Posts Tagged ‘Force 5 Media’

David Morgan

Timidity is not the route to success

Monday, April 20th, 2009 by David Morgan

In the past few weeks, we’ve (Force 5 Media) seen several articles on dealing with marketing and advertising in a down economy. In fact, studies have been done since the early 20’s dealing with recessionary times.

The conclusion? Companies should maintain advertising and marketing during a recession.

The studies in the 20’s-40’s-50’s and 60’s shown that during recessions, almost without exception sales and profits dropped off at companies that cut back on advertising.

Doh! That makes sense right? But here’s the catch–The studies also revealed that after the recessions ended, those companies continued to lag behind the ones that had maintained their advertising budgets.

A 1979 study showed similar findings. They found that “companies which did not cut advertising expenditures during the recession years (1974-1975), experienced higher sales and net income during those two years and the two years following than companies which cut ad budgets in either or both recession years.”

All of these study’s present evidence that cutting advertising in times of economic downturns can result in both immediate and long-term negative effects on sales and profit levels. The quote I liked said “I have yet to see any study that proves timidity is the route to success. Studies consistently have proven that companies that have the intelligence and guts to maintain or increase their overall marketing and advertising efforts in times of business downturns will get the edge on their timid competitors.”Obviously, this is a tough thing to do. Cutting the advertising budget seems sensible, but it’s not…. A strong marketing campaign, and a sensible advertising budget might make the upturn a little quicker for you, and leave those a bit more timid still trying to figure it out.
 

 

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Nevin McElwrath

From Idea to (re)Invention

Friday, April 10th, 2009 by Nevin McElwrath

There are some exciting things happening here at Force 5 Media. One of which, is exciting for me, since it involves self-discovery and insight for the purpose of solely helping our clients realize their goals. There is an old saying, “In order to see where you are going, you must know where you’ve been.” This goes for not only our clients, but ourselves. We have something in common with our clients; our need and want for success. We are on a journey; the more we realize where we have been, the more focused we can become in realizing our goals.

There’s been some reinventing going on at Force 5 Media. This journey is represented in a new page inviting clients to join us on this new journey we are embarking on. Join us on our journey. This was a fun project to work on due to the wide variety of mediums involved as well as the awesome ideas that were generated by the Force 5 team. Sure, there’s been a fair share of Willie Nelson (On the Road Again), Rascal Flatts (Life is a Highway), and B.B. King (Key to the Highway) parodies. Some humorous, some unfortunate. Over all of the tears, we enjoyed the creative brainstorming and coming up with some amazing ideas. On the “tech/creative” side of this project, we played with Flash, 3D, Photoshop, PHP, and Javascript. What’s even more exciting is the direction this project is headed. Over the next few weeks, our journey page will evolve with different messages, animations and hidden treasures – eventually revealing our new destination.

Stay tuned – it’s a wide open road ahead.

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David Morgan

Blogging for Business

Friday, April 10th, 2009 by David Morgan

Here at Force 5 Media, we see the blogging movement picking up speed as businesses begin to realize the benefits of blogging.

  • The boom of weblogs (blogs…) happened in 1999 when several companies & developers made easy blogging software and tools. Since 1999, the number of blogs on the Internet has exploded from a few thousand to over 100 million. Universal McCann Research shows it like this (for 2008):
    • 184 million WW have started a blog | 26.4 US
    • 346 million WW read blogs | 60.3 US
    • 77% of active Internet users read blogs

When 77% of active internet users read blogs, you should take notice!

Blogs can fall into two general categories:

Personal Blogs: a mixture of a personal diary, opinion posts and research links.

Business Blogs: a corporate tool for communicating with customers or employees to share knowledge and expertise.

Business blogs are sweeping the business community. Blogs are an excellent method to share a company’s expertise, build additional web traffic, and connect with potential customers. It also allows the company to personally connect with consumers, head off any potential negative press, and establish the corporate culture better than ever before.

What does Blogging Provide to Small Business?

  • It’s easy to use. Simply write your thoughts, link to resources, and publish to your blog, all at the push of a few buttons. Blog software companies such as: Movable Type, Blogger.com. WordPress and Typepad all offer easy blogging tools to get started. We use WordPress here at Force 5 Media.
  • It allows for a constant and fresh presence on the web. We recommend to our clients that each blogger in the company post something new at least once a week.
  • It provides your small business with a chance to share your expertise and knowledge with a larger audience. It humanizes the company, showing the consumer the knowledge base that is inherent with every company.
  • There are minimal costs with a blog from a start up and hosting perspective, but be careful if every employee is blogging daily—you’re productivity rate may suffer.

Some of our clients have asked us to prepare a “Best Practices” blogging policy for them. We’re working on that now, and I’ll have some examples of that in a future blog.

We’re starting our own blogs at Force 5 Media, and have asked our employees to participate. It should be fun. We have great people with great skill sets, and passion for many things. We look forward to having them share their expertise with you, and write about things they are passionate about. From design and animation, programming and marketing strategy, the topics will be interesting. Our company specializes in marketing communications, and we hope to share with you some of our experience in the field of advertising and marketing.

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