Social Media/PR Intern Opportunity

Are you passionate about social media, influencing and engaging with customers?  Do you love social

Account Executive/Business Internship Opportunity

Work with our account team to ensure clients are happy, and have all the information they need to ma

Art Director/Creative Internship

Work with Art Directors to deliver creative concepts including artwork, animation, and interactive c

 
Seizo

Online ad spending larger than print for first time ever

January 19, 2012 in Uncategorized

2012 will be the year that online advertising will outsell print advertising.  What does that mean for your business?

For many business it means that they will be more visible.  Properly targeted ads which is the strongest positive for online advertising, means that marketers can use their dollars more wisely.  As online advertising providers like Google, continue to improve their models and technologies for targeting ads, and as mobile grows this presents great opportunities for smart businesses to create new customers.

This also means that if you’re advertising but you’re not buying online advertising you are missing the boat. It means that your competitors have an opportunity to steal your customers by providing them with the right offers and buying opportunities, especially with mobile.  This last holiday season taught us that consumers buying from their iPads spent roughly 30% more than their non-iPad counterparts who were shopping from their desktops.

Targeted ads are one factor.  But another important factor is that you still need to grab your customer’s attention.  You still need to have well crafted ads that look good and connect with your audience.  This requires good design and execution (including strong SEO and SEM strategies), and is something that we work closely with our clients to achieve.  Great design, research and execution can make the most of your advertising dollars.

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david

Ignore the Shift to Mobile at Your Own Peril

January 16, 2012 in Mobile

Once again it seems that businesses are behind the curve when it comes to mobile.  In fact, according to L2 (a think tank for digital innovation), only two-thirds of indexed brands have mobile-optimized sites, and yet a full third of those don’t allow consumers to shop from those sites. Many also fail to provide the full range of content available on their desktop sites, including product search and user ratings, to mobile audiences.

Is it because the move to mobile apps seems daunting?  Is it because these decision makers feel like it will be too expensive?  Neither of these points are reasons not to move forward with developing an app. The development of a mobile app can be a relatively easy process.  Also, compared to what you can lose by not providing your customers with a rich UI and a functional mobile app, it is relatively cheap.  Forrester predicted that by 2016 (which is right around the corner), mobile sales will account for $31 billion dollars. Companies large and small are risking a great deal in potential revenue if they do not make the move soon.

Simply put, mobile is here to stay.  The trend will soon be the norm and companies will have to not only create a mobile app, but be able to provide a UI and UX that will make it stick.  And, while a great user Interface and experience is a must, many companies are not taking advantage of all that can be done when it comes to mobile.  For example, there is monetization, geo-synchronization, and much, much more.

Even if you do not feel the need to create a mobile app, at least optimize your website for mobile.  Companies who do not, come off looking foolish.

 

 

 

 

 

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Shweta

Introduction to Google Analytics

January 12, 2012 in Search Engine Optimization

Most businesses have websites, but have no idea about their website’s incoming traffic or customers or pages that customer’s are visiting on the website. This makes it difficult for businesses to identify issues with their website or find out which pages are more interesting to their customers.

Google analytics is a free web analytics solution that allows you to track your website traffic, where the traffic comes from, which pages they visit, how much time they spend on your website, which pages are not interesting etc. It is quite a powerful and easy-to-use tool for analyzing website traffic and uncovering trends. It is also very easy to setup – all you need is a Google mail account. After getting a free google account, you can visit analytics.google.com and sign up for Google analytics.

Once you sign up, you can fill up a form with the name of your website. This will create your google analytics account and generate a unique tracking code for your website (something similar to UA-XXXXXXXX-1). It will also generate a tracking script code, which needs to be copied on your website’s homepage and every page to be tracked. Once the Google analytics tracking code is copied on your webpages, the results will be available on the google analytics website after 24 hours. It’s that easy.

Some of the basic and advanced features of google analytics are as follows:

  •  Dashboards

Put all the information you need on a custom Dashboard that provides a snapshot of all the relevant data on a single platform

  • Custom Reports

A drag and drop interface lets you select the metrics you want and define multiple levels of sub-reports

  • Analytics Intelligence

Allows you to compare your website statistics with similar other websites and benchmarks

  • Advanced Segmentation

Isolate and analyze subsets of your traffic such as “Paid Traffic” or “Organic Traffic”

  • Advanced Analysis Tools

Perform advanced data analysis with pivot tables, multiple dimensions and filtering  

  • Data Export

Export your data directly from the Google Analytics interface into Excel, CSV, PDF and tab delimited files

  • Goal Funnels

Visualize your conversion funnel. Fix leaks by seeing which pages result in lost opportunities and where your would be customers go

  • Sharing and communicating

Control how sensitive data is shared and which reports are available to users on your account

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david

Adapt or Perish

January 11, 2012 in Uncategorized

“In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment. “  Charles Darwin ~ British Naturalist and Author (1809 – 1882)

Adapt or perish – it’s not only the rule in nature, but in business as well.  All of a sudden, companies were “forced” in the late nineties and the early 21st century to have a web presence.  Now, that same shift in how companies communicate to other businesses and their consumers has taken a quantum leap.  The power of social media can propel your message across the world in a matter of seconds, and it seems every company has to manage their presence on that front.

Where companies were previously seen as not serious about their business if they didn’t have a website, the same is true now in respect to social media.  The problem we see with many businesses is that they have waited so long to get started that they are behind the curve.

There are so many daunting aspects to social media and the technology involved that many people tasked with managing this part of their business have turned to social media marketing companies.  These “experts” have been popping up with great frequency over the last few years.  Furthermore, all it seems to become an expert all you have to do is to say you are an expert.

Usually, when someone has to tell you they are nice person the exact opposite is true.  The same goes for many of these social media experts.  While they may have a good grasp on the technology involved with Facebook, Twitter, and the rest, do they have a proven track record on how companies market and advertise?  Have they worked with companies helping them to market and sell B-to-B and B-to-C?  What do they advise once they have set up your social media sites?

These are all questions one has to ask before engaging a consultant.  While social media seems to be the new trend, don’t get fooled into spending thousands of dollars with a company just because they know the technology.  Make sure they are adept at marketing and have a proven track record of growing their client’s businesses.  Make sure they can show results.

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Seizo

Creating a great user experience for mobile apps

January 11, 2012 in Mobile, UI/UX

Creating a great user experience takes time and understanding not only how users are going to use your application, but also knowing the limitations of the target devices.  This is especially important when considering applications for mobile.

We now have many options for deployment.  Smart phones can have screens from 3.5″ to 4.6″.  Tablets range from 5″ to 10″, and then of course there are web and desktop versions.

In addition to the screen sizes developers and designers also need to understand how these devices are going to be used.  Will the app be used while the person is sitting, running, walking, laying in bed, in a meeting, at the dinner table?  Is it just for them, or should we consider other people participating?

Our goal, when when working with clients is to provide them or their customers with a great experience. This includes beautiful graphics, fluid appropriate animation, ease of use and more.  It should be easy to use and intuitive. They should be delighted.  This takes expertise, planning and brilliant execution.

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Seizo

Mobile Apps: Choosing your development platform (Native, Air, or Web Standards)

January 9, 2012 in Mobile

So you’ve decided that you want a mobile app for your business. Excellent decision. Now what?

You realize that apps have become an important way to maintain your brand awareness. You also know there are many options for getting that app developed.  Have you thought about how you want it developed?  This is an important question because not only will it affect the final cost of the application but it can have other consequences as well.  This decision may impact the platforms that it can be deployed on, and it can impact the features that you are able to include in the application.

There are three main ways in which to have an app developed: 1) Fully native code, 2) Adobe Air, 3) HTML 5/CSS/JavaScript.

Each of these three has their advantages and disadvantages and it’s important to choose the development methodology that will benefit your business most.

It boils down to the questions

How many, and which platforms do I ultimately want to deploy on? What platform is my audience on? How important is time to market? How critical is native functionality?

Fully Native Code

Some apps can only be built using native code because they require specific functionality not available to the other development methods.  This ultimately depends on your specific requirements.  Native code however has some significant advantages.  It can be highly optimized for performance in that environment and it can take advantage of specific functionality not available to the other development methodologies.

Adobe Air

Some people have stated that flash is dead.  That is incorrect.  Although support for flash on mobile is not going to continue like before, the flash platform, and specifically Adobe Air, are very much alive.  Flash remains viable on the desktop (where it has recently been improved to handle advanced 3d graphics bringing consoloe quality gaming to the browser), and Air for Mobile is impressive and will retain continued support from Adobe.  One significant advantage that Air has over the other two methods of app development, is the ease with which applications can be deployed to multiple platforms.  An Air app can be deployed to the desktop, Android, iOS, TV etc, quickly, while retaining a consistent look and feel.  With the addition of native extensions it has been extended to include more and more native functionality.  For the right applications, deploying on Air makes a lot of sense.

HTML 5/CSS3/javascript

This is an area of continual improvement.  Although the tools here are relatively new, it is a perfectly acceptable way to publish a certain segment of applications.  However there are some disadvantages.  These types of applications are dependent on the browser capabilities of the mobile environment, namely webkit.  This can affect performance, and in general these types of applications do seem to perform a bit more sluggishly.  This however is an exciting area of development to watch as the tools will continue to get better.

Conclusion

Although the number of options (and questions they raise) may seem daunting, an expert can help you to make a smart decision.  The questions I asked at the beginning of this post should help you to examine your needs more closely.  Mobile apps are incredibly exciting, and can create a fantastic bond with your company and customers.  Together you can help create memorable experiences that your customers will love.

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Why We Did This

January 9, 2012 in General, Uncategorized

The World's Coolest Car at the World's Hottest Ad Agency

The team members of The Voice make a diverse group. Right now, our roster has nationalities from Pakistan, India, Korea, Canada, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, Mexico, Japan and Jamaica. I am the token WASP. With this diversity comes different sensibilities, approaches, priorities and views of our world. We like to think of ourselves as a creative lab here, a place where we symbiotically exchange ideas in an open, thirst-for-growth environment.

Our team comprise the Voices of The Voice. As what we have to say is important, we have launched The-Voice.com/blog. This platform will discuss what’s relevant to our industry as communications professionals. Some initial topics may include: the power of great imagery, app development and being solution-providers vs. order-takers.

As a firm that prides itself on being on the vanguard of advertising, we feel that Voices of The Voice will become an important and valued resource to the field. We look forward to advancing our craft’s dialogue.

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Seizo

Delivering Stunning Images

January 9, 2012 in Art Direction

I love my job as an Art Director at The Voice.  I get the opportunity to create beautiful imagery for our clients.  In this case we had a great headline and needed the right visual to go with it.  That headline was “Cloud Drivers Wanted”.

After exploring a few different ideas inspiration hit me.  I didn’t want to create the same old cloud imagery that’s everywhere right now.  I wanted to make something that would capture the imagination of the audience.

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