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When it comes to running a focus group that will provide your company with critical information about its brand, products and services, Davis Advertising is the place to go. The information you gain here will help you improve your offerings, better meet your customers’ needs and attract new clientele. At Davis, your company’s growth is our goal.

Davis Advertising’s staff is one creative, ambitious, well-educated, business savvy, experienced, arts/music/literature-loving, and community- and family-oriented bunch—and all the more so when you mash our DavisAd.com profiles into one.

So without further ado, here we are, Mr/s. Davis Advertising:

Artistic Sensibilities, Abilities and Training

Mr/s. Davis Advertising loves art, pure and simple. S/he loves art in all of its forms, from painting to photography to video to graphic design to the art of sound to the art of literature. S/he loves art when s/he’s at work, where s/he cherishes the challenge of—the art of—bringing out the best in brands, and s/he loves art when s/he’s away from the office.

At home s/he likes to read but s/he keeps the couch-sitting to a minimum, preferring instead to get crafty by sewing, drawing, playing the guitar, drumming, writing music, painting (s/he has a particular fondness for large-scale acrylic painting, and is greatly influenced by the work of surrealist painter Salvador Dali and poster artist Rick Griffin), poetry and photography. But sometimes even that’s not enough. S/he gets antsy so she gets out on the road, seeking other creative opportunities; for example, s/he loves underwater photography and has a special interest in photographing the elusive hammerhead that has narrowly evaded h(er)im several times before.

The growth of Davis Advertising is taking many forms: an expanding client list, a flowering of creativity and an explosion of web-based work to name a few. But perhaps the most interesting and exciting development is the amount of visual effects and animation, including 3D Animation, Motion Graphics, 3D Tracking and compositing, being produced at Davis these days.

As this collection of recent animation for clients such as Honey Dew and Webster First demonstrates, animation gives brands and companies a unique personality—it tells customers that you provide an extraordinary experience they won’t find anywhere else.

At Davis Advertising animation is created in-house, spearheaded by our amazing Animator Imer Diaz. Diaz collaborates with the Art, Creative, Video and Audio teams to make logos dance and animated and cartoon characters play roles and tell stories.

As Davis Advertising gets ready for a commercial shoot this week that includes an animal (okay, one of us in animal costume), we’re reflecting on the widespread use of creatures in advertising.

From the cartoon-animated to the computer-generated to the costumed and even the genuine, animals are selling everything from potato chips to insurance.

Coupons date back to the late 1800s, when Asa Candler, a Coca-Cola partner, distributed handwritten tickets for free glasses of Cola in 1887. Clearly, it worked. Within 20 years, one in nine Americans had received a free Coke, and we all know what happened after that—we became addicted, the Coca-Cola company became an international success, and couponing became a widespread business tactic.

Today we’re seeing another great leap in coupons, mobile coupons, and like their forebears they are one of the best ways to bring customers to your retail establishment.

Unfortunately, many businesses still fear mobile coupons, even though they have no reason to. But more on that later. First let’s talk about why mobile coupons are taking off.

Could Craigslist be a source of inspiration for advertising copywriters?

The writing on CL forms a genre all its own, with ads ranging from the purely straightforward to the ridiculous, outrageous, hilarious, desperate and self-indulgent. Say what you want about this online classifieds site, but many of the postings are nothing short of creative genius.

Business owners are renowned control freaks, and that’s often a good thing. After all, you want to know and, to a certain extent, manage each and every aspect of your business in order to ensure your vision is being met. Perhaps that’s why some business owners fear the “business directory” corner of social media; it’s a land where anyone with a keyboard can say nearly anything they please about the services and products you offer.

Social media marketers (such as Davis Advertising’s expert and creative web development team) will tell you, however, that there is nothing to fear. Yelp, Yahoo! Local, Citysearch and the rest should be managed just as one would manage any other marketing messages pertaining to your business.

When Marissa Mayer ended Yahoo’s work-from-home policy, a debate erupted in the media and in break rooms everywhere, questioning the merit of the decision. The magnitude of the ensuing uproar is due to the fact that she called into question issues that all workers deal with, not just those working at Yahoo: the very nature of work—productivity, creativity and innovation. Shortly following her decision, Best Buy terminated its own Results Only Work Environment, begging the question: if it’s not about results, what is it about?

Many people wondered if this was the start of the end for working-at-home. After all, if a new mother thought it was a bad idea, doesn’t that say something?

Countless articles and video tributes have been produced recently about the history of the Big East conference, now that the conference has lost many of its original schools and will soon be renamed.

One nugget, however, caught our eye. In the Alexander Wolff article published in Sports Illustrated, “Pearl, In the Lane, With the Kiss,” Wolff describes how the conference got its original name, way back in 1979:

We live in a connected age with a rapidly growing percentage of the population always online—carrying mini-computers with phone capabilities, do-it-all tablets and even “books” capable of browsing.

A large percentage of time spent online can be considered passive shopping, or a precursor to active shopping.  This can take the form of reading reviews of new products on blogs (frequently the result of free samples sent to bloggers), scanning Pinterest for new spring fashions or sitting through commercial breaks while watching a show on Hulu Plus.

At the same time, mobile browsing is taking up a larger portion of overall internet usage.  So, why hasn’t mobile advertising received the attention, respect or funds to match that growth?