Professional Veterinary Products Names S|O Interactive and Branding Agency

Professional Veterinary Products (PVP) recently named Salva O’Renick its interactive and branding agency. As one of the nation’s most established and respected animal health product distributors, PVP sought to increase brand recognition and solidify its position as an advocate to the veterinary practice. By partnering with Salva O’Renick, PVP was able to start paving the way for more powerful, more effective engagements with veterinarians and practice managers. “One of the things we like most about Salva O’Renick is their focus on sales and marketing integration within the animal health sector. They work with us to understand all aspects of the sales process and it’s evident in the solutions they bring to the table,” says Daryl Schraad, Vice President of Sales & Marketing for PVP. Through an aggressive discovery process that included participation in field sales activities and website analytics, PVP and Salva O’Renick developed a digital roadmap that is already taking shape through the launch of a redesigned brand identity, website and tradeshow experience. Brandon Anderson, Director of Digital Client Development for Salva O’Renick, looks forward to continuing to evolve the PVP relationship stating, “PVP has a unique advantage in the marketplace as a company built and owned by veterinarians. Enhancing the way they serve and communicate with their clients is something we’re excited to be a part of.”

Get Away

It's summer time, and like many folks it's time to head out for a few days of family vacation.  Yet in a pressure-packed world, where every day is a struggle to prove value (especially in a tough economy) taking a vacation seems downright irresponsible.  And if we care about our families, working hard to help provide for them is an important thing right?  In reality, though, getting away from the rat race once in a while is the best thing you can do for your business and your family. An article by ad-agency focused Grant Consulting, quotes a medical journal study that found men age 35 to 57 who took annual vacations were 21% less likely to die young than non-vacationing males, and 32% less likely to die from coronary artery disease. By comparison, high cholesterol as an isolated factor increases the risk of death from coronary heart disease by only 1% while high diastolic blood pressure raises the risk only 3%.  According to Grant Consulting, "Agency people who regularly pause to recover from stress are usually more successful than those whose automatic response to pressure is to work even harder and longer."   They talk about the phenomenon of pushing so hard that your "wheels spin and your tires smoke," a condition that not only blocks your ability to think creatively and strategically, it also increases stress and wears on your health. At the root of this is what psychologists call “vigilance for threat," the consistent reminder that threats are out there that could be detrimental to our well being.  In cave man days, this was a healthy primordial fear that helped us survive.  Now it just causes undue stress - especially when it's focused on things we can't control.  Not to mention the fact that it wastes valuable energy that we can use to unleash our strategic and creative firepower to solve problems and take advantage of opportunities. Vacations are a great time to refocus and regain perspective.  It's a great time to free our minds to come back fresh and tackle challenges and opportunities with new-found energy.  To worry less about what might go wrong (most of which we can't control anyway) and think more about what we can do to create value and drive success.  As Alan Kay said, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." Here's to a great summer and a chance to get some well-deserved rest and relaxation.  Your body and mind thank you too.

People

Salva O'Renick began innocently enough in 1970. That was the year two enterprising eight year olds met and forged a partnership that would continue to this day. Actually it was the year Dan Salva and Mark O'Renick sat down next to each other in Ms. Fleming's second grade class.

What is a swfobject?

In order to help people understand flash deployment and the best practices thereof, I figured I would cover one of the technologies we use to allow flash to be displayed in your browser and the reasons why we use it. I am going to get fairly extensive in this description so even if you don’t know what I really mean when I say “the flash player” I will give you a general knowledge.

So when you are on the internet, you are using an application on your computer that is called a browser, unfortunately browsers do not have Flash Player already installed. Flash player is a program owned by Adobe that allows Flash content to be viewable in a browser. So, even though it may seem like a pain, you need one program to view “normal” web content and another program to view Flash content on the web. The reason for this is because the Flash player is proprietarily developed by Adobe and released on a separate timeline than most browser applications. In addition, Flash started out very small and browsers did not initially see it as an accepted and popular type of web content.

However, much has changed since then. Today, Flash is huge, with a penetration greater than any other multimedia type on the web. Below is some data that really drives this point home—illustrating that when Flash Player 9 came out in June 2006 it was present on 98% of computers. Also, it is worthwhile to note that as Flash player becomes more and more open source there may be a day where the Flash player is installed and updated simultaneously with the browser.

Source: Adobe.com

While I could spend a great deal of time touting the redeeming qualities of Flash, it’s almost a moot point given the numbers above. However, even if Flash had not gained popularity so quickly, something else would have come along to take its place. You see, I believe people are generally attracted to things on the web that mimic the way things behave in real life. And in my opinion, content that comes through programs like the Flash player are the best way to achieve this phenomenon.

Because the Flash player and the browser are two completely different programs, when a user happens to land on a page that has Flash content they should be prompted in a nice, friendly way that they do not have the right program installed to view the content. Chances are, as long as a web page is not using the newest version of Flash, this will rarely happen. But, with that said, the prompt should be as inviting and intuitive as possible. Enter swfobject.

Swfobject is a javascript tool that was authored by the awesome Geoff Stearns. Here’s how it works. If you visit a site with Flash but don’t have it installed, swfobject allows you to design something to replace where that original flash application/animation would have been if you had Flash in the first place. This is awesome because if the flash was there just for eye candy, as web designers we can opt to just show a static image and the user is not burdened with an install in the middle of their experience on the website. Or, if the content is important to the experience, we can direct that user to install Flash Player via adobe.com while maintaining the look and feel of the web site. This is crucial because you do not want your user to feel as if the site is broken or too complicated to view. Without something like swfobject to detect that the user did not have flash, the browser would probably prompt the user that they do not have the right program. However, this method is typically abrupt and varies across browsers preventing you from maintaining a unified look and feel.

Source:inplacesystem.com

If a user already has a Flash player (above Flash player ver. 6.0.65) we can also choose to do an express install. This option saves the user time because they don’t have to leave the website, but admittedly it is fairly disjointed from the look and feel of a site, as you can see in the image below:



With a great JavaScript Flash detection tool like swfobject we gain significantly more control over the Flash player installation process. And, the more control we have to alter that experience, the better experience we can ultimately create for the end user.

Clients

Let's take what we know and what we've done and use it to get us where we want to go. Your business deserves the experienced perspective of a seasoned team of technology-savvy creative marketers. From business-to-business to business-to-consumer, you can find the expertise to help propel your efforts.