Becky’s Fund: Leading the Fight Against Domestic Violence

Becky’s Fund is a national non-profit organization focused on domestic violence awareness and prevention. The mission of Becky’s Fund is to foster awareness of domestic violence, encourage peer advocacy, promote activism, and support victims. Based in Washington, DC, Becky’s Fund believes in introducing innovative and lasting ways to educate people of all ages and all stations in life about issues concerning domestic violence.

Since 2008, TriVision Studios has been a valued marketing partner in Becky Fund’s fight against domestic violence. TriVision’s sustained public support of Becky’s Fund has been a shining example of the importance of community involvement in ending domestic violence. On July 3rd, Becky’s Fund partnered with the Washington Nationals to organize “Domestic Violence Awareness Day at Nationals Park.” This year, TriVision donated all the T-shirts for the baseball game. From major events to outreach campaigns organized by Becky’s Fund, TriVision’s printing, design and marketing contributions have made it possible to unify the organization and raise its profile.

Through college tours, collaborations with partners as varied as DC policymakers, local designers, sports teams, entrepreneurs, hospitals, and youth organizations, Becky’s Fund brings together diverse teams of people to achieve a common goal: domestic abuse prevention. Some of the organization’s activities include working with the Girl Scouts of DC to organize a workshop on healthy relationships, holding fundraisers through the Virginia Gold Cup horse races, a charity fashion show featuring the Washington Redskins, and collaborating with local stores, hotels, and restaurants to throw events benefiting Becky’s Fund. Becky’s Fund has also successfully conducted college campus tours to over 20 campuses nationwide each year.

Becky’s Fund is always dedicated to creating discussion about domestic abuse. This August, you can help by voting online on the Pepsi Refresh Everything website for a grant proposal for Becky’s Fund to develop a domestic violence mobile/web app. The free application will help victims and their supporters find information and statistics on domestic violence laws in their state, and list local resources that can help with an abusive situation. Becky’s Fund is also working on its annual Walk This Way charity fashion show to be held this fall in DC to raise money for its education campaign. For more information on Becky’s Fund and see how you can get involved in their next project, visit www.beckysfund.org or contact info@beckysfund.org.

Capitalist Partners’ Branding Objective

Based in Washington DC, Capitalist Partners, LLC is a leading international financial services firm on the forefront of meeting the financial needs of unique business ventures worldwide. The firm has a history of financial stability and strength in fund development and management, having established a private investment fund organized with credit support and a guarantee from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), an agency of the United States government and Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency, a subsidiary of the World Bank.

TriVision Studios provided the complete branding and corporate identity for Capitalist Partners. A “brand” is the identity and face for a company, product or service. A well-made brand conveys to consumers a message of trust and assurance that the products and services represented by their brand are unique and valuable. TriVision performed this task by creating a corporate logo that best matched the objective and mission of Capitalist Partners. The branding process included consultation, the generation of multiple logo options and a corporate color scheme, plus final modifications and revisions. The final logo was then provided to Capitalist Partners in a high-resolution format, along with a “How To” guideline on using the newly developed brand with all its business stationery.

To read more about Capitalist Partners, please visit www.capitalistpartners.com. To see how TriVision can brand your company or product, or revamp your existing one, please contact us at design@trivision.tv.

Afghan Sports Federation (ASF) presents Afghan Cup 2010

Thousands of athletes and fans from all around North America, Europe, and Asia gathered together on the weekend of July 9th thru the 11th, 2010 in Virginia and Maryland for Afghan Sports Federation’s 13th annual Afghan Cup 2010. 

ASF’s Afghan Cup is a popular annual sports tournament and cultural event that usually takes place during the month of July bringing together Afghan athletes and fans from all around the world. This year, the teams included 12 men's and 3 women's soccer teams, 10 men's basketball teams, 3 women's and 5 men's volleyball teams, 2 youth soccer teams, as well as both amateur and professional table tennis players. Afghan Cup 2010 was prominently featured as the front cover story of The Washington Post, as well as broadcast in several other media outlets.

The 3-day tournament began with a welcoming dinner reception on Thursday evening, July 8th where representatives from each team were invited to formally register their teams, draw their game schedules, and meet and greet the ASF board and team of volunteers. The preliminary games for each sport were played Friday and Saturday, July 9th-10th in Woodbridge, Virginia, and the final championship games were played on Sunday, July 11th at Germantown Soccerplex Stadium in Maryland.  The final day also consisted of cultural activities, shopping, music, food, and a performance by prominent Afghan musician, Najib Nawabi.

TriVision Studios, ASF’s founding sponsor and official marketing and media partner, did much in the effort to make Afghan Cup 2010 one of its most successful and most publicized sports tournaments to date. As the creative and advertising means behind ASF, TriVision Studios successfully ran Afghan Cup 2010’s massive marketing campaign. This included the conceptual design and production of its video commercials, which were broadcast globally on TV and the Internet, as well as the design, print and dissemination of posters, postcards, banners, signs, forms, invitations, T-shirts, hats, bags and other promotional items.

ASF, which is a non-profit organization based in the Washington, DC metropolitan region and run by Afghan-American individuals for the benefit of promoting amateur sports, strives to create a center of guidance for Afghan youths and adults, both men and women, at every level of excellence in the region, the U.S and the world.

To read more about ASF and see photos and video clips from Afghan Cup 2010, please visit ASF’s official website at www.afghansportsfederation.org, developed and maintained by TriVision Studios. To view the video commercial, please click on the thumbnail to the left.

10 Technological Advances Marketers Can’t Live Without

Liodice Looks at New Strategies & Tools Changing the Game for Brands
by Bob Liodice, Adage.com
Published: July 12, 2010

Inventions have changed the face of advertising consistently throughout history and will continue to do so, as technology evolves at an ever-increasing rate. The creation of new forms of media, from radio to TV and the internet, have caused the industry to create new strategies and tools to help brands find their own optimal media mix. This week, as the ANA hosts its inaugural Digital and Social Media Conference, we take a look at 10 technological advances that marketers of today and tomorrow cannot ignore.

SOCIAL MEDIA Social media brought the conversations that consumers were having online, giving marketers the chance to monitor, further and contribute to them in real-time. Social media has shifted the conversation so forcefully that consumers have an unprecedented level of control over brands, rapidly turning themselves into a brand's best advertisers. Nielsen found that while 14% of people trust ads, 78% of people trust consumer recommendations.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
Search engine optimization is one of the most important and cost-effective ways to attract customers on the internet. Research has found that almost two-thirds of the time, people look only at the first page of their search results. SEO is a way to ensure that those consumers using the web to search for a product or service easily find it, resulting in a more targeted lead for the advertiser and easier search process for the consumer.

INTEREST-BASED ADVERTISING (BEHAVIORAL TARGETING)
Behavioral targeting allows ads to be more relevant, valuable and thus persuasive to the consumer. This has given the marketing industry an unprecedented level of precision. This comes with a level of caution, however, as consumers are wary of being watched on the web.

MOBILE ADVERTISING AND PAYMENTS
According to eMarketer, the mobile advertising industry is expected to be worth more than $1.56 billion by 2013, as consumers increasingly look to their phones to aid in more aspects of their lives. While the internet can tell advertisers what sites consumers visit and for how long, the iAd platform gives a detailed picture of their potential customers' everyday lives. Additionally, mobile payments allow marketers to make appeals for instant buys, and dole out coupons and other rewards.

ONLINE VIDEO: VIDEO ON DEMAND
The arrival of video on demand and sites like Hulu and YouTube signaled a huge change in the industry. People started looking to the web for entertainment, and advertisers redirected dollars to take advantage of the growing world of online video. Viral videos have shown potential to turn ordinary people into brand ambassadors as the clip gets instantly forwarded to friends and family. Internet broadcasting also has provided another online venue for measurable and targeted advertising in the form of attached text and pre-roll ads.

MEASURING ACTIONS VS. IMPRESSIONS
Since the cost-per-click model has emerged, advertisers have been taking advantage of the internet's ability to measure user action, something impression-based pricing cannot match. Those using action-based systems like Google AdWords and Facebook, pay based only on how many people engage an ad with a click. Marketers can now see a clearer picture of ROI; consumers who interact with ads tend to be more valuable.

INTERACTIVE TV
As DVRs made their way into consumers' lives, many industry pundits mourned the end of the 30-second spot and wondered how advertisers would fare now that people could skip through their commercials. The answer was not just to formulate ads that worked in fast-forward, but to introduce interactive TV ads that worked within and in tandem with regular programming. Companies such as BrightLine iTV formed to bring the interactivity of the web to TV. This area is one to watch, as consumers accept, and eventually seek, interactivity in all aspects of their lives.

BRAND-SPECIFIC COMMERCIAL RATINGS
More than $70 billion is spent each year on TV advertising. Where, on one hand, the digital realm was providing precise statistics on an ad's effectiveness, TV ratings were still based on the average of all commercials airing with a program. In 2007 the ANA began calling for ratings that were specific to each commercial. The industry is now starting to see a potential pathway, as a test conducted by Nielsen shows that the move toward brand-specific commercial ratings is clear.

MARKETING-MIX MODELING
Technologists found ways to create highly productive media-decision models by weaving together analyses of consumer sensitivity to a company (or brand's) media platforms. This tool gave media planners the opportunity to increase the effectiveness of an integrated marketing plan while reducing overall costs.

AD-ID
To help bring a higher level of accuracy to the coding process and consistency to advertisement identification, as well as enable the industry for digital convergence, a new identification system was created. Ad-ID came into the marketplace in 2003 as a digital identifying code for advertisements. It has since been dubbed the "UPC code of the advertising industry." Ad-ID helped transform the marketing industry for the digital revolution.

Story courtesy of Adage.com, Published on July 12, 2010

5 Things ‘Jersey Shore’ taught us about Social Media.

Here's 'The Situation': Experimental Website Helps Gauge Power of Spreadable Content
by Ilya Vedrashko
Adage.com, Published: July 21, 2010

Shared links have a longer shelf life on Facebook than Twitter, and Buzzfeed sends more traffic through re-shares than direct clicks. That's two of the things my agency learned when we launched a stealth social-media experiment through a site we created called Jerzify Yourself.

Jerzify Yourself was created in January of this year, a week after the season one finale of the popular MTV show "Jersey Shore" that attracted an audience of 4.8 million. The site, written in a few days in Flash, allows users to upload their headshot onto a stylized body and morph themselves into a Jersey Shore "Guido" or "Guidette." Or as New York's Village Voice put it: "The gist is Snooki-grade simple: upload a medium-size jpg, scale the image to fit, choose your spray-tan shade, pick your pose -- and holy Freckles McGee, you're magically recast as a human meatball."

Why did we do this? To evaluate the power of social media and spreadable content. As an experiment, Jerzify Yourself was highly successful in adding the much needed texture to our knowledge of how content gets passed along online. One obvious caveat here is that the observations below are based on a single experiment, so please treat them as such and not as some kind of immutable laws. That said, we hope our findings will add a new angle to the collective thinking behind online content dissemination.
Here are five social-media learnings that grabbed our attention:

1. The Invisible Impact. If you find yourself measuring the value of referral sources for your campaign, consider their total impact via re-shares in addition to the direct traffic they send your way. Counting only the direct clicks from any site is likely to underestimate the site's total value; five out of six sites on our top referrers list sent almost as much traffic through re-shares as through direct clicks.

2. If It Doesn't Spread, It's Half-dead. Having looked at the data, we can now say with a degree of confidence that you'll still get viewers if your link gets picked up by major online publications, but content that's designed to be spreadable can nearly double the referred traffic through re-shares.

3. Some Sites Are Read By More Active Spreaders Than Others. Some sites on our top list turned out to be a lot more spreadful (for lack of a better word) than others. Buzzfeed, in particular, sent more traffic -- twice as much! -- via re-shares than through direct clicks.

4. The Speed of Content Depends on the Medium Through Which It Travels. You know how the speed of sound depends on the medium through which it passes? It's like that with Twitter and Facebook, and probably other social networks. To repeat an observation made earlier: in our experiment, shared links had a much longer gestation period but also a longer shelf life on Facebook than on Twitter. For the entire January-May period, Facebook has referred 12,789 visitors, 83% of them after the first week. Twitter has referred 10,549 visitors altogether, 97% of them during the first week. This difference probably has to do with how people access the news feeds on these sites. On Twitter, the single stream of news quickly washes away older items. On Facebook, older news can still be the front-page material on the individual slower-moving walls. If you find yourself choosing between the two sites for your next campaign, be aware of this difference.

5. Don't Reach For the Off Switch. As the 404 errors on formerly popular viral branded destinations demonstrate, it might be tempting to kill the destination site some time after the traffic has peaked. I've argued elsewhere that abandoning old microsites in their Long Tail phase means leaving money on the table, and our experiment has demonstrated that not only do off-peak sites attract healthy traffic, these visitors can also be more valuable than the rush-hour crowd.

Story courtesy of Adage.com, Published on July 21, 2010