Modea's blog

Our interactive designers combine imagination, creativity, and pixel perfection to create drool-worthy designs for a number of Fortune 500 brands. You'll balance form and function to push the limits of what can be done on the web and work on anything from beautiful image composites to detailed interfaces. As a member of the creative team, you'll be working directly with award-winning creative directors, art directors, copywriters, and user experience designers. You will work hard for our clients and for our agency and will be expected to consistently improve and learn.  In addition to creating beautiful, user-friendly designs for our clients, personal projects are both encouraged and supported by your fellow employees as we help you develop professionally.

We are seeking an experienced general manager to lead the growth acceleration, drive strategy, and manage day-to-day tactical execution. The individual we seek is entrepreneurial, digitally savvy, lean-thinking, and able to lead a group through rapid iterations of the build-measure-learn loop. You must know how to manage to the individual level and take personal pride in the development of your team members.

The Digital Media Strategist at Modea is a hybrid role combining both strategic and execution capabilities in support of digital media.  You will be assigned to a dedicated team focusing on a select group of clients and responsible for the strategic direction of media services including campaign strategy, media and audience research, assisting in channel and media planning, display and mobile advertising, SEO, social media/community management, email marketing/CRM, campaign performance testing, measurement and reporting.

Modea is on the lookout for an SEO Specialist to fill a highly tactical role at our growing agency. Somebody who is detail-oriented and lives, eats and breathes search engine optimization (SEO). Somebody who soaks up the latest in industry best practices and trends.  This person will be responsible for successful execution of strategic SEO deliverables recommended by Modea.  Additionally, this position will assist in supporting new business initiatives and ongoing research as well as the development and maintenance of processes, standards, and guidelines.

Since the number of mobile applications on the market has reached over 1 million on Android and iOS platforms alone, companies and businesses are forced to reckon with the preferences of mobile consumers.  With 44% of people in the United States owning a smartphone developers are presented with a pressing question: How can our apps reach as many users as possible without writing a completely custom version for each platform?

With the recent release of the iPhone 5 and iOS 6, there has been a ton of buzz surrounding Apple lately. But, in the midst of all the Apple press, will a new game addiction enter the spotlight? Meet Blendamaze - a hybrid of Paint Pallette & Labyrinth.

Ever wonder who’s on Pinterest?  We did.  That’s why we created our first Pinterest Infographic: Pinning = Winning in February, which visualized the power and growing popularity of this social media platform.  Now we’ve put together a new Pinterest infographic that takes a deeper look into the lives of Pinterest users, revealing everything from where they purchase their groceries to which mobile provider they use.  Learn who’s visiting Pinterest, how they access information, their shopping and leisure habits, and much more.  We even compared these habits to internet users at large, so you can get a handle on what is unique about Pinterest visitors. What insights do you find most surprising? How will Pinterest fit into your overall marketing strategy?

To sum up Part One of the Ultimate Guide, the internet marketing industry sits right in the middle of an intense collision of search (as we’ve henceforth known it), social, and rich web experience.

We’ve got the tools to inject our great content right into the mix, and I briefly explained a few markup tactics that can give Google and other search engines the information they need to put your content in the right place, in front of the right people.  In part two of this three part post, I’ll explain what actually happens with all that extra effort, thought, and code that we’re being asked to put forth, and why it’s totally worth it.

Facebook announced Timeline late last year, which caused a huge buzz in the social media world. First, it rolled out to its users, then to select brands. Now everyone has it, and we have no idea what to do with it.

It's an exciting time in search and internet marketing. We’re part of an unprecedented change in how people browse online and consume content – the social and search functions as we know them are converging aggressively.

Steve Grant, Head of Strategy at Modea, presented at the IAB Case Study Road Show Series in San Francisco today and will be visiting the Detroit session next week. The conference is a collection of digital marketing success stories and his presentation detailed our 2011 work with Chiquita Snacks. We were delighted to be invited to present alongside our clients Chiquita and Vitrue.

If you’re new to advanced segmentation or have never heard of it, we’ve put together a down and dirty overview of the Advanced segments feature within Google Analytics. Advanced segmentation allows you to easily refine data to greater levels of specificity and detail. What can you do with Advance Segments?

Is your social media campaign strictly based around the 9-5 work-week schedule? If so, your social media plan may be underperforming. Certainly, there are a lot of stats on why certain times of the day have higher share rates.

Pinterest is the new digital doorway to your brand and you're no longer the gatekeeper. The details included in the following infographic will help you better understand this audience and ultimately, the undeniable impact of Pinterest as a referral platform.

Millennials, as a group, are advertising darlings if there ever were ones. Being accustomed to on-demand access to information, and a high-comfort level with technology, makes them a group primed for the digitally integrated advertising campaigns. They’re a cynical bunch – difficult to impress, entertain and ultimately convince. So why do we go after them? Their $170 billion in buying power, and 79 million at last count, may have something to do with it. Yet there are some interesting nuances in marketing to them.

Advertising during this week’s Super Bowl XLVI will likely be different than any other Super Bowl before. Television viewership of the Super Bowl continues on an upward trajectory and this year’s big game is expected to be the most watched in history. There’s no doubt that TV viewers have not only become accustomed to watching advertising during the big game, but also that they will eagerly anticipate it.

If you ask most consumers if they are aware of a “little” shopping day called Black Friday, chances are - they’ll say yes. But did you know that, although widely publicized, Black Friday is not the largest shopping day of the holiday season for online shopping? In fact, it is not even the second (or third) largest online shopping day for the holiday season.

With the launch of “Search Plus Your World” Google is drastically changing the landscape of search, social media and the practice of digital marketing and SEO as we know it.

What is “Search Plus Your World” (SPYW)? The collective algorithm updates and platform changes basically give each of us our own personal search engine. Google will use beacons of activity from Google+ to highlight content you or your friends have shared and display them within Google SERPS. I’m also seeing snippets of content from other Google properties like YouTube and Picassa and expect content from other Google properties like Music, Shopping and more. To illustrate, here are a few examples of my Google+ Circles and recent searches on Google.

It’s been over a year now since our family relocated from Providence, RI to Blacksburg, VA and I can honestly say for us it was the best move we ever made.  It all started with an excise tax bill from the state of Rhode Island. The cost of living in RI is about 20% above the national average, and although my husband and I both made very comfortable salaries we never seemed to get ahead.  Spending over $15K a year on day care certainly didn’t help nor did our inflated personal and property taxes. One year we realized we spent over $5k on oil to heat our house, a nice but modest 2 story cape. On that day the bill arrived we had been shoveling snow regularly for about 6 months and I looked and my husband and said “I quit RI” and he agreed.

Many of you may remember hearing something a little over a year ago about some “caffeine” thing that Google was working on.  Caffeine was released last summer and was essentially a change in their indexing infrastructure – meaning the way they crawl and store pages in their massive index – to support a more changing content environment.  The infrastructure change would allow content to be searchable almost immediately after it was crawled, providing a quicker, more powerful means for users to find a plethora of newer, fresher, more engaging, and more relevant content. 

Well, that’s all fine and good.  Google heavily increased their means of acquiring and indexing content last year.  So what’s new?

Twitter has recently launched a whole bunch of new features to their website, simplifying & unifying the user experience on the desktop & mobile apps.With the introduction of the new Home, @Connect, and #Discover tabs, somewhat lost in the shuffle were some massive updates to brand pages. To bring you up to speed, here's what the enhanced brand profile pages offer, and why it matters.

It’s that time of year again – cold weather, holiday traditions and full, hearty meals abound. It’s the perfect recipe for staying indoors and putting on an extra “hibernation” layer for the winter season. More often than not, the holidays serve as an excuse to indulge and health and wellness don’t even enter our minds until it’s time to make New Years resolutions. Only then do we start paying attention (or pretend to pay attention) and pledge to start working out earlier, eating fewer sweets and avoiding soda. But this year, Modea decided to get ahead of the game – and thus, ModeaFIT was born.

During the weekend of September 10 & 11, a handful of Modeans volunteered in CreateAthon, a 24-hour, nonstop event put on by the Ronoake AAF to help build the brands of 17 non-profit organizations. Starting at 10am on Saturday, members of the Modea Accounts, Creative, Planning, & Development teams rolled into Virginia Western Community College, and prepared for 24 hours fueled by hot coffee, cold pizza, & wild creativity.

While in San Francisco for TechCrunch Disrupt, we had the unique opportunity to visit the Pixar campus in Emeryville, CA. One of our Creative Directors, Charles Wood, put us in touch with Max Bickley at Pixar, who was kind enough to invite us out and show us around. Built over 10 years ago under the direction of Steve Jobs, Pixar is a breeding ground for creativity, something Modea is striving to create with the construction of our new headquarters in Blacksburg, VA.

Last Friday evening begins as any other number of ends to the workweek at Modea.  Tired but energized, Modeans gather to talk about plans for the night, and the 48 hours ahead.  The gloaming is here, downtown Blacksburg awaits.

What to do?  With a tap on my shoulder, David Catalano solves this riddle. Within minutes David, Aaron Herrington and I are driving to a very special dinner, and a night we will long remember.

http://t.co/7HgEej2

Mr. Jobs’s departure “leaves a void in the largest tech brand on the planet,” Raqib Sheikh, a senior strategic planner at Modea in Blacksburg, Va., wrote in an e-mail.

“This is the realization of most Apple fan-boys’ biggest fear,” he added, referring to ardent admirers of the brand and company, and is, at the same time, “the most exciting challenge faced by the best tech/business/cultural success story of this decade yet.”

After twenty-five years of building marketing campaigns in partnership with some of the best and brightest clients --  in service of their global blue-chip brands -- I must take a breath and reflect upon being afforded such a rich opportunity. Pause.  Happy sigh.  Like everything else in life, there are trade-offs.  Having had such a fortunate career, one downside might be a sense of complacency, and ennui.  Well, for the rest of you 25-year veterans of this game; three words: Making Digital Work. Wow!  I had the enormous privilege of attending this conference created & supported through Boulder Digital Works.  Yes  ... Boulder is the home of Bogusky, CU and Ten-Ten Brassier, but it is also the forum for the most forward thinking digital killers in this business.  I learned a very important lesson, you are never too old -- or are too arrogant -- to learn from the likes of Matt Howell, Gareth Kay, Edward Boches, Matt Britton, Sheena Matheiken (could go on forever).

I'll trade you a slideshare and a flickr for a Google+

One of the hazards of having a desk in close proximity to one of the Modea conference rooms is that, if chairs are scarce, some think it's okay to just steal yours. Lee had a creative idea to teach these little thieves a lesson. Or so he thought...

Jobs...the buzzword you hear more than any other in politics. President Obama recently launched an initiative to increase entrepreneurial activity in rural America to spur job growth. Aneesh Chopra, the Chief Technology Officer of the United States, is visiting communities that are bucking the trend of mounting job losses and the exodus of young people from these communities. Naturally, he decided to visit Blacksburg, home of Modea.

We are incredibly fortunate in our business to work with amazing people and partner with incredible brands. It is imperative for our team to be immersed in the business of the companies we work with, and nothing gets me more excited than to see those operations in person. Recently, our team had the opportunity to experience first-hand one of the greatest sporting events of the year and gain tremendous insight into one of the most unique industries we’ve had the chance to work with.

Last week Modea was honored with the Best Agency Culture Award by AdAge for the 2011 Small Agency Awards. Before we started Modea five years ago, Aaron and I weren’t naïve to the challenges of starting an agency in Blacksburg, Virginia. But we thought that if we could do it, we’d have something truly unique.

Last week Zediva sent the email above to it's customers. Stating that they will no longer be able to provide service - with much grace and humor I might add.
Why does this matter? Well read on fair reader

Deserved or not, HTML5 is a hot topic. The topic’s significance is called into question because the term ‘HTML5’ is currently used in multiple ways. Despite the hype and praise on seemingly everyone’s lips (or at least their blogs), there’s not even a clear consensus on what they’re talking about! On one hand, as a technical definition, HTML5 is very clearly defined: it is the newest addition to the stable of doctypes a developer can choose for page validation and code consistency. And as a doctype, HTML5 certainly deserves praise.

Let’s set the scene. In the months leading up to February 15, 1898, the United States of America was tense, to say the least. Along with recovering from the American Civil War, the Manifest Destiny was also being used as a justification of war, which increased the political divide. At the time, newspapers were the primary source of public information and they were waging a war all their own.

Most teams have an individual that's tasked with being the advocate for the user—a user experience designer. Once the information architecture and wireframing and prototyping are finished, however, that doesn't mean that the user experience has been finalized and that part of the process is done. These are the deliverables of a user experience designer, sure, but an experience is also shaped by the visual design, the development, and other aspects of the execution. These are the things that can make or break a site for a user. It's the remaining bits and pieces in the execution that will determine whether someone enjoys using what you've built or loathes every second of it. Experiences are emotional.

Getting people to share your message online has become somewhat of a holy grail for marketers these days. It is interesting though, that with the importance that is sometimes placed on sharing, there seems to be precious little time spent determining why or how someone would want to share the content. If sharing is a part of your strategy then it is important to understand the motivations behind someone’s choice to share or not share.

This fall, Apple is introducing iOS 5, the updated operating system for iPhone, iPad, and iPhone Touch, and, here at Modea, we believe these awesome upgrades are going to give brands cool new ways to reach people while adding value to their lives.

When a Modean takes the field, our comportment is mirrored to that of within our walls on South Main Street; team focused, results oriented and a rip-roaring good time.  We play hard on the field – which of course yields to our post-game celebrations at one of the many local watering holes here in Blacksburg – and work even harder when we step through the office doors at 6:58am every day.

 “You can have a car in any color you want -  as long as it’s Black. Capiche?!”
- Don Henry Ford
(Image via: poncнo☭penguιn flickr.com)

I think we can all learn a valuable lesson here. ;)

"If you like clever data visualizations, you’ll love Visual.ly, a startup that lets you find and make infographics with all kinds of web-based data."

- Mashable

From taking readers through the thought process of the four-person team behind designing Nike Better World, to demonstrating the code necessary to create your own parallax scrolling site, this article is a great read for creatives and developers alike. It goes in depth without being exhaustive, and provides key insights into the creative process of crafting a great interactive experience with a brand.

Andrew Vaughan's cousin has a rocking music video and Richard Hammer's son Devon sings the blues.

VT Robots from the Robot World Cup

Instead of adhering to a single, centralized big idea, a brand must create coherence around multiple, smaller ideas. Embracing small ideas is a powerful way to navigate a rapidly evolving, connected world. Small ideas are fresh and immediate. Flexible and accurate, they can be defined in the immediacy of the present context, allowing brands to respond quickly in moments of crisis or celebration.
- via Fastcodesign.com

Raqib Sheikh's a wanderer. An Indian guy who grew up in the Middle East found his way to Modea after working in agencies across the country. Broad strategic thinkers feel at home here.

What's happening on the Internet every 60 seconds.

Klout has just launched a “gating” system, in which brands can customize user access level on their Facebook pages based on their Klout score.

The Internet body that oversees domain names voted to end restricting them to suffixes like .com or .gov and will receive applications for new names next January. Besides the $185,000 to apply, individuals or organisations will have to show a legitimate claim to the name they are buying.

(image via TransCam Flickr)

The blood supply is critically low!

The American Red Cross is issuing an appeal for blood donors to roll up a sleeve and give blood right now because there is currently a critical blood shortage across our nation. Many donors are busy or traveling, school is out of session and donations have dropped dramatically.

Timothy Phillips has come to Modea to do the thing he's darn good at doing: Make Financial Growth Inevitable. Yep - we're excited.

Couple of questions with Mark Grieco (aka Marquee G.), Advertising Vet, Yankees Fan, New Yorker, Group Account Director extraordinare and now fellow Modean.

Joe Chasse's one of those guys who sees numbers like beautiful colors and pictures - and is smart enough to then tell you that that's called "Synesthesia". He's our resident Data Ninja.