BRAND IQ NOTES

PersoniCom and Brand IQ Creative are proud to announce their partnership and the most advanced personalized video solution on the market. “By merging our platforms and industry-specific knowledge, our companies have combined the best practices in higher education and corporate sectors to provide PIVOT 2.0, a one-of-a-kind video platform that is unmatched in the higher education industry,” said Cecil Foster, Managing Partner of Brand IQ Creative. “To engage your audience, sometimes you have to shake things up and do something amazing. PIVOT 2.0 allows our partners to do just that.”

Brand IQ Creative specializes in empowering the higher education sector with transformative technologies that have been proven across multiple industries. Approaching a decade of experience with personalized media helping enrollment offices, student life, human resources, and alumni services, Brand IQ is committed to providing these innovative solutions at an affordable cost, ensuring that its clients can engage students without compromising their budgets.
PersoniCom, on the other hand, focuses on the corporate sector, providing personalized video solutions that are tailored to meet the unique needs of each client. With almost two decades of experience, PersoniCom has been the longest continuously operating provider of personalized media communications in existence. Establishing a reputation as a leader for delivering high-quality, personalized video content that helps businesses connect with their customers and drive revenue growth.

Together, PersoniCom and Brand IQ Creative have emerged as the leaders in higher education personalized videos, serving clients across multiple continents. With features that are not available in any other solution on the market, PIVOT 2.0 is designed to help institutions engage with their students in a way that is more meaningful and effective.

"We are thrilled to be partnering with Brand IQ to offer PIVOT 2.0," said Scott Smith the CEO of PersoniCom. "Together, we are committed to providing the Higher Education Sector with exceptional service and dedication to their ongoing success. We are confident that our joint efforts will revolutionize the personalized video industry, and we look forward to the continued growth and success of PIVOT 2.0."

PIVOT 2.0 is expected to enhance the way institutions engage with their students, providing a level of personalization that helps create a more personal and emotional connection. With its advanced features and affordable pricing, PIVOT 2.0 is set to become the go-to solution for institutions looking to augment the engagement experience between students and institutions throughout the various stages of the student life cycle.

As one of the many interns of the this year's Brand IQ Intern class, I am happy to say this summer has been an incredible experience. Coming into the summer, I had very few expectations for what an internship at Brand IQ would look like. However, as I spend my last week finalizing projects and preparing to leave, I have a plethora of lessons learned. Here are five to hopefully shed a light on the Brand IQ Intern experience:

1. Collaboration is Key. The nature of Brand IQ’s creative process fosters a spirit of collaboration amidst the entire company. From discovery to the support aspect of each project, you can find everyone from Client Relations employees to Research and Branding interns working together to find solutions. In the office, the Interns have a row of shareable desks all within a few feet of one another. At the beginning of the summer, we remained at our desks, quiet and focused. Yet by the end we were walking (or in my case wheeling!) from one desk to another, throwing ideas back and forth about projects our divisions were working on. Some of Brand IQ’s best work is done when collaboration is at the heart of the project.

2. Flexibility. Brand IQ is a creative company that is continually evolving, just like the Intern program. Some days I would be working on a project, then an RFP would appear and my priorities changed. In other cases, we would have a project planned from the beginning of the summer that changed course due to client needs and current projects. Learning this lesson of flexibility was hard, but is a testament to the entire creative industry. Brand IQ tackles this flexibility with ease, always willing to adjust a timeline or expectations to meet our clients needs.

3. A Time to Work and a Time to Play! Being a part of the Brand IQ team taught me the art of balance. This is a company filled with extremely hardworking people, as well as hard working interns. However, work does not have to be boring. Whether sitting in on a brainstorm, helping on a video shoot or eating ice cream from the office freezer (that's right - FREE ice cream!), Brand IQ’s employees are the opposite of boring. Each person has a different personality that is so unique, but it all works together to produce exceptional client solutions. The Brand IQ team strives to pair complementary personalities with clients, employees and interns alike. Truly, if you are a client of Brand IQ, I am pretty jealous.

4. If You Ask, You Will Receive. As a Client Relations Intern, I had my own projects and tasks to complete daily. However, just because I was in one division of the company did not mean I was restricted. If I simply asked to help on a photo shoot or brainstorm a website, I was allowed. No questions asked. This spirit of asking can be seen throughout every division of the company, both intentionally and unintentionally. I especially loved seeing it in our Client Relations efforts. For instance, if a client asked for a different voice in a video or a different text on a banner, we would work to change it to a product that pleased them. This definitely meshes into Brand IQ’s flexibility. This spirit of asking helped me learn infinitely more than I could have asked for this summer.

5. Everything Benefits the Company. An Internship at Brand IQ is not making Starbucks runs or being the company Secretary. However, like any industry, there were days that were fantastic and days where my work was unthrilling. Yet through even the boring days, I felt confident that my work was benefiting the company. This is the attitude of Brand IQ. Every effort we make with clients, to edits on videos or websites, is done in the same spirit. At the end of each day, I felt accomplished and ready to come back the next day of whatever Brand IQ threw at me.

Want to find out more about the work of Brand IQ? Seeking an internship? Use our Contact Form to get in touch!

Do you ever feel like your website is stuck between a smartphone and cyberspace? The catch-22 of building your web presence on a budget is that you need to provide an excellent and personal user experience across the digital platforms that your audience is using. You need solutions that will provide the biggest bang for your buck while stretching your dollar as far as you can.

If you’re designing a new website, you probably want the latest bells and whistles but that “wow” factor won’t matter if your website doesn’t actually work for your users. That’s why Brand IQ approaches web design with the “form follows function” principle. Our developers utilize web strategies known as Adaptive Web Design (AWD) or Responsive Web Design (RWD) to increase our clients’ ROI by minimizing maintenance costs, improving SEO, and providing a consistent user experience across PC, tablet, and mobile devices.

This content-first approach to web design ensures that digital content remains consistent, securing the brand integrity. The result is an experience for the end user that is personally meaningful and uniquely reflects a client’s brand identity. We know that the website requirements and project budgets of our clients are as unique as the digital identities we create for them, so we provide a range of web solutions designed to give each of them the “wow” factor they want.

Allowing clients to maximize the utility of RWD, our web development team employs a “Swiss army knife” approach to building page templates so that each template shares the same user-friendly content entry method as the next, which allows for any and all customization of specific pages to occur in one place. We employ informed CMS strategies to streamline content creation, approval and publishing for all content contributors. This design strategy ensures that the website is not only functional and beautiful, it is also simple to manage.

Rutgers University partnered with Brand IQ to develop a responsive website that integrated video and photographic content to promote their athletics program to fans, increase ticket sales, showcase individual athletes, and ultimately improve recruiting results.

Brand IQ designed and developed all aspects of the site using an in-house custom CMS created by our developers. With content built around the “R U Rising” tagline that we developed, the Rutgers Football website, is a great example of the way that carefully crafted and expertly executed responsive web design can provide a tremendous user experience and compelling visual content.

Not every client we work with wants or needs a complete overhaul of their brand or web presence, however. We’ve worked with many clients who are either satisfied with their existing website but require a mobile presence or who are in the process of converting to a RWD version of their website, but need a mobile presence in the interim. Whatever your specific web design needs, there are creative solutions and targeted strategies that will allow you to integrate compelling content, interactive media and visual design to connect with your audience on any platform.

To experience responsive web design for yourself, shrink the width of your browser’s window to the size of your smart phone screen to see the content adjust to fit any device.

Brand IQ had the privilege to work alongside Writer and Director, Heather Arnet, and the Women and Girls Foundation to create the documentary, "Madame Presidenta: Why Not U.S.?", exploring women's rights in the United States and why, after 238 years, we have yet to elect a female president.

There’s no denying the power of video in advertising campaigns.  It is proven to increase behavioral changes relative to a specific brand or institution by more than 100%¹.  It’s no surprise, then, that millions of videos are uploaded to Vine each day and more than 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.²  Brand IQ’s groundbreaking National Enrollment Communications Study (NECS) confirms the influence that video use in social media has on higher education recruitment campaigns.  More than two-thirds of prospective students say they utilize social media to connect with colleges and universities on a personal level and to learn about the campus experience from the individual perspectives of current students.

At Brand IQ, great storytelling is part of our DNA.  For more than 30 years, we’ve been creating videos for higher ed recruitment campaigns that leverage current students’ storytelling to connect with prospective students on an emotional level while informing them about institutions’ brands.  Using student voices to tell schools’ unique stories is a rewarding challenge in which we take great pride.

Over the past 30 years, our work has received more than 100 awards, yet we still get excited by every new recognition. Most recently, our work for The University of Scranton received two awards from the Higher Education Marketing Awards: a gold medal for the :30 “Expect More” commercial and a silver award for the “Choosing Scranton” video. The University of Scranton videos are great examples of the way Brand IQ captures students’ personalities in order to showcase your unique campus experience through their eyes.  How are you using video to reach prospective students? Send us your stories at chris@brandiqcreative.com and we’ll feature some of the best in an upcoming blog post.

Contact Us for more information about how we can help you tell your story.

That’s just one of the findings from Brand IQ's groundbreaking National Enrollment Communications Study of best practices in recruitment communications today and what prospective students love and hate about the college-search process. Brand IQ audited the recruitment communications of over 1,000 schools across the U.S. and conducted student focus groups from coast to coast.

Now on to The Big Question: How did my school score??? To find out—and to get more information on the National Enrollment Communications Study contact our Director of Client Relations, Chris Shults, at chris@brandiqcreative.com.