Lift Letter – a B with a bit of bounce
An extra piece in a mailing designed to reinforce an offer.

Litho – printer's crockery
Method of printing where the paper has direct contact with the whole plate surface at once. Usually only used for small runs where exceptional reproduction quality has to be achieved. Offset printing is the process where the ink is transferred from the printing plate to an offset blanket cylinder and then on to the paper. Allows printing at great speed and can use continuous sheet feeding from rolls of paper (web offset).

Marketing Mix – Getting all peed up
Is usually applied with reference to McCarthy's '4 P's' these being Promotion, Place, Price and Product. Other words beginning with Pee are often added, including Process and People.

Master File – useful if placed in a cake and sent to prison
The file that is retained as a permanent file against which all others are referenced, or the one within which all the others are stored.

Matte – for feete
Hollywood has got a lot to be blamed for by ditching its support for all the clever old scriptwriters and becoming totally dependent on the big action special effects films. It’s quite simple really. Tell a computer that a certain shade of blue doesn’t exist (a matte) and it’ll treat any area using that colour as being transparent. Result. Peter Pan can really really fly. Oh yes he can. We also use green matte for our special effects studio.

Modelling – for the poseurs
Another of our specialities. Using a wire-frame our 3D modeller will create a graphic object that will end up looking so real you will want to reach out and touch it (unlike the modeller who is sadly no model himself). Once his job is done, our animator is let loose with his virtual camera and virtual lighting so that he can bring the whole thing to life.

Morphing – a really good squelch
Some of the best effects on the silver screen are down to the process of morphing, where one image is transformed into another over a period of time. Another great one for the animators to be let loose on, and they even try to do it to each other on a quiet day if the truth be known.

Mouse – about this house
Dictionary definition: "small hand-held input device moved on a flat surface to control the position of a cursor on the screen". But wouldn’t life have been much more interesting though if they’d called it a rat? It also rhymes better with 'mat'.

Multimedia – playground for designers
Really just a catch-all that’s meant to cover anything that has to have a computer or electronic device attached to it. What it really means of course is ‘using different media’ which isn’t just limited to electronic. But then I suppose boys need their toys and a nice vague term to give it some credence! We typically mean it to cover Internet applications and CD-ROM and DVD applications including the combination of sound, graphics, animation, video and text.

Multiple regression – rock yourself to sleep in the corner
Statistical technique applied to cross reference the response of a mailing with demographics and list characteristics. Allows better targeting.

Negative option – not going to the match instead of the in-laws
The supply of products or services where the customer agrees to receive them regularly and which will continue until the customer instructs the supplier to stop.

Nesting – resting on a bed of straw
The enclosure of one mailing item inside another before placing in an envelope.