Digitrends.net Relaunches Site With Content Expansion and Site Redesign; Company's Expansion of Online Services Coincides With New Conference for Major Brands and Digitrends Magazine Initiatives.

Business Editors and High-Tech Writers

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 5, 2001

Digitrends.net, "The Information Network for Interactive Marketers" since 1998, Monday announced a dramatic redesign and expansion of its content and capabilities.

The site and its related e-mail newsletters have been undergoing a months-long reorganization and expansion of content and new features and today's redesign puts a dynamic graphics overlay to the content, allowing for easier navigation and usability, and a more comprehensive archival and retrieval system for the site's 8,000 pages of feature stories, daily industry news and directories.

"Over the past four months our Web production team and our editors have been making very significant and exciting changes to the structure of our content," said Kurt Indvik, president of Digitrends, LLC.

"They have created new channels focusing on interactive advertising and marketing and customer service/CRM issues to help our marketing executive readers keep abreast not only of how to reach and build customers online, but also of how to retain and grow those relationships online once they have been established."

Indvik noted that as a result of that effort, traffic to the Web site has grown by more than 30 percent.

In conjunction with the expansion of content and reach of Digitrends' Internet initiatives, Indvik also announced a new conference, Digitrends' Brand Leadership Forum, May 20-23, designed in the same model as the company's very successful media buyers summits.

Targeted for senior marketing executives at traditional brands, the Digitrends' Brand Leadership Forum provides for their continued education into the effective application of the Internet for their marketing programs.

In support of that effort to build traditional brands online, the company is also returning Digitrends magazine to its previous and successful quarterly frequency, as a journal focused primarily on delivering interactive marketing case studies of major brands for its marketing executive readers.

The magazine will also introduce a series of proprietary I-agency and brand executive research studies, done in conjunction with partners such as Greenfield Online.

Digitrends.net focuses on both a comprehensive daily industry news approach and a daily posting of new in-depth features written by industry contributors and journalists specializing in interactive media. The news group continues its expansion, now generating four e-mail newsletters (and weekly HTML digests) serving more than 60,000 daily readers.

Channel editors have ratcheted up daily content for the Web site's 10 major sections, divided between its "Advertising and Marketing" and "eBiz" channels. The newest addition has been the "NextWave" section and related e-mail newsletter focusing exclusively on wireless and broadband advertising and marketing applications.

According to Joshua Messinger, director of interactive media for Digitrends, the Web site will also debut in the next few weeks a new discussion board feature called "Media Roundtable," and later this quarter several new directories will be added to the nine directories already on the site.

"We've been focused on executing this major content re-organization, expansion and graphical redesign in the past months. Now we will act on the plans we have developed for a whole host of Web- and e-mail-based new products and features that will further our goal to be the most comprehensive, single-source of interactive marketing information and news for marketing executives."

About Digitrends, LLC

Digitrends, LLC was founded in 1998 to serve the interests of senior-level marketing and advertising executives at mid- to large-sized companies (and their agencies) as they extend their brands into the online environment.

Along with its online and print publishing efforts, Digitrends also produces numerous conferences each year, including Camp Interactive, the twice-yearly Online Media Buyers Summits and Digitrends' Brand Leadership Forum. For more information, visit www.digitrends.net.