Advertise & grow your business with Unified

View our latest Facebook advert for local business, Sapphire Studios

 
 

There’s never been a better time to make what you love your life, by starting up a business of your own. So what makes ‘now’ so special?

It’s no secret: social networking is massive. Geet massive. ‘Geet’ means ‘very’, if you’re not from our neck of the woods. So it’s very massive. So that’s one of the reasons it’s never been a better time to start and grow a small business. Something else is fairly obvious in this equation, and it’s that advertising works. That’s why businesses pay literally millions of dollars to have their services and products advertised during something like the Super Bowl. And that’s just for the slot - never mind the production costs of the advert itself.

These days, effective advertising isn’t something only enormous businesses and corporations can afford. Although television & print advertising remains effective, the internet has levelled the playing field somewhat. Or at the very least, it’s given new businesses a way of targeting and exposing themselves to their audiences for prices that are actually affordable to most people.

Facebook, for example, allows business owners to set themselves up and promote themselves organically for free - with an option to take advantage of their marketing and targeting algorithms for small amounts of money. Of course, you can reach more people with more money, but the scaling is something every tier of budget can afford. From £10 to £10,000 - you set your budget, and the amount you pay determines the amount of people who will see your advert. And you get to choose exactly who sees your advert, so only the folk who are likely to be interested in your product will be exposed to it. Once again, for peanuts, in a relative sense.

So the sudden ubiquitous nature of Facebook makes it much easier for people to actually start businesses, as they no longer require massive amounts of initial investment & risk just to get in front of people’s faces. You can inch forward in a way that’s comfortable with you, and commensurate with your growth.

But what are you going to advertise with? Well, another thing that’s shifted is how much more affordable it is to have adverts produced for you. Camera technology has come on considerably (as in, as is the case with all technological arcs - increasingly cheaper and more compact and accessible) and so now it’s possible to have a small video production business like ours to provide video content that is actually affordable to the majority.

It’s looking like the only way is up, as social networking isn’t likely to go anywhere any time soon. It’s here to stay, and with it the opportunities to provide other people with information in an immediate and cost effective way. If you’ve got a sound service and a competent product and you’re wiling to invest everything from a little to a lot, this is one of the best ways you can get it out there and in front of your audience. On a more general and thoroughly positive note, this whole situation is proving extremely beneficial for personal, national and global economic growth, too.

Not only are you improving your world, but the world, when you choose to start a business, and allow what you love and what you’re good at to fully manifest.

Why advertise & grow your business with Unified?

The problem with advertising is that there is a lot of it. People are savvy to the ways of advertising. They understand it more than ever, and more than ever are they aware of the disingenuous side of marketing. Not all businesses are truthful and operate on integrity - some use cheap tricks to sell their message, product or service, ranging from the manipulative to the full on deceptive.

As a result, advertising is like the boy who cried wolf - it can be hard to believe. We’re so used to being bombarded with messages that they’ve become trivialised. No longer do we believe that products can solve all of our problems, or claim to make us eternally happy if we buy them.

We do, however, know that products and services can and do benefit our lives, and have brought us a level of comfort, leisure and amenity never before seen in human history. We also know that there are people out there so competent, genuine and passionate about what they do, that they’re worth listening to, and worth our hard earned money. The issue is, if you are all of those things, how do you get that across to an audience in a way that makes it obvious that those things are true about you? Of course adverts are going to claim that the product is those things - but how does your audience know it can trust you?

That’s where we come in, we would say. And so would our clients. How we do things different, and how we promote your product or service is in that we tell the truth. We find the heart and the truth in your business, in you, in what you’re offering the world, and we hold up what is already there to your audience. We don’t create propaganda. We tell a story. The story of who you are, what you’ve created, and, truthfully, what you’re offering. If what you’ve created is something you’re good at, something you do well, then all we need to do is be honest about that in a creative and engaging way. You have to build trust between you and your customers, and the business that does that well, these days, for reasons mentioned earlier, are the ones that succeed and thrive. People are wise to the BS, it would seem, and so, only the truth will do.

So if you’re thinking of investing in a powerful trust-building tool such as an advertisement created for you by ourselves, get in touch. We’d love to talk to you about you, your story, and the most creative and effective way of making you the most natural choice to your customers.

- Jon & the boys @ Unified

A film we made for England Rugby

If you’ve watched our latest video blog (featured in the last blog post) you’ll know that we recently worked on a film for England Rugby. The film was used as part of England Rugby’s Keep Your Boots On campaign, which encourages future-match officials out there to take the challenge and take the whistle.

We really enjoyed working on this one, especially as our experience with it has shown us just how much individuals can benefit themselves and others by taking on a responsibility such as rugby match-officiating. For many out there, it may well be their path to being their best selves, and so we’re chuffed to have played a part in that.

Much love,

Jon, and the boys at Unified.

'8eyes' - an abstract glimpse into the lives and perspectives of Unified

A year or so back, each of us made three 15 second films for '8 Eyes', a feature we'd planned on doing regularly. At the time, our friend Kyle* was still part of Unified, hence eight eyes instead of six. Each 15 second film would then be cut together to make a single 1 minute film, possibly to work with Instagram if I remember correctly. I've often slammed the 60-second instagram cap, yet I suppose it can also give you a sort of finite condition and structure to work within, which can be good. I'll be doing a blog on that topic very soon, as it relates to a film we made this year for England Rugby, who hired us to take on a challenging brief after the success of our Durham RFU Women & Girls film.

But anyway - the motivation for this feature? Well since you asked, you see, the films we make as Unified Media are always filtered through the unified filter and joint-perspective of all of us, and so this was a sort of excuse to make something individually, where we could each produce a film without having it subject to feedback from each other. We just wanted to do something fun and just for us, some kind of Frankenstein film, where we'd stitch different body parts together to see if they wouldn't come to life.

There was only one criteria: each person's film had to in some way be representative of their own life (perspective/eyes) at the time they were made, and so these are what resulted. They're definitely weirder and more abstract than our usual films, and perhaps that serves as a sort of metaphor for what we'd be like if we were each left to our own devices. In any case, I've always really like watching these, and find them deeply evocative of the time they were made. The music was also produced by our very own Ryan, which gives them a veneer of heightened 'us-ness'. 

We did three lots of them before shifting our attention to films for clients, and so like my 6th hamster once my family finally got a puppy (sorry, Hammie) '8 Eyes' was kinda' neglected. There's a good chance we'll do more in future, but these are the full wack for now.  

Anyway, here they are. We hope you enjoy, and as always, let us know what you think!

- Jon, and the boys at Unified

*Kyle will always be the 4th member of Unified, though he has since moved on to other creative endeavours. We'll be putting out a full blog about him soon, as he's a fundamental and crucial part of the Unified story, and one of our best friends. Enough of the mushy Sh-.... show of emotion, though, it's time for the films...