Gone are the days of a handful of top tier firms controlling the advertising world and monopolizing their services. An advertising agency no longer reflects a scene from the television series Mad Men. There are no seedy meetings in dark-martini bars or smoke-filled, male dominated boardrooms. Advertising agencies are now infused with a young and creative mind-frame without the stuffiness and strict feel of a corporate entity.

Many small businesses just out of the entrepreneurial gate rely on their own abilities and knowledge, but when the necessity to do one’s job overshadows the duties of advertising, it’s time for outside help. Advertising agencies specialize, excel and enjoy the world of promoting your business. Let someone else take the reins and steer your business into prosperity, but who’s reliable hands do you turn them over to?

• Ask and Research: Inquire fellow business owners about whom they use and how their experience has been thus far. Do your homework and research online. Visit ad agency’s websites and pay attention to their clients and what they offer.

• Bigger isn’t always better: If your business is made up of only a handful of employees and isn’t bringing in the multi-millions of dollars, a larger firm may not be your best fit. They are often more costly and your hard-earned money may not stretch as far. Smaller firms have the advantage of being able to cater to your business and demands usually with immediate results.

• Do they have the vibe: With your business, what kind of agency are you looking to work with? Remember, an agency does not strictly work for you, they work with you. You both are working to make your efforts a success and it’s in this relationship that you work with someone you should feel comfortable with. Do you want someone you can chit-chat with and have a productive and fun time, or do you want someone that is very stringent with a military mindset? Whatever your preference, never settle just because of their name.

• What do they have to offer you: When you meet or call with agencies, have a list of your requirements and what you are looking for. Do they have accomplished examples of their services and duties. Many businesses don’t want to go to one place for printing, one for branding and another for website and mobile design. It’s simple and more effective to have all your requirements and services under one roof. Another advantage to this, is during negotiations a deal could be struck for the bundling of services.

• Where you at: Sometimes the right agency maybe in your back yard or over your computer. Time is a precious commodity and if you are comfortable and confident with using a virtual agency to discuss your business’s advertising, then it can have numerous advantages. One doesn’t have to constantly set up meetings and drive to a specified location. If this is the route you choose, meet with the team at least a couple times to get a sense and feel about their work ethic, be sure they have a reliable platform to see visuals of your advertisements and experience their communication through email and phone.

Like most industries, advertising has changed drastically since Mad Men. With so many options and variables, advertising remains an important step in the growth of many small businesses and companies. Advertising is an investment so be confident in finding an agency that will not only nurture your investment, but also your business. Contact NADA advertising today for your business’s advertising needs. Ask us about our history, services or who we are in order for you to make an informed and confident decision.

Here are a few trends that are looking to be huge driving force in 2013. Make it a priority to keep these in mind when working on your next website design, or maybe choose one or two trends to be included in a minor website update.

• Responsive Website Design: Your website is no longer viewed from the traditional station of a desktop or laptop. Now the more frequent platform to view your website is mobile and often on the go. From tablets to smartphones, each device will vary in screen size and other proportions. The reason responsive website design will be huge in 2013 is because designers cannot create a new design for a single individual website, they have to focus on where that website will be viewed and respond with a design that complements that device. A single well-designed responsive website will be adaptable between desktop, tablet and mobile website providing the widest range of access to your users.
• Huge Buttons: Since touch screens are becoming the norm with every passing day, large buttons will be tapped everywhere. Large buttons were used for an aesthetic purpose, but in 2013 they will serve as a necessity. Users want their interactivity to be simple and as easy as possible. A large button showcases where the next step takes you or where to submit and send without any confusion.
• Brand Identity then site functionality: Branding is everything and for website design that means that the latest trends are not always the best for your brand. One should never include a new trend for the basic reason of remaining relative. Focus should be narrowed on features, design and inclusions that will compliment the brand itself or enhance the beauty of it. It is important for you as a business owner to have a website design that represents your brand’s image, target market and goals.

As 2013 starts to creep its head around the corner, these few trends will make your technology competitive in a constantly evolving world. The team at NADA advertising is always here to help you with 2013 advertising plans, marketing strategies and questions about specific trends. Contact us today and 2013 won’t know what hit it.

One of the easiest and most obvious methods of planning your 2013 budget is looking at 2012 and what worked and what didn’t. Discuss with your team about what campaigns, technology advancements and areas of emphasis were successful. Don’t stick to the same plan and simply rehash your strategy, spice it up. Add to it and build upon it with new inclusions, features and incentives.

This budget season sharpen your pencil with these budget tips:

• Website Design: When the words “website design” are whispered, they initially send a shiver down the neck of people with power, but website design doesn’t have to. It can be a fun process and the opportunity to accomplish goals and improvements that had been lingering. A complete website design does not mean one has to throw out their old design. A simple website design update is a good way to be conscious of a budget and to provide a facelift to your technology platform that can always be flexible for future updates. Don’t forget to be aware of a mobile sector. Mobile is becoming one of the fastest growing platforms out there and any company would remiss in excluding this from their marketing strategy.
• Print Media and Campaigns: Print will never die and it’s possibilities are much more contagious than one would think. A beautifully designed brochure or an awe-inspiring banner or poster captures attention and makes viewers interested. Print is relatively inexpensive compared to other marketing campaigns and promotions can provide quantifiable results.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): It’s always beneficial to set aside a bit of your budget for making your business accessible and noticed by your potentially new customers. Search Engine Optimization is a way of increasing your ranking on search engine sites, thus making your business relative to viewers. Making your presence known on search engines increases customer interaction and improves the chances of them becoming your new customer.

Wherever your budget needs lie, remember that advertising goes a long way for your business’s health and improvement. The team at NADA advertising can help you with whatever budget and its restrictions, to help you get the most from what you have. Contact us today, because 2013 will be here before you know it!

Todd Nelson for Star Tribune

Founded in 2004, virtual advertising agency NADA is enjoying a healthy client base as it ponders its next moves.

Nathan Nerland and Daniel Williams-Goldberg left a leading corporate coffee company to start, in NADA Advertising, the type of agency that a neighborhood coffee shop or other small businesses could afford.

Nerland spent four years at Caribou Coffee, in marketing and as a store manager. Williams-Goldberg was in Caribou operations for six years, overseeing 16 stores and hundreds of employees as a district manager.

“Daniel and I have endless ideas,” Nerland said. “We take such ownership over everything we do that we thought we also might as well go out and use those ideas for our own good.”

They founded NADA — the name uses the first two letters of each of their first names — in 2004. The full-service agency offers website, print and social media services, including branding, advertising and marketing, design and Web development.

NADA has three employees, with 10 independent contractors rounding out its services. Each founder serves as relationship manager for his own roster of clients. But they collaborate on high-level project decisions and strategy. Revenue reached $510,000 last year and could hit $600,000 this year.

NADA operates virtually, to run as an efficient, lean agency that’s affordable to small-business owners like Nerland’s mother, who has two coffee shops. Nerland works from his St. Paul home, Williams-Goldberg from his home in Laguna Beach, Calif., after moving there from the Twin Cities three years ago.

The agency started in a small office on Grand Avenue in St. Paul, then moved to downtown St. Paul. But they gave up the fancy, glass-walled digs to stay lean.

Although they’ve never met face-to-face with more than half their clients, they have all the work they can handle thanks to repeat business, referrals and their own marketing efforts. They communicate with clients throughout the country, from Chicago to New York and California using Skype and other online tools, including a proprietary Virtual Office site where they share work with clients.

The virtual move came just before the recession, as did a well-timed push to diversify NADA’s client base. The agency, which had been heavy on clients in real estate and development, used online marketing and networking to develop new business in health care, restaurants, professional services and media.

Now, as the new year approaches, Williams-Goldberg and Nerland are preparing to expand. They’re considering how to redefine the agency, their own roles and whether to continue operating virtually as they consider making a hire or two. One goal is to do more project-based rather than hourly work. They also would like to license their Virtual Office tool to other agencies and photographers as the first of what could become a number of NADA products.

“We’ve talked about not adding or not reducing but maybe focusing a little bit more on some services,” Williams-Goldberg said. “We’re so good at design, we’re so good at website development and we’re so good at print, maybe we’ll focus on those three areas and just totally expand those but still be the full-service agency for the clients that want it.”

John Travalent, marketing coordinator at Village Cooperative, said he has been pleased with the new sales portfolio, revamped website, direct mailings and newspaper ads Nerland has overseen over the past four-plus years for the Eagan-based company, which develops senior housing communities in the Midwest.

“We’ve had a very strong relationship both in communication and effectiveness,” Travalent said. “He understands our projects, our target market and is everything we’re looking for in our sales and marketing.”

Rob Max, executive director of the Sweet Relief Musicians Fund in Laguna Beach, said the website that Williams-Goldberg created has won praise from some of the top artists and management companies that support the nonprofit, which assists disabled musicians.

“It’s as good as anything I’ve seen from the giant [advertising] houses in the country, and we’ve gotten acclaim from around the country,” Max said. “They had to straddle the professional feel you want someone to feel when they go to a charity site but also the hipness you need when you’re based in the entertainment world.”

Many business owners can argue that their same desktop version will suffice in the hands of a user, but this is false. By 2015, 81% of U.S. cell user will have smartphones allowing for another avenue of which to attract customers, but you don’t want to turn them away. Navigating through a desktop version of a website on a smartphone is difficult and cumbersome. A mobile website allows for easy mobility and to obtain information faster.

Here are a couple practices and tidbits to ensure your mobile site is efficient as possible:

• Simplify: Create a mobile website that is for someone on the go. The key information your visitors will be looking for; hours, costs, special, direction, phone number
• Site layout: Mobile website pages load slower than traditional web pages, so it’s vital to keep the number of pages to a minimum. Think like your customer and interact with your mobile website and limit content and items to what people would most likely be searching for.
• Branding: The design of your mobile website should reflect the brand of your standard website design. A similar design will make them feel like they’re family members and is important to loyal customers.
• Less is more: It’s a natural tendency to want to cram as much information into your website, but with a mobile website everything is small and more constrained. Let the viewer’s eyes and nerves relax with a generous amount of white space that is both sophisticated and simple.
• Home sweet home: Even though you’ve done a good job trimming down your website and giving a more streamlined appearance to your mobile website, a viewer may want information you’ve chosen not to display. Always allow the viewer the option to view the full version of your site.

Mobile websites are now the new frontier for consumers and marketers. Don’t forget that limitations foster creativity, so utilize the limits of a mobile website and design something that is both functional and eye-catching.

Mobile websites often promote a viewer to act immediately, seeing as they don’t have the luxury of time to really debate over the issue. With one half of all local searches being performed on mobile devices, the smart phone will be the way many users and viewers interact with your business. By 2014, mobile internet should take over desktop internet usage. With a mobile website, this will increase customer and viewer engagement with your business.

NADA advertising of Minneapolis/St. Paul and Laguna Beach can help you maneuver through the daunting world of website and mobile website design. If you want to engage and interact with your customers and viewers, contact us today and your new mobile website will help build your business.

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Mobile app development makes it possible for businesses to reap bountiful revenues,to reach new markets and garner awareness by simply tapping a screen. As a business owner, how does one go about producing a productive app that provides a sense of value and purpose? To help you maximize your mobile potential, the following features are best for your business, and the pitfalls to avoid.

• A location-based discount feature allows customers to be rewarded for checking in at your location through your app, unlocking special pricing and discounts to participating customers. In addition, it lets the world know that they visited your establishment through social media.
• A purpose to use your app needs to vital. Just because your app is out in the world of the consumer doesn’t mean it will be valued, it needs to serve a function and provide a service to customers.
• No one likes lines and slow check-outs. Make sure your mobile app development includes a simple method of payment and shows your customers that your business is innovative and ahead of the curve.
• Make your customer feel special. Allow customers of your app to have unique capabilities and features. Introduce loyalty cards and the ability to instantly plan an order for pickup.

Whatever features your app may include follow these few inclusions and you’ll have interactivity that benefits your business and builds your market. Contact NADA advertising today and we’ll make your mobile app development a simple process that will produce a user-friendly mobile app.

Full list of features.

A couple of weeks ago, the pop siren, Lady Gaga, premiered the print ad and more recently the commercial for her new perfume, Fame.  The ad consists of a presently nude Lady Gaga covered with strategically placed nude men climbing their way feverishly up her as if conquering Mount Everest.  The trailer to Fame ups the print by showing glimpses of what appears to be a visceral, liquid latex landscape featuring imagery of exploding eyes, men imprisoned with bondage attire and Lady Gaga commanding them all.  For the average consumer and brand, this is beyond risqué and most likely deters the main-stream audience.  This is where her campaign succeeds.

How do you extend your brand without resorting to gimmicks or activities that don’t fit your purpose and the brand?  Stay true to it!  A hair salon or a doctor’s office is most definitely not the appropriate fit for the style of campaign as Gaga’s, but she stays true to her brand and her consumer.  Her consumers consists primarily of her fans, the Little-Monsters, the eccentric and, possibly, the thought of social outcast.  Resorting to a gimmick of her in a baby-doll dress wearing pearls and catering to a man would go beyond her brand.  She is a strong female performer and these campaigns reflect her perfectly, no matter how outrageous or shocking.  The outrageous or shocking end would see her in a glamorous and romantic look often associated with beauty ads.

Now let’s say you don’t want to go the extreme of providing visual S&M, here are a couple pathways to success.

• Shift the Form: Take a feature or a service and provide it in a different manner. If you only take orders over the phone or at a cash register considering an online feature or introducing your cashiers to a new iPad check out system.
• Leverage your customer base: Do you have a loyal customer or a fan-base? Set them up with features and rewards that are specifically tailored for them.  This can be done by a card or frequency rewards program.
• Update the look of your environment and merchandise: Now look closely, it says “update” not throw out. Update your customer’s surroundings with new signage and fresh imagery of your brand. Provide them with complimentary items that accentuate the service. A medical procedure calls for a more sophisticated and substantial packet or brochure, not bargain bin container.

Don’t fit your circle business into a square campaign.  Don’t resort to nudity or bondage-inspired latex either.  By following these guidelines you’ll keep what is true to your customers, business, service and brand, and at the end of the day make more sales!

Tom Daley went from 100,000 before the games to 1 Million Facebook Fans

Worryingly for music fans, one of the biggest winners appears to have been the Spice Girls. Twitter released its official figures, which among athletes, put Jamaican gold-medals winner Usain Bolt firmly at the top with 80,000 tweets per minute for his 200m sprint final and 74,000+ for his 100m. However, the single-most tweeted event of the games went not to a competitor, but to the mercifully brief reunion of the Spice Girls, who triggered more than 116,000 tweets per minute in the closing ceremony.

That disturbing fact aside, it is rightly the athletes themselves that appear to be big winners, boosting their social media profiles as the London 2012 games captured the public imagination around the world.

Jane Cowmeadow, agent for British heptathalon gold-medal winner Jessica Ennis, said that services like Facebook and Twitter had brought fans much closer. “Social media has been an incredibly positive experience,” she said. “Jessica had incredible support. It gives fans a lot closer insight into the people they are following.”

However there is a dark side to the ready availability of the competitors to their fans, as Tom Daley discovered when he was the target of a Twitter troll. “You are open to everyone saying anything about you. We recommended to Jessica [Ennis] that she shut her Twitter account down during the games because she didn’t need distractions.”

For some, that boost has catapulted them into a different league, says Nick Thain, CEO of Sports New Media, a London-based company that helps sports stars manage their social-media pages on Facebook. According to Mr. Thain, British diver and bronze-medal winner Tom Daley and Ms. Ennis, increased their Facebook fanbase up to 800 percent during the games. Both are clients of Sports New Media.

While sport is about the fans, Mr. Thain suggested, there is a rather less idealistic motivation behind building up a personal fanbase. Today’s global sports industry is worth between €350 billion and €450 billion (about $430 billion -$555 billion), a recent A.T. Kearney study reported, with sponsorship the second-biggest component after gate revenues.

Similar to what is in vogue in the fashion world, television advertising trends fluctuate and evolve to represent the “real” world.  Television advertisements of the past sought to capture an ideal, a status that all viewers strived to achieve.  However, the realization that one may not achieve this level of perfection or success can be down right depressing, causing the viewer to turn the channel and literally, tune out.

Advertisers want to relate to their viewers and customers on their level and associate tactics and functions that they can use in their daily lives that could provide certain benefits.  Gone are the days of vacuuming in pearls, having the time to play catch in the backyard and now are the days of stretching that dollar and working longer hours.

• Optimism. With the current state of the U.S. economy, many individuals have been hit hards by the downturn.  People are experiencing financial troubles and stresses that offer no sign of an escape.  They need hope.  Inspiring TV commercials that speak to the consumer about overcoming obstacles are taking center stage.
• Solutions. For many of us, money is tight right now.  TV ads of the past parlayed a life of perfection and opulence, which were successful for that era.  Today, people are looking for products that will save them money and are not just a frivolous purchase.
• Realism. Viewers are cynical these days, there’s always a catch or a hidden agenda.  The idea of the perfect family and the perfect house is becoming stale.  Viewers would rather see realistic scenarios and individuals that are easily relatable.

Just like in all avenues of advertising, having a relatable product, message, scenario, look or feel will go a long way in attracting a potential consumer and keep them.