Power Media Group Celebrates its 10th Anniversary

Founded During the Recession of 2001, Company’s Customer Service Excellence Allows it to Grow Even in the Current Economic Downturn

Santa Clarita, California – October 29, 2011 – Power Media Group, an advertisin agency and media buying company with humble beginnings in the founder’s living room, is now celebrating its 10th anniversary. By specializing in addressing the needs of the Hispanic market, the company has done so well since its founding that in July 2008-SBA qualified for a real estate loan -acquisition of an 11,000 square-foot commercial building, a new home for clients and customers.

Patricia Gracia

Power was founded by Patricia Gracia. Gracia is an immigrant to the United States, originally from Peru, whose first position in the United States was at the Peninsula Hotel in California. The hotel sponsored her education at UCLA, where she majored in public relations. In 2001, she opened her advertising agency and was gaining clients. Three years after, her husband Tony Gracia joined her in managing the public relations firm. He is now the CEO and a full partner.

Tony Gracia

As CEO, Tony Gracia focuses many of his efforts on financial matters and the company’s long-term growth. One of his accomplishments is helping PMG in acquiring an SBA loan and making sure the firm met the agency’s strict requirements. He also works to solve financial issues that affect clients. After ten years of working in the advertising and broadcast industry, he understands the need of a financial product that can help companies avoid losses in revenues. He introduces “Dona Dollar”- to avoid Revenue Lost by Catalog Sellers, Direct Sellers over undeliverables and merchandise returns. “The frustration that companies have resulting from misdirected and lost mailings translates into significant money on the bottom line – revenue loss that can finally be avoided with our payment system called, “Dona Dollar.”

Tony Gracia also appears as a panelist or speaker at various public events.

Since its founding, the company and its management have received many awards. Some of the most recent ones include the Latin Business Association’s Sol Award, the 2009 Addy Award for Excellence in Creativity for a TV ad in the General Market and the US SBA’s Minority Small Business Champion of the Year Award for 2010. These are just a few of the many awards earned by Gracia’s company.

One award deserving of special mention arose from the Women’s History Month celebration of 2011 sponsored by the Air Force Flight Test Center and NASA Dryden Flight Research Center. Held at Edwards Air Force Base, this event celebrated the achievements of women in the past. Patricia Gracia was one of the keynote speakers. Her presentation, titled “The Transforming Role of Latina Business Owners in the Past Two Decades,” was an inspiration for many who attended the event. In recognition of her participation, she was awarded a plaque and a military decoration by the executive director of the Flight Test Center.

During the last 10 years, the company has gained an impressive roster of clients. These include giants like Vivendi Visual Entertainment, Universal Music Latin, Baby Magic and El Aviso Magazine, Creativa Interior-Primor, DDA- Directory Distributing Associates, along with numerous local companies. This shows the public relations firm’s recognized excellence at handling the unique advertising requirements of clients targeting the Hispanic market.

One of the reasons for this success is the founder’s customer service background. While working at the Peninsula Hotel, she learned that the key to providing a five star experience is in the details. She and her company work to always surpass customer expectations and take care of even the tiniest details. They work to create, position and maintain clients’ brands with the utmost care. Not only that, they work with clients to find new directions for their products. This allows clients to expand their market presence and improve sales success.

Gracia’s personal background is another underpinning of her company’s philosophy. She knows that creativity, dedication and perseverance are necessary for success. Before she crossed the Tijuana border into the United States, she had a goal and the drive to achieve it. This same goal-oriented planning is applied to clients’ accounts to ensure their utmost success. She also knows that it is very important to shift goals to meet changing needs.

Gracia makes sure to actually care for her company’s clients and their campaigns. Customers are not mere names in a book at Power. Their tagline, “we love your business as we love our baby,” shows their dedication to catering to clients’ needs and helping them grow. Clients don’t just get an ad campaign from Gracia. They also get helpful guidance and caring direction to help with their branding and sales efforts.

Patricia and Tony Gracia show a sincere desire to help others succeed as she has. Last year, they opened the Power Woman Business Center, a business incubator dedicated to helping minority businesswomen and men succeed in the marketplace. The Center occupies the same building as Gracia’s advertising company. The United States Small Business Administration’s Los Angeles District Office honored this effort by naming Gracia the Small Business Champion of the Year in 2010.

The United States Hispanic market has a potential buying power of $1triillion annually, and its size is growing every year. This has undoubtedly helped Gracia’s company expand, since many businesses are now seeking to tap that market. The excellence shown by her company then works to keep those new clients happy and returning for even more ad campaigns. Her company’s ability to bridge the culture gap allows domestic companies to cater to the unique needs of Hispanic customers. Hispanic-owned companies also do well by retaining her company to promote their products and services.

About the Company:

Power Media Group ( www.powermediagroup.com)

A public relations and advertising agency specializing in creating all-inclusive Spanish language campaigns for high-profile clients, including Universal Music Latin and Creativa Interiors Primor, Power Media Group helps businesses build lasting relationships with the Latino community. As the 2010 Minority Small Business Champion of the Year, Power Media Group utilizes grassroots media campaigns to reach out to the booming Hispanic population, who contribute more than $1 trillion to the U.S. economy annually. Last year, principals Patricia and Tony Gracia launched the Power Woman BusinessCenterwww.powerwomanbc.com , a business incubator that reaches out to diverse entrepreneurs who are trying to develop and grow their businesses during these precarious economic times.

Tablets Influence News Consumption

About one in 10 (11%) of US adults now own a tablet computer of some kind, with about half (53%) of tablet owners getting news on their tablet every day,  according to survey results released in October 2011 by the Pew Research Center Project for Excellence in Journalism and The Economist Group. Almost eight in 10 (77%) tablet owners use their tablet every day, spending an average of about 90 minutes on them.

News among Top Tablet Activities

Consuming news (everything from the latest headlines to in-depth articles and commentary) ranks as one of the most popular activities on the tablet, about as popular as sending and receiving email (54% email daily on their tablet), and more popular than social networking (39%), gaming (30%), reading books (17%) or watching movies and videos (13%). The only activity that people said they were more likely to do on their tablet computer daily is browse the web generally (67%).

The survey also finds that three in 10 tablet news users (defined for this study as the 77% of all tablet users who get news at least weekly) say they now spend more time getting news than they did before they had their tablet. Just 4% say they spend less time while two-thirds (65%) spend about the same amount of time.

In addition, one-third (33%) of tablet news users say they are turning to new sources for news on their tablet, sources they had not turned to on other platforms such as television or their desktop computer. And more than four in 10 (42%) say they regularly read in-depth news articles and analysis on their tablet.

Tablet news users also say they now prefer their new devices over traditional computers, print publications or television as a way both to get quick news headlines and to read long-form pieces.

Tablet News Revenue Potential May Be Limited

At this point just 14% of tablet news users have paid directly to access news on their tablet. Another 23% get digital access of some kind through a print newspaper or magazine subscription. Of those who haven’t paid directly, just 21% say they would be willing to spend $5 per month if that were the only way to access their favorite source on the tablet. And of those who have news apps, fully 83% say that being free or low cost was a major factor in their decision about what to download.

Desktop Beats Apps for Tablet News

The study reveals that, so far, while about two-thirds of tablet news users have a news app on their tablet, the browser, carried over from the desktop experience, is still the more popular means of consuming news. A plurality of tablet news users (40%) say they get their news mainly through a web browser. Another 31% use news apps and the browser equally, while fewer, 21%, get their news primarily through apps.

Branding Important for Tablet News

Liking the news organization is a major factor for 84% of those who have apps. In addition, among both app and browser respondents surveyed about their behavior over the last seven days, the most common way by far to get news headlines was by going directly to a news organization’s content. Fully 90% of app users went directly to the app of a specific news organization, compared with 36% that went to some sort of aggregator app like Pulse. And, 81% of those who went through their browser accessed news headlines via a direct news website, compared with 68% who went through a search engine and about a third (35%) that went through a social network.

Starch: Tablet Ads Beat E-reader Ads

Magazine ads viewed on tablet computers are more effective than magazine ads viewed on e-readers in garnering consumer attention and engagement,  according to data collected by Starch Advertising Research from May-July 2011. Starch data reveals that, on average, 55% of consumers who read a magazine on a tablet “noted,” meaning they saw or read a magazine ad on their device.

In comparison, 41% of e-reader magazine app users noted an ad. This means tablet readers are 34% more likely to note a magazine ad. To put these findings in perspective, the average noting score for all hard copy magazine ads Starch measured in 2010 was 53%.

About the Data: The study, executed by Princeton Survey Research Associates International, involved a survey of the general public and three separate surveys. The first was a general population survey. The next two surveys were conducted with a Pew Research Center panel of more than a thousand tablet users. The panel was developed through interviews with 40,000 US adults. A telephone survey was conducted with 1,159 tablet users and 894 tablet news users, and a web-based survey was conducted among a select group of those news users about their news habits over the past seven days.

Source: MarketingChart.com

Electronics Sales Most Often Lost to Web

October 21, 2011

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Electronics is the category mentioned most by both all shoppers and smartphone owners as the type of product checked out in the store and purchased somewhere else online, according to data released in October 2011 by Retrevo. Forty-eight percent of all shoppers, and 58% of smartphone owners, report purchasing electronic goods elsewhere online after looking at them in a store.

The next category on this list is shoes (32% of all shoppers and 41% of smartphone owners), followed by apparel (31% of all shoppers and 39% of smartphone owners). All product categories are ranked in the same order by both all shoppers and smartphone owners in terms of likelihood to check out in a store and purchase somewhere else online, with smartphone owners more likely in all cases to do so.
Close to eight in 10 (78%) smartphone users have checked out a product in a store and then bought it in another store online, as have 66% of all shoppers.

Smartphones Aid In-store Shopping

More than half the smartphone respondents in this study indicated they have used a mobile device in a store to help them buy something. Most of those used their phones to check prices (42%) and get coupons (25%), but 29% also looked up ratings and reviews on products they were considering buying before making the big decision.

Most Retail App Downloaders Don’t Find Them Useful

More than four in 10 smartphone owners (43%) have installed and used a retailer’s app. However, Retrevo data indicates only 14% of those who installed them say the app helped them buy something.

Electronics Shoppers Feel Overwhelmed

More than half (53%) of the respondents in this study said they have had the experience of going to the store to buy an electronics product but couldn’t decide what to buy Forty-one percent have not had this experience, while 6% do not buy electronics products in the store. The most common reason cited (30%) for this was not having the information they needed (online prices, reviews, specs, etc.) followed by feeling overwhelmed by the number of choices. Many also felt the salesperson was of little help.

RSR: Consumers Force Mobile Retail Presence

A majority of global retailers agree that customers have evolved so rapidly they are forced to have a mobile presence, according to a September 2011 survey from RSR Research. Data from “Keeping Up with the Mobile Consumer” indicates that almost eight in 10 (78%) respondents agree with this statement, and 35% strongly agree.
In addition, 13% of respondents are neutral about customer evolution forcing a mobile presence, meaning only 9% actively disagree with the premise. In addition, 81% of respondents agree that mobile’s best uses and impact have not been fully fleshed out yet, with 24% strongly agreeing and only 10% disagreeing. Only 46% of respondents have completely different goals for mobile shoppers than e-commerce shoppers (9% strongly agree), while 35% are neutral on the subject and 19% disagree.
About the Data: The data for this report came from a study of online individuals conducted exclusively for Retrevo in October 2011 by an independent panel. The sample size was more than 1,000, distributed across gender, age, income and location in the US.
Source: www.marketingcharts.com

Consumers Willing to Share Shopping Data with Brands Online

About seven in 10 (71%) of global consumers are willing to share their personal shopping data with brands online, according to new research from McCann Worldgroup released in October 2011. Data from “The Truth About Privacy” indicates that 5 times as many consumers will share their shopping data than will share their financial data online (14%).

According to McCann insight, this reflects the sensitivity of financial information to a consumer’s sense of security. Roughly double the number of consumers (27%) will share medical data than will share financial data, while almost triple (39%) will share personal data. About half (49%) will share location data with a brand online.

Privacy Goes Both Ways

According to the report, slightly more than half of consumers (57%) believe that businesses and brands have a right to privacy, far less than the 84% who believe that consumers retain that right. In fact, of the categories surveyed, consumers ranked businesses’ privacy rights ahead of only governments’ (51%). Indeed, more consumers (65%) believe that a reality TV star has a right to privacy than a business.

Financial Institutions Most Trusted

Globally, banks and credit companies are the most trusted to look after personal data and use it wisely. Almost 7 in 10 (69%) consumers trust banks with their information (65% of US respondents), while 57% hold credit companies in the same regard (46% of US respondents). Medical companies are the next most trusted, followed by pharmaceutical companies and health insurance companies. Consumers show the least amount of trust in beauty companies and dating websites.

Exact Data Usage Important to US Consumers

Close to six in 10 (57%) of US respondents say it is important to know exactly how their data is going to be used, selecting this as one of their to 3 important criteria when deciding to trust a brand. Closely following is a commitment from companies that they won’t pass personal data (ie. their telephone numberor email address), chosen by 56% of US respondents as a critically important criterion. 55% of US consumers want control over which data will be shared, while 30% want to know how they will benefit.

LoyaltyOne: Consumers Unsure about Sharing Personal Data

US and Canadian consumers display high degree of uncertainty about sharing their personal data with companies, according to an October 2011 survey from LoyaltyOne. Almost nine in 10 (88%) consumers say they feel companies are primarily collecting personal information for their own benefit, and 85% are often concerned about how much of their personal information is held by others.

About the Data: The report is based on a 6,525-person quantitative study conducted in the US, UK, Hong Kong, Japan, India, and Chile.

El enojo y su impacto en la vida diaria

Las relaciones interpersonales dependen en muchos casos de la serenidad y la tolerancia

Las relaciones interpersonales son clave para lograr éxito en la vida. No sólo se trata de comunicarse oportunamente sino también de manejar situaciones donde se ponen a prueba el enojo, los resentimientos y la irritabilidad.

En este mar de emociones, la ira es una de las que más afecta la salud física y emocional de las personas, ya que aumenta el ritmo cardíaco, la presión sanguínea y los niveles de adrenalina y noradrenalina, entre otros principios.

Desde una perspectiva psicológica ampliamente aceptada, el enojo y la ira son formas de reacción y respuesta evolutiva que permite a las personas enfrentarse contra las amenazas del entorno. A partir de ello, el instinto de autopreservación se pone de evidencia en la expresión facial, el lenguaje corporal y, en algunos casos, hasta llegar a la agresión.

Según la psicóloga Guadalupe Martínez es natural que los seres humanos se pongan de mal humor, sobre todo porque siempre existen problemas o traumas reprimidos desde la infancia y la adolescencia que son parte del “modus vivendi”.

Sin embargo, advierte que en entornos sociales difíciles, donde conviven diferentes factores como el estrés y la ansiedad, ante el surgimiento de un problema muchos optan por “echar la culpa” a otros y a partir de ello desarrollar la secuencia mal humor-enojo-ira.

“A muchos hombres y mujeres les cuesta entender la impotencia ante diversas situaciones que están fuera de su entorno, y al no encontrar una salida razonable se muestran irritables”, consideró Martínez.

Por otra parte, la especialista valoró que el enojo y la ira pueden expresarse huyendo o atacando al “supuesto” agresor, puesto que se da un proceso de negación o aceptación, según patrones de comportamiento individuales.

“Los que atacan en momentos de ira lo hacen bajo múltiples causales como la fuerza verbal, física y, en muchos casos, con objetos que le dan una falsa sensación de seguridad”, agregó Martínez.

Asimismo, para los psicólogos la estimación del nivel de enojo se hace sobre la base de su frecuencia, su intensidad y su duración. De este modo, la sensación será patológica cuando se presenta mucha veces en un periodo determinado, con demasiada fuerza y se prolongue por largos periodos.

Es bajo estos términos en que se necesita atención médica para tranquilizar al paciente y, posteriormente, ayuda psiquiátrica a mediano y largo plazo.

Para Martínez, lo opuesto a estos casos es el sentimiento de enojo poco frecuente, leve y de corta duración. Este es con el que las personas más conviven en su vida cotidiana, pero, al no saberlo manejar mina las relaciones con otras personas, sobre todo en ambientes laborales, académicos y familiares donde se ponen de manifiesto las formas de decisiones de diferente naturaleza.

“El común denominador entre muchos pacientes es que al no saber sobrellevar los problemas se fomenta la ansiedad y la impaciencia, lo cual se traduce en cólera e incide en las posibles soluciones a corto o mediano plazo”, explicó.

Los síntomas de la ira

Las expresiones del enojo van más allá de las que son evidentes. Desde la perspectiva de Martínez, la violencia por lo general se reprime a nivel social y se expresa también de forma no manifiesta entre círculos de personas que persiguen un objetivo en común.

Un ejemplo de ello son los comportamientos reservados de aquellas personas que en apariencia no son irritables pero que “cargan” con diferentes malestares para luego hacerlos desaparecer sobre un tercero.

Algunos de ellos van desde la manipulación mental, la autoculpabilidad, la predisposición al fracaso y el desapasionamiento en un entorno amplio y diverso.

“El no evacuar el enojo tiende a generar trastornos obsesivos que minan la salud emocional y cambios radicales en los puntos de vista de las cosas”, acotó la psicóloga.

Caso contrario, las expresiones activas y manifiestas parten de un odio concreto hacia alguien, incentivadas, sobre todo, por las condiciones de un espacio determinado y la amenaza que experimentan los sentidos.

“Al llegar al odio manifiesto hay una acumulación de acontecimientos que ya no se pueden tolerar y que, por diversas circunstancias desencadenan en episodios violentos”, puntualizó Martínez.

El enojo no debe ser diario

Partiendo de factores comunes como el hambre, la fatiga crónica y la frustración sexual, el hombre moderno debe de convivir ante diversas condiciones que ponen a prueba su capacidad de razonar sobre su reacción instintiva.

Para ello es básico el autoconocimiento de las emociones para comprenderlas y admitirlas. Esto pasa, conforme Martínez, por conocer las raíces del conflicto, acompañado de una evaluación de los elementos favorables o adversos que empujaron hacia determinada situación.

“Ordenar bien las funciones y los roles, sobre todo con la familia ayudará a tener más lucidez para tomar decisiones acertadas, más que todo en casos donde se necesitan combinar responsabilidades”, finalizó.

Por último, cabe recordar que los sentimientos dependen de un ejercicio constante de reflexión para saber valorarlos. Así se podrá explorar en toda su dimensión la convivencia y evitar episodios traumáticos que reproduzcan la violencia.

Source: ElSalvador.com