HOW important is branding and marketing for a company that usually handles these two aspects for other companies?

Forefront International chief executive officer Darien Mah will tell you that it is just as vital, if not more so.

“Naturally, the goal of an advertising agency is to help clients market their brands and products effectively.

“The danger of doing so is that they may neglect themselves along the way. Some agencies do not market themselves enough, despite the fact that they are offering marketing services to clients,” Mah noted.

What Mah’s digital and creative advertising agency does is walk the talk.

“A good agency shouldn’t just say that it’s important, but we should practise what we preach – that in itself is a form of branding and marketing,” he said.

The company, which was established by four partners, had a simple start within the four walls of Mah’s old condominium unit.

From a web design-based firm, Forefront gradually progressed into a full-fledged agency with a strong workforce of 90 people; it also has offshore offices in London, Hong Kong, and soon, Jakarta as well.

Mah explained that building their own brand and a strong clientele base is an ongoing and interweaving process.

“We started by knocking on doors. We then managed client relations by providing good services from which we were able to tell better brand stories for ourselves.”

At first, Forefront started with just two clients – the Royal Mint of Malaysia and AW.

“They were very important clients for a small startup like ours.

“Eventually, we developed more skills and learnt how to have a better grasp of the ins and outs of advertising.”

The agency does quite a bit of advertising work for property developers.

“Our penchant for property design and investment plays a part in how the company moved into this direction,” said Mah.

It started with web designing for property clients before going into other aspects.

Today, Forefront handles bigger projects, having done work for some of the property industry’s biggest names, including Eco World, S P Setia, Gamuda Land and Capitaland.

To work effectively with clients, Mah said it’s important to put themselves in their shoes, but at the same time, we need to think like a consumer too.

“As a property purchaser, I feel I can help my clients with better decisions in terms of their marketing and advertising strategies.

“By understanding their values and needs, we create a range of services which complement what they need to best communicate their products.”

The company provides end-to-end creative solutions such as advertising, digital and interactive technology, CGI and architecture visualisation and animation, video production, holistic branding and strategic communication counsel.

By offering a comprehensive range of services, it has been able to build successful mutual relationships with clients.

“We understand that we have a symbiotic relationship with our clients – if they grow, we grow too,” said Mah.

However, what sets Forefront apart is the way it sets the groundwork for its projects.

“We won’t tell you what’s important or useful without gauging the validity or feasibility of the service or feature.

“For example, if we learn of the latest tech trends, we’d build the relevant tool or write an app to test it out for ourselves first as well as for our clients.”

The result, Mah said, is a cascading positive effect.

“By doing a good job for clients, they do better, and when our clients do better, we build a stronger brand for ourselves.

“We also leverage on clients to strengthen our brand, and from there, we can grow our clientele.

Mah stresses on the significance of small to medium enterprises to work on their branding and marketing, without which it would be difficult for the business to be recognised.

“You want people to know about you and you want them to get in touch with you,” he said.

That is why all the work they do, he added, has “branding-worth”.

“Our corporate identity, name cards, websites, apps, newsletter materials, down to the smallest details, they all reflect who we are,” said Mah.

He said the company also tirelessly participates in award programmes to benchmark themselves against some of the best businesses in the industry and fortify their company image.

Forefront received the silver title for Best in Marketing (under RM25mil) at The Star Outstanding Business Awards (SOBA) 2016.

On top of that, Forefront also makes time to work on its own projects, including video productions.

“We create short films, viral videos and work on social media experiments as well; this is an avenue where we can express ourselves with far less restrictions.”

Aside from helping to build the company’s brand, the company’s own projects are also great morale boosters for its employees as well.

“Sure, we can sell these ideas too, but we also want to be able to speak for ourselves through the passion and engagement poured into these ideas by our own team.”

After all, Mah said the company’s brand and identity is put together by the hands of the talents working in it.

Moving forward, Mah said Forefront will continue to grow its brand in London, Hong Kong and Jakarta.

“Our branches are also property-based, largely serving local clients with projects in the overseas locale.

“We also hire talents there to build local insights there; it’s not just another Malaysian agency setting up in that city.

“We want to be a local firm with a Malaysian brand,” he concluded.

Updated 3 hours ago

LOS ANGELES — Nintendo was hemmed in on both sides and in deep trouble.

The company’s Wii U video-game console, an effort to add a small, semiportable screen to the hit motion-sensing Wii, was a flop. And Nintendo’s handheld consoles, descendants of the legendary Game Boy, were suffering as people opted to play games on smartphones instead.

This was in 2014, the year the Japanese gaming giant recorded its third consecutive annual loss, a setback that followed decades of profitability. Critics called for the company to reboot its hardware, or perhaps reduce the emphasis on its own devices by bringing beloved characters like “Super Mario” or “Zelda” to smartphones.

“You gotta either go back and do something that’s more (traditional) consolelike, or go forward and do something that’s all motion, like the Wii,” said Phil Spencer, the head of Microsoft’s Xbox gaming business, describing the prevailing industry opinion at the time.

“And they didn’t.”

Instead, Nintendo doubled down on its effort to build a console that combines mobile and living-room gaming, developing the Nintendo Switch.

So far, it has been a wild success. Nintendo has struggled to make enough devices to satisfy demand since its launch in March, and at the E3 trade show here earlier this month, Nintendo had a bit of its swagger back.

Spencer’s Microsoft is trying to pull off a similar rebound. His team is going back to the roots of the Xbox business: pushing the boundaries of the power you can pack into a gaming machine.

The company’s Xbox One X, unveiled at E3, is — as Microsoft’s marketing mantra repeated constantly — the most powerful console ever made, aimed at hard-core gamers who want every bit of graphical realism they can get.

Microsoft and Nintendo had taken a similar path: Facing speculation that they would have to reboot or rethink their video-game businesses to respond to rival Sony’s dominance, they instead doubled down on what makes their devices stand out.

Living-room battlefield

The competition to sell living-room video-game consoles is among the oldest battlefields in video gaming, dating to the emergence in the 1980s of Atari and Nintendo devices that plugged into television sets.

This market has seen competitors come and go, but a pattern has remained remarkably steady. New devices tend to come out in waves every few years, “generations” in industry-speak, adding each company’s take on the latest technological advances.

When Sega dropped out of the market in 2001, the contest winnowed to three primary entrants: Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.

The current generation began in 2012, with Nintendo’s Wii U. Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One followed a year later.

Sony, with a hardware package that was easy to use for both game developers and consumers, and a laser focus on drawing the best games, quickly took a wide lead.

In Tokyo and the Seattle area, Nintendo and Microsoft plotted their response. Microsoft’s campus in the Seattle-area city of Redmond is adjacent to Nintendo of America, the Japanese company’s subsidiary for the Western Hemisphere. Nintendo, which set up shop in Redmond a year before Microsoft came to town in 1986, sold Microsoft some of the land that became its campus during one of the company’s growth spurts.

Cultural divide

Far more ground separates the two corporate cultures.

Microsoft, which helped put a computer on every desk with Windows and today runs a sprawling business-software empire, got into gaming at first through experiments in entertainment CD-ROMs. Dabbling in encyclopedias turned into computer games that pushed the boundaries of PC hardware and highlighted the power of Windows.

The company’s dive into consoles began when some leaders in the Windows unit worried that Sony’s popular PlayStation would conquer the living room and shut Microsoft out.

The Xbox console was born in 2001, a brand Microsoft tried to associate with raw computing power and graphical fidelity.

Since then, Xbox — which is far more popular in the United States than abroad — has also been closely tied to hard-core gamers. Microsoft’s most popular franchises, “Halo” and “Gears of War,” are both “shooters,” the top U.S. console-game genre.

Nintendo strikes a more lighthearted tone, one explicitly aimed at appealing to a broad range of people — “from 5 to 95,” as Nintendo of America chief Reggie Fils-Aime says.

The 127-year-old company got its start making playing cards, and eventually wound up in the business of building arcade games. Nintendo’s later living-room consoles, and visionary game designers, helped establish video gaming as a popular pastime.

Its more recent efforts haven’t fared so well. With the Wii U flagging, Nintendo accounted for about 5 percent of global console and console-game sales last year, researcher IDC estimates. But instead of dropping the concepts the device explored, Nintendo dug deeper.

In October, the company announced a new console that kept the Wii U’s portable small-screen concept, but rebuilt the device as a sleek, tablelike tool that could be plugged into a television dock for traditional play.

Nintendo’s internal game studios, in need of a hit to go with the new device, built one in “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild,” one of the best-reviewed games of all time.

Frustration at microsoft

Microsoft’s situation wasn’t so dire, but the company’s Xbox One, after marketing missteps that placed the focus on broader entertainment instead of games, was selling at just half the rate of Sony’s PlayStation 4.

The company stopped reporting sales of the console entirely, officially a move to emphasize use of the Xbox Live subscription gaming service, but to some a capitulation to Sony’s dominance.

Microsoft faced calls from outside observers to try to blow up the console market entirely and go with something different.

Spencer, the Xbox chief, had voiced frustration with the console model and its tendency to make old games outdated. That, along with a renewed Microsoft embrace of PC gaming, had many analysts speculating as they went into the E3 show that the company would opt for a device that blurred the line between Xbox and PC gaming, perhaps with a new operating system or closer ties to Windows.

But the company’s research showed that while the growth in console gamers globally had stagnated over the last decade, people still identified as either a PC or console gamer, and were unlikely to drop one device entirely.

Building a PC box risked ceding the console market – which researcher Newzoo pegs at $34 billion this year — to Sony.

Spencer gave the greenlight to develop the Xbox One X shortly after taking over the Microsoft gaming business in 2014.At the E3 show, he unveiled the console in front of a few thousand people in a basketball arena.

The reception was mixed. Observers praised the promised capabilities of the device.

But others thought that the demand for a $500 Xbox – $100 more expensive than Sony’s PlayStation 4 Pro – might not amount to much.

“They need to do something different if they want to make a meaningful run at Sony,” said Doug Creutz, who tracks video gaming at Cowen. “They need to shake things up.”

Spencer said the Xbox One X builds on work the company has already done, and that there’s plenty of room in the market for a focus on hard-core gamers. He points to the Xbox Elite controller, which at $150 cost about $90 more than Microsoft’s standard console controller.

“I had similar questions from people, ‘I don’t understand what this is for,’” he said. “And if you remember, we couldn’t make enough” to satisfy demand.

Spencer, who has been with Microsoft’s gaming unit since 2002, is also a big Nintendo fan.

The roster of Nintendo consoles he has owned goes back decades to the SNES Nintendo 64. (He even has some nice things to say about the Game Cube, the relatively unloved turn-of-the-millennium console).

What impresses him about the company, he said in an interview, is how it has stuck to its guns over the years, and learned as it went along.

“It’s not like everything they’ve done has been as successful as the Wii,” he said.

Spencer draws a line from the ultimately unsuccessful ideas in the Wii U to those that caught on with the Switch.

“Persistence is just so critical,” he said. “To learn, move forward, innovate again. That’s so important.”

He might as well have been talking about Xbox.

Chat with us in Facebook Messenger. Find out what’s happening in the world as it unfolds.

Starting out like many others in the blogshop modelling scene, Mongchin Yeoh made a name for herself in the social media scene. Possessing beauty and brains, the Singapore Management University Accountancy undergraduate carved a niche for herself through her love for fashion, beauty, food and travel.

In this edition of Now following, Yeoh sits down with Marketing to talk about her influencer journey so far. Some clients she has worked with include Clinique, L’Oreal, Dyson, Urban Revivo and Cebu Pacific Airways to name a few.

Marketing: When and how did you start out as an influencer?

I started out when I was still in university, around 2012! I started by doing blogshop modelling first and was sharing about my life and recommendations with my friends, documented on my blog. I write about lifestyle, beauty and fashion. I don’t think I had a time or any particular event that shot me to fame, it happened very gradually.

Marketing: How would you describe your followers? What do you do to strike a connection with them?

They are mostly females aged 19-29, that are interested in beauty and fashion. I’ll reply to every comment and queries to the best of my ability!

Marketing: Which platform gives you the highest engagement with your readers?

Instagram.  This is especially with the Instagram Stories feature which allows me to connect with my readers on a more personal basis. Now with the added Instagram Live function, my readers are able to see the real me and get to speak with me at real-time. This makes it a lot more real and relatable, compared to a curated feed of photos.

Marketing: What are some of the challenges of being an influencer in Singapore?

The challenge lies in coming up with good and new content on a very frequent basis. I also have to pick up skills such as photography, videography and learn how to use the different types of photo and video editing softwares from scratch.

Marketing: Any funny or silly boo-boos you have made so far in your career?

I don’t see mistakes committed as silly. (Laughs) I tend to learn from them and move on! Every mistake is a precious lesson learnt.

Marketing: Any outrageous demands you have gotten from clients?

Some try to get work which is pretty, time-consuming and skills-heavy for free.

Marketing: What are some things you feel clients should take note of when it comes to working with influencers?

I feel some clients look solely at the influencer’s numbers and statistics without doing much homework, such as background checks about said influencer.

The hardest part about a campaign is finding the right fit. Everything has to match, from the influencer to the image of her brand, to the demographics of her followers and what are the platforms that would work best for the particular campaign, to name a few.

Sometimes when the campaign doesn’t produce results as per expected, clients immediately put the blame on influencers.

Some might even lose faith in social media marketing using influencers which I think can be a little unfair at times.

Marketing: How can marketers make the influencer-client relationship sweeter?

Be open in discussions with the influencer, and find out more about what the influencer thinks. Ultimately influencers should know their audience best. It would be great if the client allows space and flexibility for them to work their creativity.

Marketing: Who is an influencer you look up to? Any fellow local influencers you look up to?

Chriselle Lim, Jenn Im, Pony (make up), Notjessfashion. Locally, I look up to Dreachong and Xiaxue.

Marketing: What are some of your views on the influencer landscape locally and globally?

I feel that the Singapore’s social media market is still pretty new and we have a lot of room to grow. I’m looking forward to see how much we can stretch this in 2017!

Marketing: What’s next for you?

My goal for myself in 2017 is to really put my time and energy into building my brand by improving my content. I also aim to be more consistent and also put out quality work on my platforms. This year, I’m starting to shift my focus on YouTube and I’m still in the process of learning about video editing along the way. So far my viewers have been nothing but really kind and patient with me and I’m very blessed!

As for the future, I try not to think too much about it and take each day as it comes. Of course I hope to establish enough experience and influence first before moving onto think about greater things.

Read also: 
Now following: Xiaxue
Now following: Youtiao666
Now following: Andrea Chong
Now following: Jemma Wei
Now following: Saffron Sharpe
Now following: Cheekiemonkies
Now following: The Chill Mom
Now following: Eunice Annabel

Bias Alert: We nerd-heart the Premier League – England’s top-flight, globally watched professional football (soccer) league.

But even if we weren’t keen on the EPL or soccer, we’d still be telling our friends about the marketing genius Premier League club Southampton FC delivers in a two-part animated video that debuts the team’s 2017-18 kits.

Here’s the Reader Digest’s Version:

Four Southampton players race from their futuristic training facility to use their soccer-superhero powers to track down the evil villain who has stolen their team’s new uniform design. The villain is a disliked former manager, Ronald Koeman, who in real life left Southampton for a heftier payday at a bigger team (Everton).

In the end, the four Saints, as Southampton is nicknamed, defeat Koeman and his nefarious accomplices from rival soccer clubs. They then return to the Southampton facility where a geek-tastic computer hologram-thingy uploads the new uniforms on to them – thereby also introducing the jerseys, shorts and socks to fans who might like to purchase said items. There’s even a low-pressure call-to-action, “Pre-Order Now SouthamptonFC.com.”

To truly appreciate Southampton’s work, you have to watch the videos. It will only cost you about five minutes. Take the time – it’s entertaining and productive. Productive? Yep, because it could be a source of inspiration, or at least an edifying indication of how marketing is evolving – getting more creative and entertainment-driven to stand out in a media-saturated world and to compel buying action.

Watch the Videos

Episode 1

Episode 2

Watching the videos, we thought of something Brandon Brown, marketing director at Top 40 promo supplier SnugZ/USA (asi/88060), told us recently:

“Intrusive, interruptive, self-centered marketing no longer works the way it once did, and its effectiveness will only continue to diminish. What will replace the legacy model? There’s a one-word answer: Stories. Good content marketing moves the brand needle, increasing awareness, changing perception, and creating desire and drive to purchase.”

Indeed, Brandon. Indeed.

PATCHOGUE, N.Y., June 30, 2017 /PRNewswire-iReach/ — fishbat, a leading internet marketing agency, which combines proven digital marketing strategies that include search engine optimization (SEO), digital ads, and social media optimization (SMO) to help businesses increase profits, discusses six ways to use photo-sharing sites for B2B products.

Overlooking the power of visuals in online B2B outreach is a misstep that can have a big impact on a business’ competitive edge in today’s digital marketplace. Photo-sharing sites and utilization of photos, videos, infographics, and other visual elements in social media outreach, help brands to showcase products in a way that creates connections, commands attention, and drives traffic through SEO boosts.

1. Build targeted contacts Being targeted improves your conversion probability and increases your productivity. Building targeted contacts within photo-sharing sites helps to reach B2B decision makers, making social sharing efforts more productive. Build contacts through the industry, job titles, user interests, and other qualifiers, to increase product awareness with qualified buyers, drive up conversion, and increase social proof.
2. Optimize for SEO Photo-sharing sites create SEO potential. Include inbound links, URLs, meta tags, descriptions, keywords, and other SEO driving tactics to maximize the power of visuals on photo-sharing sites. Employing SEO driving factors will increase traffic to your business site and product-postings through improved search engine rankings and increased online visibility.
3. Include videos For products that are best seen in action, include videos on photo-sharing social media platforms. Videos command attention, communicate quickly and easily to the audience, drive traffic, and provide SEO juice. Demonstrating products in use via video adds validity to the products and generates interest from B2B decision makers. Videos are also more widely shared on social media than other forms of outreach, which will grow your social media visibility.
4. Add licenses and a vanity URLs Adding licenses to photos for B2B outreach generates free marketing from interested B2B connections, as well as the general viewing audience. Licenses enable linking and social mentions from those who take an interest and utilize the photos in their outreach. Including vanity URLs also promotes increased social sharing by making the brand and products easier to remember, therefore easier to share. Vanity URLs increase click-through rates on search engines and can contain specific targeted keywords to elicit sharing from a qualified B2B audience. This increases brand recognition within the industry and with B2B decision makers.
5. Real-time photo-sharing Photos and videos are the heroes of B2B product showcasing and promoting, but real-time sharing can take that to the next level. Real-time sharing creates urgency with the audience, drives SEO, and increases social sharing potential.

Digital marketing agency, fishbat is a full-service digital marketing firm that takes a holistic business approach to their clients’ digital marketing programs. The fishbat team understands the importance of business principles just as well as the nuances of the latest digital technologies. fishbat offers every digital marketing service available from digital marketing research and planning to brand development to website and asset creation through social media management and search engine optimization programs – all custom calibrated for both B2B and B2C businesses. 

Media Contact: Scott Darrohn, fishbat, 855-347-4228, [email protected]

News distributed by PR Newswire iReach: https://ireach.prnewswire.com

SOURCE fishbat

When I was a teenager, this time of year would be insufferable. My bedroom would be nearly 90 degrees Fahrenheit without air conditioning, but it wasn’t even particularly hot outside. I had at least five tower PCs running inside my bedroom, all contributing a lot of heat to my tiny little room. Each performed its own role in my home network, with a file server, domain server, Exchange server, and media center PC among them. All of those tower PCs are now inside my pocket, thanks to the iPhone.

I used to run a full Active Directory with individual organizational units and push out group policies to manage my family’s local PCs. I had a proxy server set up to control web access, and revoked administrator rights to ensure my family never installed malicious software. All of our email went through my Exchange server, and I had a custom app that pulled mail from ISP and Hotmail POP3 accounts and filtered it through an assortment of anti-spam tools before it was allowed to hit an Exchange inbox. All of my family’s important documents were stored on a file server, backed up in a RAID array. I even used Zip drives for the really important stuff. I was a true IT administrator, and I was only 15.

All of these PCs were built by hand, with custom cases, cooling configurations, and my own selection of processors or RAM. I laughed at the thought of having to buy a Toshiba or Packard Bell PC, and opted for AMD’s Athlon 64 processors. I’d build powerful gaming rigs and spend hours writing scripts to get a better field of view in games, or a slight advantage by squeezing out every single drop of performance by altering textures per map. I would enter contests and win better processors or RAM, upgrade my PC and push the older components down to my servers.

These servers were so powerful at the time that I was able to get push email on my phone, something you couldn’t really do back in 2002 unless you were a business using BlackBerry devices. I’d sit smugly reading my emails on a train with my iPAQ or one of the original HTC Pocket PC devices with a stylus. I couldn’t download apps from an app store for these phones because those stores didn’t even exist yet. Instead, I’d find apps on the internet and load them on, modifying the registry along the way to tweak things. I used to spend hours browsing on XDA-Developers for the latest ROMs, downloading and installing them to tweak and test the latest software and firmware. It was an exciting time, and I miss it.

All of that tinkering and hacking things ended for me shortly after the iPhone arrived, and the closest I’ve come to it recently is playing around with a Raspberry Pi and Kodi. The original iPhone was locked to O2 in the UK and ATT in the US, but a hack quickly allowed you to run the phone on any carrier network. I continued to use Windows Mobile devices for a couple of years, but I played with the iPhone on the side as it was always tempting. The interface was smooth, simple, and I didn’t have to spend hours loading on ROMs to get a good experience. Once the iPhone 3G arrived, I switched fully over because of the App Store.

Apple’s App Store and the iPhone have altered computing massively, beyond my own examples. Nokia, BlackBerry, Microsoft, Motorola, and Palm have all had their businesses disrupted by the iPhone. The iPhone’s impact has also shaped how we use PCs today, and our expectations of computing in general. Apple’s iPhone has been on the market for 10 years now, and it hasn’t experienced a single instance of a mass malware attack like we’ve seen twice in the past month on Windows PCs.

Apple’s locked down and sandboxed environment for apps is a new model that has succeeded with consumers and security. Sure, there have been vulnerabilities, bugs, and near misses, but nobody has been forced to pay $300 to unlock their iPhone after a huge malware attack.

iOS itself has also simplified the way we use computers. A lot of what was considered “computing” back in 2002 was done from a desktop PC, but you can browse the web, file your taxes, write documents, send emails, and so much more all from a tiny device in your pocket these days. Apple didn’t invent the smartphone, but it did pioneer its simplicity and the idea of an App Store. Google has followed some of those examples, albeit with a more open Android operating system, and Microsoft responded with its own locked down mobile OS that focused on ease of use.

Even devices that we’d consider “traditional” computing have been impacted by the iPhone. Chromebooks are locked down with an app store, the iPad Pro continues to push what can be done with a tablet, and now Windows 10 S tries to answer both with an OS that only runs Windows Store apps. Windows 8, Chromebooks, and Android all probably wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the iPhone.

When I look at modern PCs, tablets, and phones now I’m surprised at the simplicity of them. Not all of them are perfect, but technology is rapidly turning into something in the background that’s accessible to everyone and doesn’t require hours of configuration. I miss the thrill of hacking away and tinkering, but as I shout to Alexa to turn off my lights at night I can’t help but appreciate just how easy everything is now.