Brand Blog

The Goal of Advertising As consumers, we’ve developed something of a resistance to advertising. There’s so much of it out there that we tune a lot of it out. For brands, this has resulted in more creative and outrageous attempts to break into consumer consciousness that often overlook the main goals of quality advertising. In a perfect […]

Revenge of the Black and White SEO Critters If you spend any time in the internet world and have even the most basic understanding of SEO, you’ve probably been affected by recent Google Panda and Penguin algorithm updates. A number of Chicken Littles are even running around and clucking about SEO being dead and link […]

Is Traditional Branding a Thing of the Past? I recently read an article by Brian Millar on Fastco Design about Why Branding Is An Artifact Of The Past. In the article he was basically making the case that traditional branding no longer makes sense, nor is it effective, in today’s digital age. He gave examples […]

Good Branding Keeps Your Brand Alive Each brand grows and evolves throughout its life and needs to be properly managed and nourished to make sure it stays healthy. Even healthy brands can quickly lose momentum when treated poorly or neglected. Unfortunately, many of us do great harm to our brands despite our good intentions. I’ve […]

Complex Doesn’t Mean Effective As online advertising continues to gobble up increasingly larger percentages of advertising budgets, measuring return on your digital campaign investment becomes increasingly important. While it can be difficult to find accurate financial measurements that directly correlate to your campaigns, this should not discourage you from either investing in online ads or […]

Life’s Too Short for Bad Web Design Most of us spend hours each day online and this number continues to grow. This can mean visits to literally hundreds of websites per week. Unfortunately, this also means each of us is probably visiting a lot of really bad websites. We don’t mean they’re evil or dedicated […]

According to WordPress.com, there are currently more than 72 million WordPress sites in the world. This includes both WordPress.com hosted sites and self-hosted sites. Obviously that’s a lot of websites and you probably surf a few of them each day. The beauty of WordPress is that it’s very simple to use, customize and edit and […]

If you’re a local business, the importance of local search referrals should not be underestimated. As potential customers try to find you they are increasingly turning to online search methods as opposed to the traditional offline options such as Yellow Pages. When it comes to online search, local or otherwise, Google is the one resource […]

Do Local Businesses Need Marketing? In addition to our clients, we interact socially with a large number of Quad City area business owners whose primary clientele is local. You might be amazed by how many of them ask if they really need to develop a marketing plan, and the corresponding budget, to market their business […]

Great Print Advertising There is a great deal more to creating effective print advertising than just choosing a pretty image and adding your logo and copy. The effectiveness of your print ads is heavily dependent on colors, layout, type and number of words and a variety of other factors. Following is our short video introduction […]