Does your website need a check up?

It's a new year and time for your annual check up!

A 2005 study at University of Iowa determined that there were over 11.5 billion publicly accessible web pages on the internet. Businesses who are serious about generating leads and attracting customers online can't afford to take an "If we build it, they will come" approach to their websites. To do business online in today's market you need to make it easy for your audience to find you and you need to ensure you're prepared to stand out from the competition.

Best Practices for Optimizing Web Advertising Effectiveness

Web advertising first appeared in 1994.1 Eleven years later, in 2005, U.S. companies spent $12.5 billion advertising online.2 No longer is that the irrational money of venture-backed startups with dubious business models; according to Nielsen//NetRatings, 25% of all display ads in 2005 promoted Fortune 500 companies. Advertisers already spent double the amount online that they spent in 2005 on billboards and other outdoor advertising and roughly half of what they spent respectively on magazine and radio advertising.3 And after a brief market contraction in 2001 and 2002, the online ad industry has been growing at 30+% for the past two years.

Yet, despite this rapid mainstreaming of online advertising, many advertisers still are not observing a range of established tactics and strategies understood to substantially improve the effectiveness of online ad campaigns. In some cases, this is because advertisers are new enough to the Internet to remain behind on the learning curve. “There are still a wide range of experiences out there,” said Arthur Rotberg, ad production manager for CondeNet. “Of course this is rare, but I just got an email from a sales assistant asking if a client could mail their creative on a disk. At that point alarm bells go off. The creative is probably not in the right format for online serving, most likely it’s a PDF of an ad the client did for a print campaign.”

In other cases, many advertisers have viewed the Internet as a source of “cheap” advertising and therefore do not invest sufficiently in experimentation and research to identify for themselves the tactics that work best. “Sometimes advertisers are pennywise and pound foolish in not running brand effectiveness studies and using the click-through rate to measure the success of a brand campaign,” said Yaakov Kimelfeld, director of business intelligence at Beyond Interactive. Brian Eakin, Associate Media Director at Freestyle Interactive, concurs: “While many clients will say that there is value in learning, the clients most in need of actionable research are frequently the companies most connected to a cost-per-sale measure of success, and many of them simply won’t allocate investment that doesn’t immediately contribute to product sales. The challenge for planners is to extract strategic insight from active campaigns without forcing their clients to choose between sales and learnings.”

Online advertising remains new and fast evolving. But after a decade, it has been around long enough for several best practices to emerge. As observed in the popular DoubleClick® paper, “The Decade in Online Advertising,” a major trend in recent years is a shift towards a seller’s market, as new ad dollars come into the market more quickly than users are generating incremental page impressions. The result is online ad prices are going up, and it may no longer be seen as a “cheap” advertising medium. It remains, however, an effective one. As such, it is more important than ever for advertisers to master the tactics that produce the best results for their online campaigns.

Best Practices for Optimizing Web Advertising Effectiveness

1. See details in DoubleClick’s paper “The Decade in Online Advertising” (2005)

2. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers

3. According to the Outdoor Advertising Association of America, the Radio Advertising Bureau and the Magazine Publishers of America

In today's tough economic environment, only the fittest survive.

An oil company makes a major discovery that significantly boosts production and reserves. How do investors find out about it?

Public Relations.

In today’s tough economic climate, businesses need to do everything in their power to separate themselves from the pack. Getting your name and your unique brand in the news is one surefire way to drive sales and attract new customers and investors.

Successfully telling your company’s story to the world through free newspaper and magazine articles, online, on radio and TV news shows or via the new media requires the specialized knowledge, contacts and skills of a public relations expert.

Dinosaur Extinction Traced to Lack of Web Site

If your business doesn’t have a Web site, or if yours is out-of-date in terms of content, navigation, technology, optimization, look and feel, you’re headed for the fossil bin. You’re a dinosaur. Think about when you personally need a product or service. Where do you go? The Yellow Pages? That would place you in the Mesozoic Era. Modern mammals go online or use a Web function on their cell phone. But not all Web sites are created equal. Natural selection weeds out those that are too cumbersome, uninteresting, difficult to navigate, or simply invisible because they haven’t been optimized to pop up when someone seeks a product or service you offer. In today’s tough economic environment, only the fittest survive. Pixel Creative Group creates Web sites that work. For your particular species. Web making is just one of the services Pixel Creative Group offers. Our job is to create advantage for our clients, through branding, advertising, public relations, marketing, design, writing, web making, audio/visual/electronic/print production and issue/crisis management. We’re unique in offering a full range of services to position you and your company for success in today’s challenging marketplace. Darwin would be proud. Pixel Creative Group 2801 Post Oak Blvd., Suite 101 Houston, TX 713-622-9293 www.pixelcreative.com

No Spring Vacation!

It’s that time of the year again: the dreaded Annual Report Season. When CFOs, corporate communicators, IR managers, accountants and lawyers hunker down to produce their company’s most important document… while everyone else takes a breather. Pixel Creative Group takes the stress out of annual reports. We’ve been doing it for more than 30 years. We’ll handle the design, photography, charts and graphs, typesetting, Edgarization, web posting, printing and distribution—even the writing, if you wish—to produce a first-class product that gets your company the investor attention it deserves. On time. On budget. No fuss. No muss. So you can rest easy. Corporate reports are just one aspect of what we do at Pixel Creative Group. Our job is to create advantage for our clients, through branding, advertising, public relations, marketing, design, writing, web making, audio/visual/electronic/print production and issue/crisis management. We’re unique in offering a full range of services to position you and your company for success in today’s challenging marketplace. Pixel Creative Group 2801 Post Oak Blvd., Suite 101 Houston, TX 713-622-9293 www.pixelcreative.com

Sometimes staying out of the news is just as important as getting in it.

Bad things happen to good people and companies. How you handle a crisis situation and the media coverage surrounding it can affect your reputation, your earnings, your very survival. Effective Crisis Management involves taking charge of the news to get the story behind you, reputation intact, so you can concentrate on your business. The flip side of that is proactive communications: telling the world—including customers, investors, employees and others important to your business—about your products, services and successes. We offer both, through one of the top Crisis Managers and Public Relations consultants in the field. That is just one aspect of Pixel Creative Group, where our job is to create advantage for our clients, through branding, advertising, public relations, marketing, design, writing, web making, audio/visual/electronic/print production and issue/crisis management. We’re unique in offering a full range of services to position you and your company for success in today’s challenging marketplace. Pixel Creative Group 2801 Post Oak Blvd., Suite 101 Houston, TX 713-622-9293 www.pixelcreative.com

What do Microsoft, Sony, ExxonMobil, McDonald’s and the hit TV series “24” have in common?

Advertising. Successful companies understand that nothing drives business and top-of-the-mind brand awareness like advertising. It’s their secret weapon, only not so secret. Your company or organization, large or small, can benefit from the very same sales generator the Big Boys use. Print, radio, television, Internet and new media advertising are just as accessible to you as they are to the world’s most successful companies. And surprisingly affordable, especially in today’s tough economic climate where everyone—including the media—is hustling for business. All you need is a message that gets attention. That’s where Pixel Creative Group comes into play. We’ve been writing and producing advertising that works for more than 30 years. Our staff of old pros and young bucks can craft messages that resonate with any age- or demographic group. Clever, informative, entertaining ads in any medium you choose. Ads that generate business. Advertising is just one aspect of Pixel Creative Group, where our job is to create advantage for our clients, through branding, advertising, public relations, marketing, design, writing, web making, audio/visual/electronic/print production and issue/crisis management. We’re unique in offering a full range of services to position you and your company for success in today’s challenging marketplace. Pixel Creative Group 2801 Post Oak Blvd., Suite 101 Houston, TX 713-622-9293 www.pixelcreative.com