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After Earth

In a dystopic future, humanity is forced to resettle on a planet called Nova Prime after a series of cataclysmic events threatens mankind’s existence on Earth.

Cypher Raige (Will Smith) commands a peacekeeping organization known as the Ranger Corps where his son, Kitai (Jaden Smith) is a cadet with aspirations to follow in his father’s footsteps. Frustrated at what he perceives as a lack of discipline, Cypher, at the behest of wife, takes Kitai on a mission to Earth. When the ship is damaged, a crash landing kills every passenger with exception to father and son but seriously injures Cypher.

It’s up to Kitai to recover an emergency beacon and signal for help by embarking on a perilous journey across a hostile environment filled with dangerous creatures that have continued to evolve in the absence of humans and now dominate the planet.

Drew McWeeny of HitFix.com writes, “It’s lovely to see something that is sincere, thematically focused, and that ultimately works in a way I didn’t expect.” HSX predicts that After Earth will earn around $44M in its debut weekend.

After Earth, Bravo Design Rating: PG-13 // Genre: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi // Runtime: 1 hr. and 40 min. // Starring: Jaden Smith, Will Smith, Sophie Okonedo // Directed by: M. Night Shyamalan // Written by: Gary Whitta, M. Night Shyamalan, Will Smith // Produced by: Columbia Pictures, Overbrook Entertainment, Blinding Edge Pictures // Distributed by: Columbia Pictures, Sony Pictures Releasing

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Traffic & Engagement

I’ve made a mistake and now it’s time to own up to it.

Over the course of the last year, I made it a priority to maximize Bravo Design’s traffic volume and broaden our content marketing pipeline going the route of “accuracy by volume.” I figured that if conversion rates held constant with growing traffic, more visibility would produce more business.

Through 2012, visits more than doubled and so did page views compared to 2011. We ranked on page one for graphic design and web development related keywords locally. But did our conversion rate double as well?

No, it did not.

Why? Because I didn’t engage them effectively. Instead of talking with people, I was talking at them. And unless you’re YouTube or a site that makes its money off of ad impressions, web traffic is a vanity metric that doesn’t correlate to revenue on the backend.

More important than attracting visitors is attracting customers.

For fans of .GIFs, this is what it looks like when you target one-off visitors who won’t follow you over time or do business with you (i.e., the wrong people).

So what should you do?

Focus on the things that matter.

Objectivity

Your people are your greatest asset. A lot of businesses think they know who their customers are and what they want, but few ever take the time to find out for sure.

In 2011, I had broken my leg badly enough to require surgery and was completely dependent on the people around me for probably about a month, and a huge chunk of that responsibility was shouldered by my parents. When I couldn’t get off the couch, my dad would come home from work during his lunch break to cook for me and later on again for dinner in the evening. It was huge, and I’m both grateful and humbled by that love.

But just so you know, my family is Thai. So by default, my dad cooks the spiciest food ever. It’s not spicy where you pound down a glass of milk or water and keep trucking on. It’s debilitating where confusion is followed closely by its friend panic. He doesn’t do this on purpose of course. He just knows what he likes to eat and thinks that everyone else will enjoy it too.

I didn’t, and still don’t, have the heart to tell him that his cooking stresses me out, and I actually don’t think he’s ever asked. But your customers will most definitely let you know if your product offering isn’t up to par. That might come in the form of negative feedback or a pass so take a step back and reassess. Optimization is an ongoing process, and you need to be objective.

The Perfect Customer

In a webinar on Attracting the Right Customers to Your Business, Sonia Simone of Copyblogger encouraged her listeners to, “spend 10 minutes describing [their] very perfect customer. That’s the person who can afford what you sell. They need and want what you sell. They’re ready to buy it.”

That’s obviously a highly specific group, but it’s who you should be targeting.

If you were in the market for a new car, let’s say a Porsche. I would probably be hard pressed to sell you a Dodge Grand Caravan. The same would be true the other way around. And while it pains me to say this, I must. You can’t be all things to all people.

On the upside, really understanding that affords you the opportunity to concentrate on viable prospects.

Apparent Value

Most of your content should be about your customer, specifically the one you’ve spent 10 minutes to describe, and should demonstrate why you should be trusted and why your product is valuable.

Each and every week, I receive an impressive amount of SEO spam from strangers that goes straight to the trash. It would be one thing if they were to say, “We helped XYZ Company in Burbank, California reach the first page by doing yadda, yadda, yadda” or offered a case study, but they never do.

One person who has e-mailed me numerous times simply says, “We can increase rankings of your website in search engines. Please reply back for more details.” No, sketchy guy. I’d prefer if you didn’t carpet bomb our website, and it get de-indexed.

Brian Clark says, “That’s the beauty of social media, blogging, Twitter, Facebook. People will tell you. Sometimes they will tell you with the sound of crickets chirping and you have to say, ‘Well, I screwed up.’ And move on. Don’t give up. Try something else.” Conversely, if it is something your people like, they’re going to let you know by commenting on it or sharing it with their circles.

Moving on

There are more points I could (and maybe should) touch on, but I’ll do that that in the coming weeks. If you’re not following us on Twitter or Google+, make sure to do so. We’ll keep you posted on tips and tutorials as well as the sequel to this part. As an added bonus, I find the best .GIFs.

Albert Einstein once said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” If you’re unable to successfully engage customers, switch it up and do something different like throw your parents under the bus. Just kidding. But sorry in advance, dad.

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Epic and The Hangover III

When teenager Mary Katherine (Amanda Seyfried) loses her mother to illness, she is forced to go live with her eccentric father, Professor Bomba (Jason Sudeikis), a crackpot inventor completely obsessed with the idea that a community of miniature people exists in the forest.

Though initially skeptical, MK is magically transformed, in a chance encounter, into a tiny person by Queen Tara (Beyoncé Knowles) and tasked with saving the world of Moonhaven and its Leafmen inhabitants from falling into the evil hands of Mandrake (Christoph Waltz) and his army of Boggans.

Epic takes its inspiration from William Joyce’s book The Leaf Men and the Grave Good Bugs. Stephen Holden of The New York Times writes, “As you watch its characters zoom through a lush forest on the backs of hummingbirds, the gorgeous 3-D adventure comedy Epic suggests a warmer, fuzzier Avatar, with a green heart. Directed by Chris Wedge, the movie is a hymn to nature rendered in phantasmagoric detail as refined as anything I’ve seen in a computer-animated family film.”

HSX is predicting that Epic takes in $38.5M this weekend.

Epic, Bravo Design

Rating: PG // Genre: Animation, Adventure, Family // Runtime: 1 hr. and 42 min. // Starring: Beyoncé Knowles, Colin Farrell, Josh Hutcherson, Amanda Seyfried, Christoph Waltz, Aziz Ansari, Chris O’Dowd, Pitbull, Jason Sudeikis, Steven Tyler // Directed by: Chris Wedge // Based on the “The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs” by: William Joyce // Screenplay by: Tom J. Astle, Matt Ember, James V. Hart, William Joyce, Daniel Shere // Produced by: Twentieth Century Fox Animation, Blue Sky Studios // Distributed by: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

The Hangover III

It’s been two years since the last Hangover movie, and three-quarters of the Wolf Pack have settled down: Phil (Bradley Cooper), Stu (Ed Helms) and Doug (Justin Bartha) are happily living uneventful lives at home. But still lacking a sense of purpose is the group’s black sheep Alan, who has ditched his meds and given in to his natural impulses.

Or at least he does so until disaster strikes.

In the aftermath of a personal crisis, the Wolf Pack convinces Alan to check into a psychiatric treatment facility by promising to drive him there themselves. Things start to go wrong en route when the group is assaulted, and Doug is kidnapped by a gang of masked thugs led by crime-boss Marshall (John Goodman).

Now the one person that can help them is Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong), their partner in crime who inflicts as much trouble on them as is humanly possible.

Joe Neumaier of New York Daily News, “A hysterical crowd-pleaser, director Todd Phillips’ wild ride through the mind of the American guy that lopes easily from epic set-pieces to male rite-of-passage shenanigans.” HSX is predicting that The Hangover Part 3 earns $67.7M

Rating: R // Genre: Comedy // Runtime: 1 hr. and 40 min. // Starring: Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, , Justin Bartha, Ken Jeong, John Goodman // Directed by: Todd Phillips // Screenplay by: Todd Phillips, Craig Mazin // Produced by: Green Hat Films, Legendary Pictures // Distributed by: Warner Bros. Pictures

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WordPress

If you own your own business, you need an online presence. That’s non-negotiable.

That doesn’t mean you need a website equipped with every bell and whistle, but your online traffic is likely to find you through organic queries, at least in part. And since search is by and large intent based where users know or have a general idea of what they want, basic information should be made available to streamline matchups with potential customers.

A locksmith might post hours of operation and a telephone number via Google Places; a restaurant its menu for customers to peruse through on Yelp or GrubHub; and a graphic design agency a blog for readers to find tips and tutorials or browse through an amazing portfolio that showcases its incredible work. That’s my one shameless plug for the week.

That’s not to say that a locksmith wouldn’t blog. It’s just that the minimum viable product requirements are different for them than, say, a brain surgeon. Primarily, because you’d want to obtain as much information as possible on surgical candidates who would potentially open up your head versus a seemingly interchangeable supply of locksmiths. For those who disagree with this point, make sure to leave a comment in the section below.

In any case, an excellent option to cover all your bases is a WordPress si

WordPress, Bravo DesignA Live Look at Activity Across WordPress

WordPress

WordPress is an open-source content management system (CMS) that has taken the world by storm. Known primarily for blogging, it has grown to be much more than that. It powers nearly 66 million websites, with 100,000 more popping up each day. Notable users include: E-Bay, The New York Times, TechCrunch, Reuters, Katy Perry, UPS and a wide array of Fortune 500 Companies. Each month, 371 million people view more than 4.1 billion pages on WordPress sites, and the number of posts created is continuing to trend upwards.

Posts on WordPress, Bravo DesignThe Number of Posts WordPress Users Are Publishing

It’s Cost Effective.

Because it’s open-source, it’s free to download and use, making it extremely cost-effective even if you do decide to purchase themes or widgets; whereas coding a custom CMS with similar functionality could cost a boatload. It’s robust and professional looking and one of the best ways to manage your SEO on the cheap.

Yoast is a plugin that let’s you optimize page information along with meta descriptions, using snippet preview functionality to see what it would look like in Google. If you have pages you don’t want indexed by search engine robots, you can hide them per page. And lastly, you can canonize pages, distinguishing originals from derivatives. Best of all, it’s free.

Yoast, Bravo Design II Yoast, “Why You Should Be Using WordPress”

It’s Flexible.

WordPress is extremely flexible and pragmatic. If a specific feature isn’t built-in to a template, there are currently 24,897 plugins available to enhance your site’s functionality making WordPress a serious contender as an e-commerce platform. With active members contributing from around the world, as well as developers for hire, the customization opportunities are endless.

As an FYI, if you’re a developer looking to chat with peers, you can do so via the #WordPress-dev channel on IRC or using #WordPress. If you’re new to the process like myself, sign up at WordPress.org and use the Codex and/or forums to start learning.

It’s Easy to Use.

Prior to working at Bravo Design, Inc., I had zero experience working with CMS no less WordPress, but learning is a piece of cake. Rest assured, you’ll pick it up quickly too. Everything from backend navigation to adding posts, media or tweaking metadata for search engine optimization is really straightforward.

That’s the beauty of WordPress.

This last week, I uploaded my own demo WordPress to tinker around with, marking my third install ever. I’ve done one via WAMP, one through GoDaddy’s easy install and this one onto the Bravo server. While it wasn’t quite done from scratch because I had a pre-configured FTP login, hosting and a tutorial on hand, it was pretty simple. When I say “simple,” I mean a novice could do it and not “simple” as in the way Ikea describes its kitchen installations.

In the coming weeks, we’ll try and upload an easy to use tutorial for those of you who want to install their own WordPress. But for those of you who already have websites, what CMS do you use and why?

Photo Credit: WordPress.org, Webdesign.org

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Smarter Web Design

Just recently, I read an AdWeek article on the ANAR Foundation, a Spanish child-advocacy organization. With the help of their ad agency Grey Spain, they used lenticular printing for a powerful outdoor advertising campaign that offered help to abused children without alerting their abusers, even if they saw the ad simultaneously. Lenticular printing is a process where printed images are given the illusion of depth or motion and allows for different photos to be seen depending on the angle it’s viewed from.

For this particular poster, anyone over four-foot-five would read, “Sometimes child abuse is only visible to the child suffering it.”

ANAR, Smart Web Design (Above)

Those under that height would see, “If somebody hurts you, phone us and we’ll help you” along with the phone number for ANAR’s hotline.

ANAR, Smart Web Design (Below)

Seeing this made me wonder: how are we as an industry adopting smarter, more responsive design given the incredible tools that we do have?

In an article in Smashing Magazine, Vasilis van Gemert wrote: Up until not so long ago, we used to base our designs on some rather general assumptions about screen size and input type. With the rise of devices with various screen sizes and alternative ways to interact, these assumptions have turned out to be unreliable. In the ‘90s, the web was 640 pixels wide. In the early 2000s, it grew to 800 pixels and later to 1024 pixels. Then, a device with a very small screen entered the market. Suddenly, our ideas about the size of the web did not work anymore.

Something similar happened with bandwidth and page load time. We went from 14.4 to 28.8 to 56k to broadband and got faster and faster. Then people started using those very same mobile devices to browse the web more and more but expected for load times to be comparable to what they saw on PCs only to find that they wouldn’t due to compatibility and integration issues.

According to an article on KISSmetrics: Surveys done by Akamai and Gomez.com indicate that nearly half of web users expect a site to load in two seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded within three seconds. 79% of web shoppers who have trouble with web site performance say they won’t return to the site to buy again, and around 44% of them would tell a friend if they had a poor experience shopping online.

At the moment, you may not be seeing much in terms of web traffic from different devices, but I wouldn’t be quick to disregard this advice. As we’ve all seen, history is filled with examples of once-thriving businesses that were wiped off the map due to an inability to adapt (e.g., Blockbuster vs. Netflix, Kodak vs. Fujifilm, Borders vs. Barnes & Noble).

As a sidebar, each of these businesses failed to read emerging markets correctly and defeated themselves. Ironically, Kodak invented one of the first digital cameras in 1975 only to put it on the backburner for about two decades because it wouldn’t be very profitable at the time. By the time Kodak decided to switch gears, it was much too late.

But going back to the point, back in March, Adobe Dig­i­tal Index posted a study after ana­lyz­ing more than 100 bil­lion vis­its to 1,000+ web­sites worldwide uncovering trends in the transition from PC to mobile device usage, which are impressive to say the least.

Adobe Digital Index, Web Design

Global Traffic by Device Type:

Adobe Digital Index, Web Design

The study goes on to say that while smart­phones remain much more com­mon, the tablet form fac­tor makes it ideal for brows­ing. Whether it be leisurely surf­ing the web, engag­ing with video or shop­ping online, on aver­age inter­net users view 70% more pages per visit when brows­ing with a tablet com­pared to a smartphone.

Adobe Digital Index, Web Design

In an article on “Responsive Web Design,” Ethan Marcotte writes “an emergent discipline called ‘responsive architecture’ has begun asking how physical spaces can respond to the presence of people passing through them. Through a combination of embedded robotics and tensile materials, architects are experimenting with art installations and wall structures that bend, flex, and expand as crowds interact with them” much like ANAR’s outdoor ad buy.

Marcotte goes on to say, “This is our way forward. Rather than tailoring disconnected designs to each of an ever-increasing number of web devices, we can treat them as facets of the same experience. We can design for an optimal viewing experience, but embed standards-based technologies into our designs to make them not only more flexible, but more adaptive to the media that renders them. In short, we need to practice responsive web design.”

Since the end of 2012, we’ve incorporated responsive web design into all of our web design projects from sites that stream movies via CDN to those with online shopping carts. If you have questions on the either its benefits or how to achieve this, please contact us here.

Photo Credit: PetaPixel.com, Adobe Digital Index

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The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby follows Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) as he leaves the Midwest in search of the American dream in the spring of 1922. A would-be writer of modest means, Nick rents a small house in West Egg next door to the mysterious self-made millionaire Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) and across the bay from his cousin, Daisy (Carey Mulligan) and her husband, Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton). Anyone who’s anyone attends Gatsby’s extravagant parties where the booze flows (despite a ban on alcohol better known as prohibition) and excess is realized.

It’s only after Nick and Gatsby become friends that we learn that Daisy was Gatsby’s sweetheart before he was sent off to war and all that he’s done since, he’s done for her. Gatsby wants to believe he and Daisy can rewind the clock to a better time when the two were in love with one another. “If I could just get back to the start,” he says. But as Nick reminds him, “You can’t repeat the past.”

Lou Lumenick of the New York Post writes, “Leonardo DiCaprio makes a splendid, Oscar-caliber Gatsby, capturing the dark side behind his affected bonhomie as no actor has done since Alan Ladd in 1949, and he’s perfectly abetted by Tobey Maguire’s hard-drinking Nick. The Great Gatsby stands out like a beacon in a sea of silly blockbusters.”

The film will be distributed in standard, 3D and RealD formats, and HSX predicts that it will take in $37M in its 3,500 theater wide release this weekend. For downloads; additional trailers; TV spots; galleries and a very cool guide to style, check out the official The Great Gatsby website.

Rating: PG-13 // Genre: Drama, Romance // Runtime: 2 hr. and 23 min. // Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Carry Mulligan, Joel Edgerton, Isla Fisher, Jason Clarke // Directed by: Baz Luhrmann // Based on the Novel by: F. Scott Fitzgerald // Screenplay by: Baz Luhrmann, Craig Pearce // Produced by: Warner Bros. Pictures, Village Roadshow Pictures, A&E Television, Bazmark/Red Wagon Entertainment // Distributed by: Warner Bros. Pictures

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The Attribution Problem

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” –John Wanamaker

Throughout the history of advertising, drawing a line between an asset and a sale has been notoriously difficult, but the Internet changed that. In its infancy, it offered a distinct advantage over its older, offline predecessors in the form of measurability. But despite the enormous progress made, the online advertising industry continues to face several challenges including a critical dilemma known as the attribution problem.

Neil Mason, SVP of Customer Engagement at iJento, writes, “Marketing attribution is both a business problem and an analytical problem. The business problem is simple: ‘How do I best spend my budget?’ The analytical problem is a bit more complex: ‘How do I develop a methodology that delivers some valuable insight to solve the business problem with the data, time, and budget available?’”

Currently, the last impression or click served is attributed as being the tipping point in a purchase and fails to credit other touch points thus discounting the impact of previous ad impressions made previously. By ignoring the contribution of previous ads, the current system devalues high impact ads and obfuscates the impact of social media on downstream conversion.

Think about the last time you saw a movie. What coaxed you into seeing it? Was it a billboard, a trailer, something you heard on the radio or maybe a mention on Facebook? In reality, all of those touch points probably contributed towards you making that decision in part. With regards to the attribution problem, only the last interaction is credited with a conversion. If that were the Facebook ad, should movie studios then decide to allocate more of their ad spend towards Facebook ads? Well no, not necessarily at least.

Last November, IBM issued its annual Black Friday Report analyzing sales trends and year over year changes on a percentage basis. In 2012, online sales for doomsday Black Friday increased 17.4%, contributing to a 20.7% overall surge in sales. Pretty surprisingly, it goes on to say that Twitter delivered 0% of referral traffic and Facebook just 0.68%. And finally that between Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube, the social sites generated 0.34% of all online sales on Black Friday, down just over 35% from 2011.

IBM Black Friday Report

But before you abandon your ad spend on the aforementioned social media services, you should probably take the report with a gain of salt. Because it doesn’t disclose the methodology used to compile the results, it’s difficult to assess how significant the data is without the proper context. Curiously, it’s worth noting that Black Friday is a day where retailers push to get people into stores, not make purchases online. It would’ve been interesting to see follow up data from Cyber Monday in a second report, but it doesn’t seem as if that was taken into consideration.

That said, this doesn’t mean that Twitter or any of the other social media sites aren’t driving referral traffic or that they don’t have the capacity to influence, neither of which is true obviously. What it does indicate is that there are serious issues in tracking and quantifying downstream conversion when it should clearly demonstrate a return on investment (ROI) to businesses willing to shell out precious advertising cash.

In a Forbes article on “Search vs. Display Advertising,” Michael Blanding writes, “Faced with this conundrum, most companies allocate their advertising budgets in a an ad hoc manner—throwing money into whatever bucket they perceive to have most influenced past purchase decisions leading firms to overspend on some actions and thus waste money and/or under spend in others.” Blanding goes on to say, “The only way to truly determine the efficacy of display ads versus search ads is to watch the effects over time, and to see how modifications in budget allocations change customers’ purchase decisions.”

That’s exactly what Sunil Gupta, a professor of business administration at Harvard would do in a working paper titled, “Do Display Ads Influence Search? Attribution and Dynamics in Online Advertising.” Through the use of persistence modeling, Gupta along with Pavel Kireyev and Koen Pauwels were able to figure out the ROI on search and display ads for every $1 spent by a major US bank in new customer acquisition. By first calculating the expected effect of advertising and later using a series of regressions over time to isolate the effects of display and search ads, the three were able to see how changes in ad budgets change those expectations over time and optimize ad spend.

Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of us don’t have Harvard business school professors available to fine tune our ad budgets or expertise in advanced statistics, so we’ll have to tough it out on our own. But going back to Mr. Blanding’s article, you’ll have to tinker with your ad budget to figure out where you should be spending ad dollars and where you should taper back. Don’t be discouraged if ads fall flat. That’s really just the nature of the beast.

Have questions? Leave a comment in the box below or fill out a contact form here. We would be happy to work with you to create a plan that best serves your business by maximizing your ad dollars.

Photo Credit: Inc.com, IBM