The best place on earth

Is about to be your host

As a dedicated hard-working professional, you stand at the beginning in your quest for recognition as a sales or recruiting winner this year. By now, you should already be pouring on the energy to achieve attendance at our upcoming international meeting.

You already know our destination is Madrid, Spain! You already know when we're going next January! You already know the qualifications you need to become a winner! For the next year, your TOGETHER magazine will feature exciting or important places you'll want to visit as a champion! Join us as a champion and be our special guest in Madrid!

LEFT: This international meeting teaser cover kicked off the best promotional campaign in company history. One of the company's simultaneous translators—Charo (Maria Rosario)—grew up in Madrid, the daughter of an admiral in the Spanish navy. We car pooled and she was gracious enough to let me use her collection of color images. Together with her firsthand knowledge and a wealth of reading she provided, I learned so much about life, art, and architecture in the Spanish capital city. RIGHT: Charo was insistent that everything we said be accurate, so I relied on her for technical approval of the copy. Once again, her photos proved invaluable for pulling together the teaser feature based on a destination stop on the planned city tour. After picking through her photo collection and selecting the ones to be published, I fell in love with Madrid, especially El Escoriel and the Prado museum of art. Charo's running travelogue encouraged my creativity for the year long Madrid promotion.

[Ed. Text featured here was printed inside the kick-off TOGETHER magazine cover. Captions describe the development of the promotion. Do to legal constraints, all company specific information has been removed.]

Now let's see you give the extra energy you need to join us in sunny Spain — in marvelous Madrid — where you'll be our guest for six days and five nights of fun and excitement. Check the guidebooks for all the terrific sights you'll be treated to in Madrid. Once you arrive, you'll find yourself falling in love with this scenic city.

It is said that "all roads lead to Madrid. " It's true — we can tell you, because we visited Madrid recently to set things up especially for this fantastic meeting — that Madrid is indeed the center of attraction for us. From the Plaza de la Cibeles, all streets branch out to eventually reach everywhere in Spain. Just a slight jump to the north is our base of international meeting operations, the Hotel Melia Castilla.

LEFT: The fountain at Cibeles, with the chariot of Cibeles herself, seemed a fitting testimony to the star power of Madrid city. For the promotion, I consulted with design experts to guide me in achieving the right degree of negative space—the white areas that relax a viewers eye and enhance the effect of the overall pages. There was some grumbling in management that we were wasting precious pages, but I insisted we move forward. RIGHT: In the course of each year's international meeting promotion, the hotel facility is an important publicity element. Using the 650-person-strong delegation as a bargaining chip, management always negotiated the absolute minimum price—making it important to promote the hotel features and services that would be available to our special guests.

As our special TOGETHER cover shows this month, the hospitality of Madrid is extraordinary. You'll discover a world in which you'll be treated royally. The entire hotel and restaurant staff is waiting to serve you in the comfort and luxury you expect as a champion.

We're ready to let Madrid host your stay, as you meet the criteria for Grand Club membership. We're ready to reserve your room at the Melia Castilla. And we're ready to open the curtain on the exciting opportunity to pay a once-in-a-lifetime visit to this fabulously beautiful and charming old-world capital city.

Be our guests in Madrid! "Say YES to Success" this year!

LEFT: This was my favorite teaser cover of the entire Madrid promotion year. The graphic artist and I both enjoy the work and stylings of artist Patrick Nagle, and we wanted to convey similar lines and feelings. Personally, I think he captured just the right air of sousance, of nonchalance, that said "… we're enjoying this luxury, and someone else is paying for it." RIGHT: The cathedral at Toledo, an hour north of Madrid and a destination on the super-salesman add-on tour, seemed the perfect image (with that wonderfully colorful tour bus placed … just so … in Charo's photo). My boss wanted to highlight just the tour and he was amenable to simplicity's essence. He wrote the copy and tore the paper edges ever so artfully. We were just learning to scan, so the torn paper was actually black to hold up, and then we inverted the tone range. We were told by an attendee/winner that this cover was the switch to motivate her to go.

[Ed. This page is dedicated to the memory of Maria Rosario Rutherford, who read and spoke 11 languages fluently and managed the company's staff of simultaneous translators (she also translated for the 9th District U.S. Court of Appeals). Her death from liver failure was a blow to all of us who worked closely with her. Fortunately, Charo was able to work at the Madrid international meeting, where she took on the role as unofficial, and extremely charming, ambassador to our guests from the rest of the world.]