Christmas and New Year

This issue covers two days' news and is the last DRNO of 2024. It's been a busy year for us, and has finished with a flurry of ad bookings which bode very well for the next one. We'd like to thank you all for your support and interest and wish you a Merry Christmas, a restful break and a wonderful 2025.

This year, for the first time in eighteen years, I have been without the services of the amazing Mel Crowther, who passed away in December 2023. If I had been in any doubt about how much she brought to the company (which I'm happy to say I wasn't) I would have been set right by the experience of compiling and editing most of DRNO on my own - I need this two-week break! Mel you are hugely missed and I suspect always will be.

Ad bookings for 2025 are sufficiently far ahead of where they were 12 months ago that we'll be looking for additional staff for the news, in the next quarter. The uptick is I hope indicative of a general recovery in the research and analytics space - it's been a really tough year for recruitment, and not the best for marketing, but the latter has picked up substantially in the last quarter and I expect the MR sector to have a much better 2025 all round.

In the Springtime we will finally launch our InsightClopedia feature - this has been pending, as a long-overdue upgrade to our directories section, for around two years and but for our loss last December would I'm sure have appeared in '24. More details to follow nearer the time, but it's a lot more than a directory and we're expecting it to help us promote DRNO - and (even more) to help improve news coverage. We already find and report in detail on a lot more MR happenings than anyone else, but the 'IC' should be the key to a huge expansion of our contacts and give you more confidence you're seeing everything of importance that's happened in the sector, in one place.

As ever, thank you for the fantastic feedback we've received this year, from longstanding readers and from people who have just discovered DRNO and wondered why they didn't before. A huge thanks also to our advertisers - we are a profitable business with no membership fees or subscriptions to support us, because of the faith they put in the industry's 'daily paper' and the impact it has on their audience.

There are a few, only, slots still available for next year and you can find details at:

www.mrweb.com/2025ads

- £ or $ prices available, and details of discounts and availability on request via ads@mrweb.com .

That's really it from us until January 2nd or 3rd. Have a great one!

Nick, and pp. Lena and Ian

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.