Branding, interactive plans added to roster of services to reach varied audiences. There was no one collective direction of revenues — up or down — for New Orleans-area marketing and advertising firms in 2008. Some experienced increases whereas others felt the pinch, but evolving media trends, compounded by the stagnant economy, are forcing calibration within the industry.

Just as the newspaper industry is having to come to terms with emerging media and its effect on the business, advertisers and marketers are finding a progression in how they service customers and defining precisely what type of marketing to provide.

Although the move to becoming more of a product development or brand strategy marketing agency predated the nation’s economic woes, it is even more imperative for clients and their advertisers to embrace that concept, said Trumpet LLC CEO Robbie Vitrano.

Once upon a time, before the days of DVR and TiVo, the Internet and most recently Web sites such as hulu.com that re-broadcast television shows, the marketing model was fairly simple: pose an interruption to regular broadcasting or reading, catch consumers’ attention and effectively “sell” the product. A consumer would watch “Cheers” or “Seinfeld,” be interrupted by an ad and maybe sold.

But as newspapers struggle to redefine their advertising component and traditional television ads are being viewed less and less — all compounded by the national economy — many advertisers are in readjustment mode.

“As a whole, the industry is scrambling to react to massive changes in audience fragmentation and the media environment,” Vitrano said. “It is likely that the old model of an ad agency based on media mark-ups will be very much a relic within the next 10 years.”

Media mark-ups, Vitrano said, refers to taking the net cost of media such as television or newspaper ad space and adding a mark-up to cover the agency fee. Marketers often still apply mark-ups to production of printing, photography, television production, etc., he said.

Some primary problems with that model, Vitrano said, are agencies were given a sort of blank check that probably was seldom abused, but the temptation existed. Most damning is that few agencies really were prepared to make strong recommendations on a course of action, Vitrano said.

Trumpet is part of a smaller group of agencies that have moved into what Vitrano calls “the most important marketing function” of product development — brand strategy. Branding, at its core, is about making a product or company recognizable.

“We’re also attracting and helping to securitize investment by way of providing these services,” Vitrano said. “Trumpet applies its resources to taking an often-times undisciplined start up and helping to define the most compelling value proposition, define the shape and size of the market — opportunity and actual dollars — then designing and executing the go-to market strategy.”

Some advertisers say the industry changes are not so revolutionary. Mark Mayer, president and CEO of Peter A. Mayer Advertising Inc., said though there is increased audience fragmentation and branding is more important than ever, these changes are nothing new.

“Audience fragmentation has been a media trend for at least the last 30 years,” Mayer said. “It began with the growth of specialty magazines and the decline of large, mass circulation magazines. Then it moved to broadcast with the decline of the major networks and the consequent explosion of cable networks and ‘narrow-casting.’ Now we see it in media fragmentation, with the Internet eroding other media’s share of people’s time.”

Advertising will adapt as it always has to serve as the crucial link between marketers and their markets, Mayer said.

“For us, it means integrating online and offline for all clients, all campaigns. That’s why our interactive department grew over 60 percent last year, even though our agency top-line revenue was flat.”

Berning Marketing LLC President Robert Berning differs from his peers, saying he has had greater success expanding his focus by marrying the production side of his business with the marketing side, making his firm “a one-stop shop.”

“The health of the company does not depend on any one revenue stream,” Berning said. “In order to grow, we had to offer myriad services. If we had sequestered our services to the production area, we wouldn’t have seen growth like we have in the last five years.”•

Article by Jaime Guillet, New Orleans City Business