Change is exciting! The vibrancy is felt inside AskAnny’s office in Glendale, CA. With a friendly and dynamic young core of account managers, copywriters, animators, and graphic designers, the office is teeming with creativity, dedication to the craft, and cold-blooded hunger to succeed and be great at their chosen expertise.
Ally Trust, AskAnny’s CEO, couldn’t be happier. From a small start-up that wanted to help small businesses thrive to a company embracing and accepting the challenges they face today, AskAnny is broadening their horizon by integrating multimedia advertising: traditional, digital, outdoor, and print media.
With growing platforms and clients, Ms. Trust is not losing sight of what got her company to the top: keeping small businesses an irreplaceable backbone of our economy.
We sat with Ms. Trust to talk about the progress and changes in AskAnny.com.
Q: What led you to include multimedia integration in AskAnny.com’s services?
A: We always start a project with our clients in mind. So the idea behind the multimedia integration was a practical one. We want to help them by providing their essential advertising needs. When we were working on a client’s brand, we found that using only one form of media is insufficient to help small businesses grow their company. Their clients, or people in general, use and see different platforms on a daily basis. Focusing on digital marketing alone is not enough. Most of us watch TV shows, either through cable or through websites such as Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon. Even with the rise of internet and satellite radio, we still listen to FM and AM radio. And billboards and posters are still widely used as outdoor forms of print media.
We saw and understood the need to utilize other channels to connect and interact with our clients’ targeted audiences. When conducting research, deploying campaigns, and designing ads in different formats, you need to use several marketing companies. Instead of going to multiple ad agencies for different projects, which cost a lot of time and money, we asked ourselves, “Why can’t we just be a one-stop-shop for our clients?” We all agreed that this will benefit our clients.
Our team views this change as a challenge to explore our creativity, while helping our clients’ expand their target audiences. This is why we, as AskAnny.com, took the approach of integrating cross media advertising to our work.
Q: How does AskAnny define teamwork?
A: Everything starts with our morning cup of coffee and stories of our weekend shenanigans. That is how the backbone of our teamwork begins. Our diverse team share daily experiences that cultivate and nourish the creative process to complete some of our on-going campaigns. After all, we create and develop an enjoyable experience for our clients’ prospective customers.
Through this process, the creativity and teamwork of our highly skilled copywriters, account managers, developers, animators, and designers combine their gifts to create captivating webpages, ads, videos, posters, or any marketing services our clients need. Until a campaign is finished and completed, no ideas or opinions from any of our team go unheard. This is how we define teamwork: To come up with a great campaign with excellent consumer experience, we value the experiences and voices of each individual in our team.
Q: In terms of generating results for your clients, how is the creative process like for the AskAnny design team?
A: First, we look at projects not as problems, but as puzzles that need to be put together. Once that’s settled, we start on the fun part of building the puzzle: we piece it together by creating an outline. The outline guides us as we collectively discuss our current projects. We start piecing the puzzle together by assigning specific tasks to our team members. We regroup once we all have completed and conceptualized our pieces of the puzzle. We adjust our ideas to fit the different channels, whether it’s TV, radio, digital, or print. One example is a Los Angeles-based construction firm.
They came to us for assistance with marketing and website optimization. Our designers, copywriters, and SEO strategists all sat down and discussed the needs for our client. We assigned tasks to our team members. Once the tasks were completed, we laid out a beautiful strategy to help create traffic on our client’s website. We optimized their site so they would rank higher in search engine results. At the same time, we crafted elegant landing pages that invite prospective customers to visit our client’s site.
Q: The whole idea of multimedia integration sounds pricey. Am I right?
A: Not at all. I don’t consider the services we provide as pricey or expensive. Our prices are not set. Depending on our client’s needs, budget, and continuity of their advertising campaigns, the price of the service vary on a case-to-case basis. By having flexible plans and budget, I believe we are providing a great service to small businesses because we show them options that fit their need and budget. Also, we can cut down costs for some projects because we have built great rapport and relationship across different types of advertising channels such as TV, radio, outdoor, print, or digital.
Q: How does AskAnny measure campaign results?
A: In terms of digital advertising, you can see our client’s progress through search engine results, because their website now rank higher than before AskAnny helped optimize their online presence. While we can measure results by the number of visits on our client’s website or increase in profit, but you can also see and feel the results based on the compliments our clients’ received and the number of satisfied and smiling customers they’ve helped.
Q: Why should prospective clients choose AskAnny as their multimedia/cross media advertiser over your competitors?
A: We are original and we work with the same intensity. Whether we are handling a small or a big project, we always pour our hearts out. We are always happy that the projects we worked on came to life. It doesn’t matter if our name comes up in the credits or not. The important part for us is that we celebrate our customer’s success.
