel. Thank you Fred….great work as always.

So Starbucks, the coffee chain, is coming home to you. With their new only-at-the-grocery product “Starbucks at Home”, you can now have your own Starbucks barista in your kitchen. With multiple favors and the same fresh brewed coffee taste that you pay big bucks at the store, brewing from home got much easier.

The website at http://www.starbucksathome.com, allows you to see TV personality Gail Simmons (from Top Chef fame), learn more about the Starbucks at Home coffee product and gives you tons of other goodies like recipes, videos, understanding the coffee process and more importantly the chance to enter a sweepstakes. The grand prize? A brand new kitchen. You can’t beat that.

So hop over to the bar, grab a cup and check out the Starbucks at Home site.

So we were able to meet a very interesting and powerful ad serving company called Flash Talking (http://www.flashtalking.com). They are Europe’s leading rich-media ad server and they have came to the US to give US marketers/Advertisiers a taste of good ole Flash serving.

Yes, we know, there are tons of rich-media ad servers out there but what makes Flash Talking so special?

Start off with their own very special video codec that will make videos stream faster, and smoother then any other competitor. Then you add the best analytic tools in a ad server dashboard for Advertisers to see how their banners are performing. Then you add easy to use templates and dashboard tools for uploading. And then you top it off with some amazing, compelling features that no other ad server can offer (ask about the ‘instant ads’) - and now you got FlashTalking.

Now, don’t just listen to me, go to their site http://www.flashtalking.com and check out the work yourself. And if you are interested in learning more about them and their wares, contact Joe at joe@flashtalking.com.

So I get asked a lot in meetings with potential clients - “Why Plus Factory”? After all, there are many other vendors in the world for agencies to go to, both US based (onshore) and outside the US (offshore). Their are benefits for using either one.

With onshore vendors, you know that there is someone who presumedly will speak the native language, have experience within the digital ad world, and most importantly will be available in person or on phone to help you on your projects. But you are going to pay US rates for a US person or resource. Obviously it gets cheaper when you go outside major cities like New York or LA for talent (think upstate NY or Utah).

With offshore vendors, you are really talking about price. Like a very cheap bottom base hourly rate. In today’s economy every major Client must think of their cost savings, and offshoring their digital work is always seen as a viable solution. And you can go anywhere in the world - Costa Rica, South America, Eastern Europe, India, Vietnam and of course China. But there is a price to this offshoring business.

First off, language is usually a huge barrier. Most offshore workers will not be bilingual and speak nor read English. 2nd is the issue of time-zones, are they going to be around to finish or tweak your work for your Client review or deliverable? And then there is that all too-familiar issue of quality control. As my Mother always told me, you pay for what you get. The reason you get a low hourly rate, is that the quality of work is a low rate as well. The secret for most offshore groups is that they sweeten you with the low hourly rate, but make it up with rounds of revisions and padded local Project Manager time. You need a local Project Manager to oversee your work, they say. But then you notice those rounds of reviews and padded Project Manager hours start to add up.

So how does this get back to “Why Plus Factory?”. Well thats because one of our secret sauces is our company make-up. We are an onshore/offshore model. A true hybrid. We package our services/solutions with a US based team made of US designers, Flash developers, web developers, Project Managers and Tech Directors that will then oversee our offshore production office. That means you get the best of both worlds - US based talent and resources to help you manage, produce and deliver your projects with the low cost savings of work produced oversees. But the key is, our US staff does actual work for our Clients as well.

So for instance, while work is done overnight by our China office, we will continue to develop, tweak, produce work for you during the day with our US staff. The most tech intense work is always produced by our US staff, so we make sure that everything works. Most offshore groups will just hand over files, and assume you can get it all integrated - to us, thats just half the work (Yeah - try that with Facebook apps). We not only produce the work, but we help you with the ‘last mile’ of integration. Would it be a ad server dashboard tool, working with a 3rd party platform or loading files onto a Client hosted server, we don’t call it a day till our Clients are 100% satisfied.

That’s one of our secret sauces we use for our competitive advantage. Taste good, no?

So next time you think of Plus Factory and wonder why you should try us, think of our ’secret sauce’.

Since the beginning of internet time, everyone assumed one day digital ad spend would outstrip print ad spend. Well that time has finally come. According to Forbes magazine, 2010 will mark the first time in history that US Marketers are spending more on digital then on print.

That number comes from Outsell’s annual advertising and marketing study, which collected data from 1,008 U.S. advertisers (both consumer and B2B) in December 2009. Of the $368 billion marketers plan to spend this year, 32.5% will go toward digital; 30.3% to print. Digital spending includes e-mail, video advertising, display ads and search marketing. “It’s a watershed moment,” says the study’s lead author, Outsell vice president Chuck Richard.

And on top of this, Outsell predicts that online spend will increase up to 10% for 2010. Let the good times roll…..

Click here to read the article in full.

We’ll very happy at the Factory. We recently helped one of our favorite Clients with their new online campaign for Umbro, called the “England Away Kit” Campaign. Seems like Umbro has created a whole new Soccer shirt (jersey) for fans when they go to ‘away’ games (I dunno, its England, I guess thats how they do it over the pond?).

Our Client and Umbro launched a cool online campaign to showcase the new kit which featured the band Kasabian, and their lead singer Tom Meighan - who unveiled it to the world at one of their concerts. Pretty cool stuff. Soccer, music, jerseys, you name it.

To see what this “England Away Kit” looks like, go to the site at: http://www.umbro.com/#/englandaway/?locale=en_GB

To read an interview of Kasbian’s lead singer, Tom Meighan, talking about the Umbro shirt, click here.

We at Plus Factory are proud to announce a new creation of our own. A brain-child of two of our freshest minds, Jonny and Alisa, have produced a new culture blog - There’s a List (http://www.theresalist.com). There’s a List is a blog consisting of lists. Hmmm, lets pause for a second. A blog full of lists you ask? Yes, lists that talk about subjects, topics and culture nuances you probably didn’t think of before.

It may be a list of the best 1st date restaurants, or a list of Lady GaGa’s best outfits, this blog will have it all.

The blog is powered by Wordpress, using as basis the theme Artemis, which we configured for our own needs and uses. We added a new front-end design and played with the feature modules to add in our twitter feeds, and other elements that we thought would fit the theme of the blog.

Please be our guest and check out There’s a List. And remember, besides lists, we can offer fully developed Wordpress websites.