Tap into Our Expertise

Despite the arrival of spring and with it the requisite gardening and weekend kids’ sports practices, I find myself on a Sunday afternoon testing out a new app called 'Plain Text' for blogging with ‘Facebook Pages Manager’ and ‘Simply Measured’ running in the background.  Feels like on any given day there are at least a half dozen new social media resources, white papers, and/or apps to try.

I take my hat off to full-time social media managers who keep pace with the daily tool introductions while managing the content needed to keep communication with their audience relevant and engaging.

North American and European marketers have long looked to Latin America for advertising production for a number of reasons, among them warmer climates during northern winters, neighborhoods that can stand in for European or North American counterparts, experienced crews, the potential to negotiate talent buyouts, and the ability to deliver quality work at very competitive prices.

With marketers needing to be ever-more vigilant with their production budgets, Latin America represents an increasingly attractive option to maximize every dollar – not just for advertising but for the creation of lower-cost online videos.  The question is, where to go for production?  MRA has decades of experience with production in Latin America and offers insights about the more  well-established countries for commercial ad and video production, as well as several up-and-coming ones.

Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath raised many weather insurance questions not only for businesses located in the affected areas of New York and New Jersey, but also those who have business partners in these areas, e.g., agencies and production resources.  While insurance losses are fact specific and weather is unpredictable, Larry Haggart EVP at MRA shared a couple of thoughts about what advertisers can keep in mind for the future:

Structuring an annual compensation agreement with an agency might not top a marketers’ list of favorite things to do.  It’s challenging, time consuming, and often leads to both parties feeling like they’ve left something on the table.

As a pioneer in cost management services, MRA works with leading brands to facilitate informed, effective annual agency agreements.  Here are a few insights we’ve picked up along the way.

Alistair Green, ECD from Team One, and Jonathan Green, Managing Director Mobile & Social at R/GA, spoke about responsive web design at a recent Digiday Mobile conference.  An interesting question was posed, one we hear often, “should we expect responsive design sites to be more expensive and take longer to build?” and the answer was “maybe.”  One of the reasons it wasn’t a definitive ‘yes’ or ‘no’ relates to whether or not the agency structure enables it, building from the ground up may not be significantly more (time and therefore money).

The discussion came around to agency structure and how teams work together.  Agile and waterfall project methods were brought up as well as how the agencies staff up and how they share with clients.

This is a guest post by Mike Zitt – Owner of Cincinnati-based creative agency Mike Zitt, Inc.

If you’re like most companies, you have a website and, by now, you know you need a mobile site. Great, but there are different ways to create a mobile website and one isn’t necessarily better than another — they just serve different needs. As an agency or as brand manager there are several considerations before you fire up the developers.

Despite Super storm Sandy causing widespread damage across the NY/NJ metropolitan region a little over a week before, Ad:TechNY 2012 still went on.  Instead of a booth, many exhibitors had signs which read ‘Sandy Swept Our Booth Away.’  To their credit, exhibitors were in good spirits and focused on alerting attendees of #sandyrelief efforts they could participate in.

As if a massive hurricane wasn’t bad enough, on the first day of the show a Nor’easter hit New York City with five inches of snow.  Subsequently, we had to settle for following the speakers via posts by @adtech on Twitter (#adtechny).

The show organizers and attendees made it a worthwhile trip; here are a couple of highlights:

Often, we see clients working feverishly to find a unique benefit or selling proposition to differentiate their brands or the one-of-a-kind reason-to-believe the brand delivers the benefit.  Yet the brand character, for some brands, the only thing that allows it to stand apart is the most neglected part of a brand communication strategy.

At MRA we work with a range of brands across an array of industries.  Here are a few valuable insights we have found in our travels that help teams as they are evolving and developing their brand’s character.

Advertising Week IX just wrapped up in NYC and once again it was time well spent.  Like so many people, I find it hard to break away to attend conferences but this one is in my back yard and is always energizing and informative.

For anyone who didn’t attend this year, pencil it in for 2013 and try to squeeze it into your schedule.  In the interim, you can stay connected to the event and the commentary around it via the Advertising Week Social Club http://www.theawsc.com/

MRA is pleased to announce the promotion of Sharon Blake to the position of LineWatch Operations Manager in our Cincinnati headquarters.  LineWatch^® is MRA’s agency and vendor bill-monitoring system that controls costs beyond the approved estimate stage, closing the loop on production cost control and ensuring that actual charges are accurate, compliant, and completely substantiated.

Online advertising can be a significant part of a brand team’s marketing activity and despite the maturity of the medium, we often find marketers experience costly banner rework that can be a major cost driver and result in missed deadlines.

To support our clients, MRA developed online ad production guidelines and we’ve shared a few best practice highlights below.  Our guidelines and training can be particularly helpful to marketing directors and managers assuming online responsibilities.

Like babies, animals can definitely add to the likability factor of a commercial.  If your concept and script calls for the use of an animal, here are some important considerations from a production standpoint.

A short while back I read a blog post from HubSpot on Mobile Marketing.  It was both interesting and scary to note more people in the world have mobile phones than toothbrushes (6.8 billion people on the planet 5.1 billion of them own a cell phone, only 4.2 billion own a toothbrush).

According to Morgan Stanley and Gartner, Global mobile web traffic will exceed wired web traffic by 2013. The penetration of smartphone ownership is very attractive to Marketers, which is leading many to actively incorporate mobile experiences into their plans.  2011 ANA and Mobile Marketing Association joint survey results revealed “about 90% of Marketers currently use or plan to include mobile marketing as part of their overall mix.”

While television production may be an advertisers’ biggest focus and expense, it is often part of a larger campaign supported with a coordinating print media plan.  Where an advertiser may not spend as much money on the print portion, there are many ways the agency can help to make these dollars work harder.

It was late morning, day two and the crowded room in the Boca Raton Resort needed a lift.  Kelly Mooney, the co-author of “The Open Brand: When Push Comes to Pull in a Web-Made World” and CEO at Resource Interactive, stepped on stage and brought with her a wave of energy as she introduced the “Everywhere Commerce” concept to the crowd.

Stepping into the exhibit hall for the NAB was a visual smorgasbord of light, color, and technology; truly awe-inspiring, not unlike the location for the show – Las Vegas.  The vendors at NAB had an exciting array of wares from - cameras and editing software to lighting, touch and green-screens.

Held at the Las Vegas Convention Center, the NAB was initially overwhelming, but we set out to explore and wanted to share some of what we experienced, what we saw as most beneficial to our clients and the agencies we work with, as well as to us as Production Consultants.

The process of completing a Statement of Work (SOW) that clearly outlines deliverables for a digital project is often an iterative one.  SOWs cover the spectrum of projects from the very simple (update FAQs on the web site) to the more complex (create a global social media strategy with guidance and creative for 40 markets).

We have all seen good SOWs – they aren’t like unicorns, but you’ve probably also seen SOWs that caused a bit of head scratching.  Poorly written or incomplete SOWs can contribute to missed deadlines, scope creep, and friction between client and agency.

Whether you are in the midst of a production or planning for one in the near future, it’s important to understand the facts. On March 30, 2012, SAG (the Screen Actors Guild) and AFTRA (the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) announced the immediate merger between the two unions, creating a combined union—SAG-AFTRA—that represents more than 150,000 film, television and radio performers, announcers, musical artists, stunt artists, and other media professionals.

For most of MRA’s clients, the New Year brings new budgets and new advertising.  Creative development and ad production are kicking into high gear now.  As you start looking ahead to your next TV commercial or Print advertising shoot, here are a few things to keep in mind about the most critical meeting in production for you – the Pre-Production Meeting (PPM).