MOB Media, Inc. News

MOB Media print design featured in For Profit College Article

Laura LaCommare — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 16:53:49 GMT

By acquiring regional accreditation, trade and online colleges gain a credential usually associated with the traditional academic culture of liberal arts, faculty scholarship and selective admissions. Normally the accreditation process takes about five years and requires evaluations by outside professors.

Enrollment at Grand Canyon University, a Christian college in Phoenix bought by investors in 2004, has soared to 37,700, as of Dec. 31, up from 1,500, said Brian Mueller, chief executive of Grand Canyon Education Inc. Ninety-two percent of students now take classes online, according to the company's most recent 10-K. Bridgepoint Education Inc., based in San Diego, has boosted enrollment of two regionally accredited colleges it bought in 2005 and 2007 to 53,688 students as of Dec. 31, up from 400 combined, according to a company filing. Ninety-nine percent of those students take courses exclusively online.

Daniel Webster "could parallel Grand Canyon or Bridgepoint's growth curve," said Clifford, who was part of the investor group that purchased Grand Canyon.

ITT Educational declined to comment for this story. The company plans to open more Daniel Webster campuses and also expand online offerings, Kevin Modany, ITT Educational's chairman and chief executive officer, said in a Feb. 22 presentation to analysts. The company expects to introduce programs including accounting, education and health sciences, he said.

The U.S. Department of Education, which doled out $129 billion in federal financial aid to students at accredited postsecondary schools in the year ended Sept. 30, is examining whether these kinds of acquisitions circumvent a federal law that new for-profit colleges can't qualify for assistance for two years, Deputy Undersecretary of Education Robert Shireman said in a telephone interview.

Under federal regulations taking effect July 1, accrediting bodies may also have to notify the secretary of education if enrollment at a college with online courses increases more than 50 percent in one year.

Buying accreditation lets the new owners benefit immediately from federal student aid, which provides more than 80 percent of revenue for some for-profit colleges, instead of having to wait at least two years. Traditional colleges are also more inclined to offer transfer credits for courses taken at regionally approved institutions, making it easier to attract students nationwide.

While accrediting bodies treat these purchases as changes of ownership, the acquisitions, in reality, create new colleges that should be required to earn certification from scratch, Kinser said.

For accreditation to continue once the college is sold, the buyer must promise not to change its mission, Steven Crow, former executive director of the Chicago-based Higher Learning Commission, the largest regional body, said in a telephone interview. Once accreditation is maintained, the acquirer seeks permission, which is usually granted, to start branch campuses and online programs, Crow said.

Obama administration officials recently have questioned whether the accreditation system is effective in protecting academic standards. Accrediting decisions lack transparency and take too long, Undersecretary of Education Martha Kanter said in a Jan. 26 speech in Washington to the annual meeting of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation.

Regional accreditation is worth $10 million to a for-profit acquirer, Clifford said in a telephone interview. That's how much it would cost to start a regionally accredited college, a process that can take 10 years and has only a 50-50 chance of success, he said. On top of the $10 million, buyers typically pay $23,000 to $50,000 per enrolled student, making the purchase of Daniel Webster a bargain, Clifford said.

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Harrier Industries chooses MOB Media to be Marketing Partner

Gary J. Millea — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 12:25:21 GMT

Harrier Industries, LLC has chosen MOB Media, Inc. to develop a corporate brand and identity. In addition, MOB Media, Inc. has been assigned the task of defining distinct product brands which align with Harrier Industries, LLC corporate identity.

MOB Media, Inc. has entered into an agency retainer to handle all graphic design responsibilities including logo development, graphic standards creating, corporate identity collateral, product packaging design, web site design and trade show booth design. Harrier Industries, LLC is a manufacturer of air compressors and air tools with distribution in North America, Central and South America.

MOB Media Awarded Statewide Social Marketing Contract

raina.garcia — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:29:22 GMT

MOB Media was selected by UC Berkeley to lead development of media strategy, research and buying for California’s campaign to combat heat illness and heat related deaths among agricultural and outdoor workers in the state.

MOB Media will place nearly $500,000 in media to educate workers, managers and owners of agricultural, construction and landscaping organizations regarding the deadly consequences of heat related Illness. The campaign is slated to begin in Spring of 2010 and run through the summer months.

OnAAiR: Episode 18 – MOB Media

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 15:16:00 GMT

This week I sat down with the boys from MOB Media. I got to hear how they started their shop from humble beginnings and turned it into successful media company. Enjoy the interview!

See you next week!
-M

OnAAiR: Episode 18 – MOB Media
http://www.onaair.com/

Top 5 SEO No-no's

raina.garcia — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:56:33 GMT

As a SEO professional the majority of my time is spent correcting the SEO errors and mistakes made by my customers. The art of effective SEO optimization is convoluted with many variables, and although you can Google SEO optimization and find literally thousands of results on the subject with tips, tricks, and strategies; until you remove all unfriendly SEO code your site is doomed in gaining prominent placement on the SERPs.

Avoid the use of flash, DHTML, and internal java script. These coding practices offer slick visual enhancements, but are some of the biggest SEO killers. Search engine spiders see flash objects as big chunks of empty web space because there isn’t an effective SEO method to tag them to be crawled by the spiders. If you are using flash for photo slideshows then convert them into pop-up pages and reinforce them with keyword rich content and anchor text.

DHTML and link roll over effects bloat the html coding of your website and remove the important “alt” and image “title” tags which help to further weaken your SEO ranking potential. The best menu linking method is “text” based links with keyword rich anchor text. The same goes for internal java scripting. This coding just pushes your relevant content down further into your code and slows the search engine spiders crawling your site. Convert your internal scripts into external .js applets and drop them on a folder in your site.
Non-unique, duplicate, or non-relevant content. Your websites content should be fresh and always match and relate to your sites niche. If you are selling party supplies then it would be a bad idea to have pages or content about bowling balls. Duplicate or redundant content is a big no-no as well; part of the Google PR algorithm is based on fresh relevant content.
Keyword stuffing and hidden text. Google and the other major search engines view these practices as spamming and can get your sites sandboxed (dropped so low on the SERPs that no one will ever find it!) or banned altogether. Keep your keyword density to no more than 5%, and never use hidden text.
Poor Meta data. Your Meta data is the information that tells the search engine spiders what each page of your site is about and how it relates to your content. Research your keywords and phrases and always a unique keyword rich title for each page, avoiding stop words like “and, or, the, if, it, were”. Keep your title to 57 characters or less. Your description tag should be short and no longer than a sentence or two. Your keyword tag should always have your primary keyword first, and that keyword should also be in the first sentence on your page content. Don’t bloat this tag with dozens of keywords; this will only hurt your ranking potential. Use no more than 10-12 per page and build landing or gateway pages to promote additional keywords.
Always use alt, link, and header (H1, H2, Etc) tags. Each image and hyperlink on your site is meaning less to the search engine spiders if it isn’t tagged with relevant keyword descriptive phrases. When tagging your menu links never use tags like “click here”, etc. and always be descriptive. Your content needs to be user-friendly first then SEO friendly. Avoid long paragraphs. Use bullets and numbering to summarize and break up long text. This will make your key points stand out to your web visitors and to the search engine spiders as well. Always use header tags to highlight important information. A trick I always us is I start off using the H2 tag at the top of my pages and use the H1 tag further down. It seems that almost every SEO tech starts off with the H1 tag and this has caused the major search engines to give less weight to the H1 tag as a result. This doesn’t mean it is useless, but when used second or third I have noticed better results.

There are so many important strategies in achieving top ranking on Google and the other search engines, but by getting back to the basics and making your site SEO and user friendly, you will have a clean web pallet to work with and build upon.

Keep your site filled with fresh and relevant content, avoid “Black Hat” and deceptive practices, while keeping your pages easy to navigate and informative. By doing this your site will gain higher SERPs long before those who disregard or do not follow SEO's best practices!

MOB Media Salutes Partnership with Heald College

admin — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 23:10:51 GMT

Heald College is a 145-year old West Coast educational institution currently with 11 campuses in California, Oregon, and Hawaii. In 2007 Heald College called upon the services of Orange County veteran media and marketing agency, MOB Media Inc., to aid them with a struggling campus in Portland, Oregon and to revive their media strategy overall.

When MOB Media became involved, the Portland campus was slated to close due to low attendance. MOB Media investigated the unique features of Heald College, their programs, their geographic markets, their student demographics, and market potential of new students within driving distance of each campus. MOB Media additionally targeted print and TV advertising to specific economic and ethnic groups that those audiences could relate to and were well represented on the campuses.

After partnering closely with the college to identify their needs and ideal target markets, MOB Media instituted innovative media strategy and cross-channel campaigns that quickly revived new student enrollments and turned the Portland campus around. New enrollments skyrocketed and impressively, the Portland campus exploded with new student growth so much so that the Portland campus had to move to a larger facility to accommodate a much larger student population.

MOB Media continues to run successful and cost-effective high-volume, highly-complex media campaigns for Heald College campuses leveraging their budget for ideal media placement and continuing levels of increasing enrollment among their ideal student populations.

A successful market analysis for Heald College

admin — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 23:09:18 GMT

The pressure is on. Decreasing budgets and increasing ROI expectations make intelligent marketing decisions more crucial than ever. MOB Media recently provided in-depth market analysis intelligence for a major educational institution, enabling them to make an educated decision on whether to invest in expansion in a new market.

Company Newsletters Go Video

raina.garcia — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 14:02:00 GMT

-MaryAnn Frattarole, Search Marketing Strategist

In today’s visual world, we are quickly moving from a reading society to a viewing society. This is interestingly true in everyday business applications such as corporate news and company newsletters. It has been a long held belief that Gen-Y now entering the workforce, having been raised with computers and video games, need visual stimulation, audio, and other advanced features to capture their attention.

Other industry experts push for visual mediums for all ages because of information overload, busy schedules, and the fact that people skim now instead of read, often overlooking the detail companies need to convey to customers, employees, and the public. I can foresee a future day when video is available on every street corner, in every retail store, and at every transportation terminal with a touch screen that provides a wide variety of languages for global users.

For today’s use, video is a valuable tool to convey important announcements from the President or CEO to the organization, new product training for internal employees before the product is released to the public, general organizational news, HR updates, and more. A functional use is to email a demonstration or instructional video to customers on how to assemble or use a company’s product.

MOB Media’s VP and CEO, Paul Otis recently stated “Our clients find a great deal of success and increased ROI from incorporating video into everything from Web sites to email newsletters, sales presentations and more. Of course, traditional broadcast as an advertising medium remains strong. Digital video has been around for a few years now, but is just emerging as the chosen standard for professional organizations to communicate products and services, news, ideas, and results-oriented communications to their employees and customers.”

In these modern times, a picture is still worth a thousand words and video communicates in seconds what would take pages of explanation to convey. Whether you’re publishing a company newsletter or want to convey information to a wide customer base, consider the cost benefits and increased viewership of video. You’ll achieve much high compliance with videos being viewed than documents being read and thereby accomplish your business goals.

Advertising ROI Takes a Leap with VEIL Encoding

raina.garcia — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:26:00 GMT

-MaryAnn Frattarole, Search Marketing Strategist

Orange County advertising agency veterans MOB Media, Inc. in conjunction with MOB Media Studios video production has teamed up to offer a leap in advertising ROI through VEIL Encoding for broadcast video.

Video Encoded Invisible Light (VEIL) is a technology for encoding low-bandwidth digital data bitstream in video signal, and is a fairly recent technology that provides a truly valuable and viable method of tracking and verifying broadcast video.

For “non-techie” folks, this means that each frame of the video is encoded with an invisible tracking code that enables fast and automatic verification of broadcasts and the tracking of direct responses to each broadcast. In the “old days” of 2006 and earlier, media staffers would have to collect affidavits from stations for each and every broadcast to prove that a paid spot aired, and in addition create an assumption that a particular ad would result in direct response calls during a certain time period.

For instance, if a spot was paid to run at 3:00pm an assumption would have to be made that direct response calls for that ad would come in between 3:00pm and 4:00 pm. Then, a media staffer would have to wade through a tedious line by line call report and pull and match each direct response call to try to match it to that ad to measure the ROI of that advertising. Unfortunately, this old manual method resulted in lost results for responses outside the predicted response window degrading the advertising ROI.

VEIL encoding technology offered by MOB Media, is an invisible tracking code embedded right in the video that is automatically read and verified for the date, time, and station on which the spot aired. In addition, software tracks direct response rates to those ads. MOB Media can verify ads within 24 hours and provide detailed reports to clients that used to take tens of hours to be prepared manually.

This technology, once reserved for Hollywood and Los Angeles broadcast studios, is now available in Orange County either through the encoding of your existing video, or as an addition to your broadcast-quality video production projects filmed by MOB Media Studios professionals.

Their Web site: www.mobmediastudios.com offers an array of video samples from top clients including TV commercials, viral videos, online video, and more.

For more information on VEIL Encoding, or video production services, contact MOB Media Studios @ (949) 222-0220.

Email: info@mobmedia.com

Blended Passion

raina.garcia — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Jeff Monroe didn’t see a difference between the creativity of the artist and the creativity of the software engineer, so he co-founded a company that melded the two and provided him an outlet for both of his passions.

“You don’t have to pick between the two,” Monroe, a 1992 alumnus of the Bren School said. “Creativity isn’t in the realm of classic design or artistic skills. Creativity is about how you attack a problem and how you solve it.”

While still an undergraduate at UC Irvine, Monroe and two other partners founded MOB Media, a company that provides media and marketing solutions for local businesses. The company recently celebrated its 20th anniversary and generated $20 million of revenue last year.

“We wanted to do something a little different,” Monroe said. “We didn’t want to be the typical agency that had a very narrow niche that they operated in, we are very generalist.”

At MOB Media, Monroe’s role at the company is one of a generalist too. He does everything from management to programming.

LOOKING FOR A CHALLENGE

Monroe was always a techie kid, pulling things apart and putting them back together.

“But that didn’t mean I didn’t have screws left over,” Monroe recalled with a smile.

When it came time to pursue a career path, Monroe initially attended Devry for a technical degree but found that the classes were too easy for him. He wanted more of challenge, something he found at UC Irvine, although he feels vocational schools have their place for some students.

“The experience of being at a research university as opposed to a vocational school was very beneficial,” Monroe said. “At a research university, like UC Irvine, the bar is set pretty high and the students are pushed to excel. You either sank or swam in the ICS program.”

Monroe credits his UCI education for honing his analytical skills.

“The ability to see a problem, analyze it and find solutions to it quickly without having to go down a development path and find out it was a dead end,” Monroe said.

CHANGING CHORDS

Monroe admits that there are some days where the technology side of the business can get monotonous and he can get discouraged from pressing on. But by switching chords, he finds a way to break the monotony and return later reinvigorated.

“Creatively your going to reach plateaus. There are going to be points in your life where you say, you know what, I just don’t want to go on because it seems like I’ve done everything there is to do,” Monroe said. “But you just have to look outside of your small little world your operating in and you can find other opportunities.”

Monroe does this by pursuing his passion of guitar playing and through the production of a reality TV show called House of Shred which is about building guitars.

“I played the guitar as a kid before putting it down, never really knowing how to read sheet music, then during my 30s I decided that it was going to be something I mastered,” Monroe said. “It gives me the opportunity to flex myself in other ways.”

Monroe stressed that current students should look to something outside of computer science they can turn to that will allow them to free their minds for a little while.

“Try to find a hobby or interest outside of the realm of computer science, something that you can get away from even if it is just reading something you can disconnect from the world for a while and helps you have dreams,” Monroe said. “If you can’t dream it you’re never going to achieve it.”

A current project Monroe and his team are working on is a commuter solution website for the Orange County Transportation Authority.

“What is groundbreaking about this project is utilizing social networking to create communities where people can connect and create these carpools and vanpools,” Monroe said. “Before, you couldn’t use the Internet to really facilitate that.”

The social networking tools Monroe and his team are creating will make carpooling easier by allowing groups of individuals to get answers to questions such as who in my area can I carpool with.

“My education at UC Irvine definitely helped give me the skills to succeed in this field that blends both advertising and technology,” Monroe said.

Despite the fun he has running his own business, he cautions that while running your own company can be fun and exciting, it competes for your time, because even when you go home, you are never really done working.

“If you are married, like I am, owning a business is like having a mistress, at least that is what my wife tells me,” Monroe said.

Article by ekowalik