A-B | C-D | E-M | N-R | S-Z

0-9

4-color—See Full color. Play 5.

’85 Bears—In case you’ve lived under a rock, the greatest football team of all-time was the ’85 Chicago Bears. The unfair advantage? All-stars like Payton, McMahon, The Fridge, Ditka, Fencik, Singletary, Jimbo Covert, Thayer, Hilgenberg, Moorhead, Gault, McKinnon, Gentry, Dent, Hampton, McMichael, Marshall, Wilson, Rivera…I could go on. Play R-09.

A

Account Manager—an advertising sales representative responsible for a major customer account or group of major accounts; also referred to as an account executive.

Acrobat—Adobe’s program for universal printing of any document, no matter what program created it. Acrobat is part of a set of applications developed by Adobe to create and view PDF files. Acrobat is used to create the PDF files, and the freeware Acrobat Reader is used to read the PDF files. Stands for Portable Document Format. Created by Adobe Systems in its software program Adobe Acrobat as a universal browser. Files can be downloaded via the web and viewed page by page, provided the user is computer has installed the necessary plug-in which can be downloaded from Adobe’s own web site.

Ad Network—Advertising space in a group of web sites for the purpose of maximizing revenue and minimizing administrative costs.

Ad Rotation—Different ads and different ad sources are often rotated in the same space on a web page. Ad rotation is static (one ad per page view). This is usually done automatically by software on our web site and delivers advertisements randomly and in close proximity to your desired frequency or weighting.

Adobe Illustrator—See Illustrator. Play T-05, Play E-11, Play E-15.

Adobe InDesign—An excellent print page layout application from Adobe. It’s dual-platform, too, for those of you out there who insist on being counter-culture Windows users. Play R-01, Play R-05, Play R-12.

Advertising Specialties—See Tchotchke. Play R-11, Play R-32.

.ai—See Illustrator. Play T-05.

Animated GIF—See .gif

A-roll—The primary material (cf. B-roll) in film editing. Play R-23.

Art Director—The person responsible for overseeing graphic designers, photographers, and illustrators in the creation of an advertisement or other marketing materials. Play T-03.

.avi—Video file format that embeds sound and motion picture. May require a special player to view. Play E-12.

B

B2B (or B-to-B)—Selling your products and services to other businesses. Non-consumer, non-retail. Note: Some businesses sell into both categories (Business-to-Business and Business-to-Consumer). For example, JC Penney sells to consumers through its retail stores and web site, but they also sell their gift cards to businesses (B2B) for use in an incentive program using a 3rd party reseller. The same is true for OfficeMax. Their retail stores sell to individuals and small businesses and their Contract Sales Team sells to Midsize and Large businesses.

B2C (or B-to-C)—Business-to-Consumer selling. See above, B2B.

Banner ad—A banner is a graphic image (static, animated, or rich media) that is placed on web sites as an advertisement. Banners are commonly used for brand awareness and generating sales. A rectangular online advertisement in the form of a graphic image that runs across the top or bottom of a web page. Banner ads are historically GIF images. Many ads are animated GIFs since animation has been shown to be more effective. The standard banner is 468 pixels wide by 60 pixels high. Play R-37.

Barney Speak—Remember Barney, the adorable, friendly dinosaur who taught you (or in my case, my children) a sweet tune, “I love you. You love me. We’re one big, happy family...” Well, there are sales people out there who sound just like that. They take customers out for lunch, treat them really nice, but never get the order because they aren’t quite able to bring the discussion to a conclusion and ink the order. Meanwhile, some barracuda out there, snaches the deal right out from under their nose.

Bitmap—A graphic file representing, bit for bit, an image displayed on a monitor or in print. In general, these kind of files cannot be scaled larger without loss of resolution. See also Vector Graphic. Play R-45.

Black & White—Materials that are created using only solid black and white. There is no grayscale or shades of gray. Typically your logo must be in black & white format for embroidery. Play T-05.

Blacklist—It is common for an ISP to a use a blacklist to determine which e-mails should be blocked. Blacklists contain lists of domains or IP addresses of known and suspected spammers. Unfortunately, these blacklists also contain many legitimate e-mail service providers. Just a few spam complaints can land an e-mail service provider or IP address on a blacklist despite the fact that the ratio of complaints to volume of e-mail sent is extremely low. Play K-09.

Bleed—Also known as full-bleed. Full bleed is printing from edge to edge without a page border. It may cost extra depending on your printer or publication. BusinessWeek, for one, doesn’t like bleeds. Play R-01.

Blog—Web-log, a personal web site consisting of regular journal-like entries posted for public viewing. Blogs usually contain links to other web sites along with the thoughts, comments, and personality of the blog’s creator. Play E-13.

.bmp—A Windows-only graphic file format that is not compatible with internet applications.

Boilerplate—A short description of your company for editorial use. Play T-022, Play R-18, Play R-20, Play R-22.

B-roll—Supplemental video (cf. A-roll). In VNR, B-roll material, it’s the backup material. Play R-23.

Business Development, Business Developers—Selling into new markets and initiating new business partnerships outside the normal, established markets and industries currently pursued by Reps and targeted by Marketing. Think of it this way…Marketing shines a light on the path where Sales Reps are supposed to go (okay, that’s how it’s supposed to work in a perfect world). Business Development, on the other hand, operates outside the “light” of Marketing. They are tasked with opening new markets, establishing relationships with Partners, and in general, finding new sources of revenue. They are sales people who require (and actually, thrive on) little direction or support from the “mothership.”

Button—An online advertisement in the form of a small graphic image that typically resides in the margin of a web page. Buttons are typically 88x31 pixels. These are often very cost effective and popular to generate traffic to your business. Play R-38.