Ad Ventures is one of eight Puget Sound area companies selected by Washington Mutual to be showcased in WAMU’s fall 2007 advertising campaign. Ads featuring Ad Ventures ran on local radio stations, including KIRO and KOMO ,and appear in the Seattle Times, Seattle PI, Tacoma News Tribune, and Everett Herald. Washington Mutual Bank’s campaign focuses on their niche of handling small business banking needs and helping promote the growth of small businesses. What better way to reinforce what they do well than by giving free ad space and air time to select local companies?

Hear WaMu’s radio spot featuring Alex Howard, principal and founder of Ad Ventures Marketing >

Marketing Pointers, Funny Stories and Poison Ivy
So, why name our e-newsletter Tales From The Trail? Well, after 20 years in business, Ad Ventures has more than a few adventurous stories and good marketing tips to share - from the very helpful to the just downright funny. Stay on the lookout for the first issue, coming to your email box soon. If you haven’t signed up for Tales From The Trail yet, what are you waiting for?? Click here to sign up now!

Here’s a real Poision Ivy story that will be featured in an upcoming Tales From the Trail e-newsletter. This actually happened recently to a client of Ad Ventures.

This client lost the domain name ownership for a new business division - and for all practical purposes, their total business identity - to an unscrupulous employee. Don’t let this happen to you!

Embarking on a new, web-based business channel, this company retained Ad Ventures to develop a corporate brand/logo for them. Once the logo was completed and delivered, our client discovered to their great surprise that the employee they entrusted to register their domain name had done so in his own personal name. Adding more poison to the ivy, the employee took the new logo, modified it slightly, and went into business for himself using their name, intellectual property and business plan! He was able to do this largely because of his “ownership” of the business domain name.

Ad Ventures helped our client to re-establish their copyright ownership to the logo design, but ownership of the domain name is a stickier matter.

When you sign up for a domain name, the domain registration company typically asks you for two contacts: the administrative contact which is usually the domain name owner (doesn’t have to be and often isn’t), and the technical contact which is either your website host, web master or web development company. Companies often allow the web development company to register their domain name. If you’re not careful, this may result in the admin contact and the tech contact being the same individual and the owner of domain name not being who you think.

The owner of the domain name is the one who paid for it and is listed as admin contact. Many of our clients are surprised to find out that they don’t own the domain name that they paid for because it was re-billed at a markup by a third party. The tip is you absolutely must ensure that a trusted member of your company is listed as the administrative contact for renewal notifications and to clearly establish ownership of the domain name. It is best if your company itself register and pay for the domain registration (rather than a third party) And then you can designate the technical contact and update that designation whenever you want.