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2006 Year in Review

2006 has shaped up to be another exciting year at Delvinia. We saw the interactive and digital industry continue to grow, and we are glad to say that we continue to be a strong part of it. In 2006, we experienced a 30% growth in our overall business and our staff grew by 50% including full time and freelance staff.

It is that time of year when, as management, we reflect not only on the financial health of our business, but on some of the great accomplishments we have achieved over the year. We thought we would share some of the highlights over the past year, our strongest year since we started Delvinia 8 years ago.

• This year started off with a bang, when we finalized our vision regarding the “Digital Customer Experience”, now the foundation for our company’s strategic direction;
  
• We also started the year winning the overall communications contract for the 2006 Municipal Election for the Town of Markham, which included the promotion of Online Voting. Delvinia’s partnership with the Town of Markham began in 2003 when Markham first introduced Internet Voting as an option for voters. The campaign ran from August until the election in November and it was a huge success for Markham, seeing a 48% increase in voter turnout.
  
• Also at the beginning of 2006, we started working with Random House of Canada where we redesigned and launched 5 of their Canadian websites, including “Booklounge.ca” which is their online community of avid readers. We continue to support Random House’s online strategy by hosting their online consumer research panel called the “Editorial Board.”
  
• We continued to work closely with RBC to develop a new online strategy for their business banking line of business.
  
• In March, we launched RBC’s Marketing Central. Marketing Central is a sales-force enablement solution where we applied our Experience Strategy methodology to building this intranet-based solution.
  
• RBC also awarded us with an exciting project called “The Next Great Innovator” that launched this past September. It is a competition for university students to work as a team to design the financial institution of the future. We built an innovative website and engaged university students to register through various online channels including using social media. A highlight of the project has been the launch of a blog for the website which is the first blog launched by any financial institution in Canada. Over 270 teams submitted teams for the competition and the winners will be announced in early 2007.
  
• Building on the success of our the London, Ontario pilot, we continued to work with Canadian Blood Services to launch their Operation Lifeblood campaign regionally across Canada. We worked with Northern Lights who launched a DRTV campaign to drive prospective donors to a website and online community that we created. The objective of this initiative is to use social media to build awareness of the importance of giving blood and to build a database of people intending to give.
  
• Our work with Canadian Blood Services: Operation Lifeblood led to us taking Gold in MarketingSherpa’s 1st Annual Email Awards.
  
• Our work with Manulife’s Coverme brand continued to see some great success as the Internet plays a more significant role in selling insurance directly to consumers. One of the highlights of the year was implementing a search engine optimization strategy which resulted in moving Coverme from the nowhere on the organic search list to the top page in less than 72 hours of launching the changes.
  
• After providing some valuable strategic online marketing support to the Canadian Opera Company for their Operanation event, we have completed a strategic planning exercise regarding all of their interactive activities. We are exploring the opportunity to become the Opera’s Digital Partner to build the optimal Digital Opera Experience.
  
• Our AskingCanadians™ online consumer research panel continues to grow into one of the most quality online consumer research panels in Canada.
  
• Our Data Collection business grew by over 50% this year and using AskingCanadians™ our reliance on external online consumer panels continued to decline. Our growth in data collection included our great relationships with companies including Research International, Kantar Operations, Northstar Research Partners, In-Sync, 7th Sense, IFOP and Synovate.
  
• New Data Collection clients this year included, the Strategic Counsel, Research Strategy Group, Authentic Response, Knowledge Networks, and Speed of Sound.
  
• Working with Peter Doering and Consultants, we are hosting a “Guest Advisory Board” online research panel for Four Seasons, as well as, conducting online survey recruitment on a global basis.
  
• We continued developing our AskingMedia™ online data collection platform to enable our research clients to use our innovative technology to adapt their offline research methodologies online. This included using our technology for word sort research, word recognition research, retail shelf impact studies and of course online advertising testing.
  
• This year, Synovate Motoreseach, required us to adapt our AskingMedia™ advertising testing module for the Chinese marketplace. The project was a success, enabling their Chinese office to implement Synovate’s AdCheck™ methodology, while having the Toronto office analyze the data and provide them with the results.
  
• We continue to be actively involved in the interactive, marketing and research communities. Steve was made covice-chair of the integrated marketing council for the Canadian Marketing Association as well as the co-chair of the 2007 Digital Marketing Conference. Adam continues to be the Executive Producer of the Canadian New Media Awards (CNMA) which he founded in 1999. The CNMA is the largest national new media awards event recognizing Canadian innovation in interactive content. Members of the Delvinia team also continue to be involved with the CMA, Internet Advertising Bureau, AIMS Canada and the Market Research Intelligence Association.

Our business success is not only based upon our work, but by investing in and maintaining our great relationships with our clients, employees and our partners. We rely on these partnerships to round out capabilities and allows us to focus on our strengths.

• We continued to build our relationship with Cment, a great technology development partner for us, who assists us in dealing with the complexities technical infrastructure when we are implementing our strategic digital experiences.
  
• This year we also started working more closely with Northern Lights, a Direct Response Television producer, who is one of the top agencies in North America. With a number of cross over clients, we have been able to work together to develop seamless experiences between direct response television right and digital customer experiences.
  
• In January, we entered into a strategic relationship with Edelman, the largest independent Media Relations company in the world. We have been working with them to build our public presence while we have been working to support their Toronto office with our interactive expertise as they continue to help their media relations clients embrace digital and social media.
  
• We continued to work with our survey technology provider Global Market Insite who provides us with our back end technology for our data collection and online consumer research panel.
  
• And finally, our partnership with Hbc who recruits Hbc Rewards Members and provides us with our incentive for our AskingCanadians™ panel, continues to grow and remain a key relationship in development our overall insight strategy.

We are continuing to maintain our strategy of pragmatic growth, in order to preserve the highest quality of work for our clients and deliver interactive solutions that solve their business problems of today.  However, we will continue to strategically invest in our people, our processes and innovative research and development in order to remain forward thinking and demonstrate our leadership relating to the “Digital Customer Experience.”

We would like to thank all of our clients, partners and employees for a great year and we wish everyone a healthy and prosperous new year.  We look forward to working with you in 2007.

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