Connecticut Shops Join Forces

Adams & Knight and Transcendigital have announced a strategic alliance designed to broaden the service offerings of each and help the small shops com pete in an in creasingly difficult economy.

Adams & Knight, best known as a mar keting services pro vider, will work on projects with interactive shop Trans cendigital for existing clients. The com- panies will also pursue new business together, offering the services of each as a single package.

“Tactics are getting much more sophisticated,” said Jill Adams, pres ident of Avon, Conn.-based Adams & Knight. “We want to offer our clients a full range of services.”

“[At Transcendigital] we’ve al ways felt we were only going halfway by going [the online route],” said Rhoda Clou tier, managing director of the company she formed earlier this year after serving as vp/business development at Outrider North America. “By hooking up with Adams & Knight, we can tap into their clients to build our business.”

Transcendigital, a seven-person shop that occupies office space in the same building as Adams & Knight, hopes to complement its service offering with a more traditional marketing component.

In its 13 years of operation, Adams & Knight has focused mostly on traditional media, such as print, broadcast and direct mail, though in the past couple of years it has also developed Web sites and multimedia presentations for clients State Street Re search, Allmerica Financial and The Hartford Financial Services. With the new partnership, it hopes to expand these capabilities with Tran scendigital’s roster of e-mail marketing, search-engine optimization, Web design and online ads. Adams & Knight employs about 30 staffers.

In addition, the agencies hope to use new interactive technologies, including specialized URLs, to measure the ROI on all of these services. Transcendigital is developing online technology to measure responses generated by Adams & Knight’s advertising efforts for the National Kidney Foundation of Connecticut.

Adams & Knight is providing creative support for Transcendigital client FLIR Systems, a manufacturer of air and ground imaging systems. Transcendigital is designing a multilingual Web site and collaborating on a long-term marketing plan for the Portland, Ore., client.

Other Adams & Knight clients in clude Fidelity Investments and Data Becker Software. The agency claimed billings of about $15 million in 2000.