Podcasts and cell phones and blogs, oh my!

Trés hip. Super, uber-cool. 

The location is also illustrative of Idée Force’s edgy space in Denver’s advertising market. As advertising dollars rapidly steer further and further away from conventional outlets — television, newspaper, magazines and radio — more and more ad agencies and their clients are turning to blogs, cell phones, iPods and the Internet. All things electronic, all things swift, all things sleek and all things decidedly sexy.

Idée Force (French for “powerful idea”) is a B2B and B2C, full-service Denver ad agency, offering clients the entire marketing smorgasbord: advertising, direct marketing, website development, public relations and branding. However, what Gallien and Trujillo also offer their clients may be even more critical to the success of their multiple-discipline expertise: As a pair, their partnership is ahead of the game in keeping pace with the evolving, changing-by-the-month advertising curve.

“Our clients are interested in blogs, organic search-engine marketing, and podcasts as viable advertising options,” says Gallien. “We see clients spending less on traditional advertising — TV, radio and print — and spending more on Internet marketing strategies.

“Our job, then, is to seek out and select aggressive advertising venues for our clients, most of whom understand advertising campaigns must be built in a way that actually reaches younger audiences, audiences who are not reading traditional newspapers and magazines, who TiVo their television time. We strive to be ahead of the curve, to be not simply current, but out in front of current,” Gallien says.

Megan Fearnow knows exactly what Gallien means.

Fearnow is chief business strategist at McClain Finlon, a 20-plus-years, full-service Denver advertising and marketing agency that has witnessed the evolution of metro Denver’s advertising industry — and done it successfully. McClain Finlon, a woman-owned company, is one of two women-owned advertising firms regularly lodged within the top 10 women-owned firms ranked by ColoradoBiz magazine each year. This year, McClain Finlon is once again ranked No. 2 on the list, posting $148 million in billings for 2005, up almost $50 million from last year.

“What’s happened with the diffusion of media in the marketplace,” says Fearnow, “is that the younger audience maintains control over how they ingest messages.

“And they’re skeptical, incredibly skeptical,” she adds.

“They would rather experience a message, then have a direct sale put in front of them. That’s completely different from sitting passively in front of a television,” she said referring to the traditional venue for the latest in advertising for the past 30 years or more.

An article published in The New York Times in January, titled, “A Generation Serves Notice: It’s a Moving Target,” identified the audience Gallien and Fearnow are now trying to reach. “The eldest of the millennials — as those born between 1980 and 2000 are sometimes called — are now in their early to mid-20s,” the article noted. “By 2010, they will outnumber both baby boomers and Gen-Xers, among those 18 to 49 — the crucial consumers for all kinds of businesses ....”

Andrew Zuppa, corporate general manager and marketing director for American Furniture Warehouse, feels the pain of trying to reach that audience through traditional ad venues.

With an annual advertising budget “in the eight digits,” Zuppa laments that reaching the under-34-year-old audience is the challenge of American Furniture’s 2006 advertising campaign. “It is obvious what’s happening today with technology in advertising,” says Zuppa. “Conventional ad sources — newspapers, television and the like — often don’t reach the under-34-year-old buyer. Here’s what that buyer looks like: She’s female. She’s 30ish. She has her own income. She watches recorded television programming and reads the newspaper online. But she is not reading the local papers. She’s reading The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today — electronically.”

And research backs up that demographic.

Pew Internet and the American Life Project, a Washington D.C. organization that researches and analyzes the impact of the Internet on all aspects of life, found that age determines everything, and that youth lives determinedly at the digital edge. Though 80 percent of online teenagers and adults 28 and younger visit blogs, 40 percent of teenage and 20-something Internet users create those blogs. And while 44 percent of adults 29 to 40 send text messages by cell phone, 60 percent of the teen-to-20-somethings use text messaging.

Zuppa, who helped nurture American Furniture Warehouse into one of the most high-profile businesses along the Front Range, is convinced there is no going back to traditional advertising ways. “Obviously things are changing,” he says. “And not just year-to-year. There’s been such a substantial shift in where advertising dollars go that I sense in the next few years there will be an even more dramatic shift in where those dollars are spent.

Advertisers have changed, too

The shift of advertising venues is not the only challenge the industry faces. Today’s advertising client wants a faster return on investment, and wants that ROI measured almost immediately. Gone are the days when ad agencies had the luxury of rolling out a yearlong campaign, where time spent nurturing and maturing and adjusting a campaign rendered eventual results — a kind of graduation into advertising success.

Ken Custer, publisher of the Colorado advertising and marketing industry monthly trade publication Advertising & Marketing Review, held a four-member panel symposium in fall 2005 to examine the state of the advertising and marketing worlds in Colorado today, and to hear state-of-the-industry assessments from Colorado advertising and marketing pros. Rich Carvill, representing his client Gates Corp.; Sherri Leopard, president, Leopard Communications; Pocky Marranzino, president, Karsh & Hagan Communications; and April Thayer, president of Thayer Media, sat in on the forum (the complete text of which is available at www.admarketreview.com).

“A recurring theme throughout the day’s Q&A was how clients all want more return on investment,” says Custer. “And they want that return to happen within one quarter. That’s a marked change from decades past. There was also continuing discussion concerning how everyone (in advertising and marketing) is really accountable. It used to be that you could buy a TV schedule for a client, get them some air time and hope you get something out of it. Now the client wants to know: Did it pay for itself? It absolutely must pay for itself.

“Pocky called it an ’ROI tsunami,’” Custer says.

ROI gets even more difficult to measure when clients farm out various aspects of a marketing campaign, i.e., one agency handles direct marketing, another public relations, and designers and copywriters are contracted. The reality is that it takes a staff to manage those advertising arms — which can and does quickly undermine ROI.

Sherri Leopard, one of the panelists on the Advertising & Marketing Review forum, says more than ever, advertising and marketing agencies must define and then crystallize their role in the larger advertising world.

And it ain’t always easy. Leopard’s B2B agency, ranked No. 22 on this year’s women-owned list,  specializes in technology, with clients that include IBM, Motorola and PeopleSoft. “We’ve learned, over time, exactly what types of ‘anchor’ accounts we want, which means we had to learn what we don’t want,” she says. “We’ve had potential clients come to us who wanted to do a small campaign or they needed a website developed. What we do for them today is that we help them find other agencies better suited to them.

“We have probably turned away 50 or more companies in the last few years that came to us for a specific tactic or two, and some had large budgets to spend. But you don’t get to know the content or the landscape or the customers in a one-tactic engagement,” she added. “If people don’t view their investment in an agency as a strategic long-term investment, they’re not a good fit for us.”

But Leopard is also the first to admit that it took time and a sorting-through-it-all process as an agency to first grasp, then develop Leopard Communication’s position and definition. “There’s a time when you have to take whatever business comes your way,” she says, “and a time for real discipline — which is when you begin to recognize who you are and recognize that there is a market that will value that.

“Are the clients you’re looking to work with the leaders in their space?” asks Leopard. “That’s the question we ask ourselves; it’s the sort of alliance we look for.”

Women in the business

Women-owned advertising and marketing firms represent 10 percent of the annual ColoradoBiz list of Top 100 Women-owned Companies in the state, and this year each of the 10 firms on the list posted a gain in 2005 revenues compared  with 2004. Custer says, however, that he’s not sure the successes of those Colorado women-owned companies necessarily represent women in advertising as a whole.

Industrywide, women have increased their numbers in the field, but company ownership and top management positions remain in men’s hands, several men in the local industry said.

“If you attended advertising organization meetings 20 years ago, the attendance was about 70 percent male,” says Custer. “Today it’s more like 60 percent female, 40 percent male. Certainly there are more women than men in the industry today. But I’m not convinced that they’re in the top positions. Top management is still predominantly men in my experience.”

Marranzino, who bought his agency from two of the region’s retired advertising pioneers, Phil Karsh and Tom Hagen, and sold it to a larger national firm, doesn’t disagree. “There are probably more women in management roles than there once was,” he says, “which is great. And there are certainly more women-owned entities, which is also great. But while I believe there has been a shift in the industry that has more women working today in advertising, I wouldn’t say that women dominate.”

Steve Sander, also a long-time principal in the Denver ad market and a former chairman of the now-dispersed Denver Advertising Federation, said he still describes the industry as egalitarian in its appeal to both men and women. He said the number of smaller, one- and two-person shops increased as the advertising recession of the early 2000s cut down larger firms’ numbers of employees.

A palm-sized future

Forward-looking advertising appears to be mostly palm-sized, as handheld computers and cell phones become increasingly accepted by both consumers and the general business audience.

Verizon Wireless and Spring Nextel now offer short video ads on their phones. The cell phone startup Amp’d Mobile recently announced a partnership with Electronic Arts, a video game maker. Where e-mail and online chats and Web forums were once considered instant and ingenious, “millennials” have already moved on from those venues, instead plugging into entertainment and information that is often delivered to them via a convergence of digital sources, including “g-mail” (search-based Web mail service) and “mobisoaps” (cell-phone soap operas) and Web TV.

But Mark Cornetta, president and general manager of Denver’s Channel 9 News, is not entirely convinced that the newest technology is capturing key advertising arenas, though he admits to ad selling challenges in television. “Our business is going through some changes because of new technologies and because people are consuming in different ways,” he says. “They’re not in one place, and that has made television advertising challenging.

“All of these different choices have some impact, but you can’t put a number on it,” he adds. “It’s hard to say if the challenges are because of technology or just the general state of the economy.”

Trujillo, Gallien’s partner at Idée Force, says there is no turning back. Multiple-platform, simultaneously employed, electronic device-delivered advertising is only going to get more complex, more competitive and more creative, he says. “It’s viral,” he adds. “Like those ‘Jib-Jab’ political cartoons everyone saw online before the last presidential election. It has to be entertaining so it can develop a cult-like following.”  

Last modified on 4/25/2006 11:44:45 AM.