by Dan Monk, Cincinnati Business Courier, October 10, 2008
Media fragmentation might be perceived as a threat to a company that derives most of its revenue from buying air time on television and radio stations. But instead of fighting the change, Empower MediaMarketing is embracing it with a host of new products, new employees and new mentoring relationships aimed at growing client spending and keeping agency staffers on the cutting edge of media trends.
“Now is the best time ever to be in this business,” said Bill Price, who co-founded the Mount Adams-based agency in 1985 with his wife, Mary Beth Price. “It’s a joy to come to work every day, to survey the marketplace, to invent new ways our clients can communicate and reach consumers. It’s not threatening. It’s a positive move that excites us. It invigorates the whole company.”
At the age of 71, Bill Price doesn’t want to talk about retirement. He’s too busy digging into data that Empower’s new silos of expertise are developing in Hispanic media, word-of-mouth marketing and YaYa’s. That stands for Youth and Young Adults, the niche market targeted by Mojo Ad, the University of Missouri School of Journalism’s student-staffed advertising agency. Empower has an executive on loan to the agency, which it mines regularly for talent and new ideas.
“The consumer habits are changing, and they’re changing very rapidly. It’s important that we stay on top of it to maximize our clients’ advertising dollar,” said Brian McHale, president of Empower, Cincinnati’s third-largest ad shop. McHale predicts the agency’s new focus areas, most of them launched in the last 18 months, will represent 20 percent of Empower’s total revenue by 2010.
Empower won’t disclose revenue figures, but McHale said total capitalized billings, which represent the total value of advertising placed by the agency, grew 32 percent to $300 million last year. McHale expects single-digit growth in billings and revenue this year.
The diversification strategy is one that many agencies are pursuing as companies pull back on their ad spending in a weakening economy. The Association of National Advertisers surveyed 100 marketing executives in the financial services, pharmaceuticals and consumer packaged goods industries and found that 87 percent have cut spending and 53 percent expected further cuts in the next six months.
“Not the best of times,” said Elena McSwane, president of the Advertising Club of Cincinnati, who works as a project manager and marketing liaison for EMI Network, a downtown-based multimedia marketing company. McSwane said diversifying is a good strategy as long as it’s compatible with the agency’s prior history.
“At this point, I think people are trying to reach out to as many different pieces of the market as they can,” McSwane said. “From what I know about Empower, all of these (new focus areas) do make sense.”
New lines of work
Here’s a look at some of Empower’s new focus areas:
• ChatterWatch is a proprietary software program that monitors blogs and other Internet traffic to find out what consumers are saying about various products. The Red Robin restaurant chain used the service to respond to criticism that the company wasn’t making nutritional information available. The company changed its Web site to make the info easier to find.
• Commercial Copy Testing is a service that offers independent analysis of new ad content, using focus groups and surveys that evaluate whether another agency’s creative work is producing the intended message.
• Impact Moments is a research project that helps advertisers find the best time to reach a consumer with a particular message. For Stanley Steemer, that might be Saturday morning, when homeowners think about house-cleaning projects. For restaurant clients, that might be an ad that appears late in the afternoon – when dinner plans are being made.
• Hispanic Marketing became a new focus area when Empower hired Brian Melendez, a former program director for Univision, a Spanish-language cable network. Four months after his hiring, Melendez is working on new product launches for existing Empower clients that McHale declined to name.
• Also in May, Empower beefed up its word-of-mouth and social-networking capabilities when it hired Jessica George, a former Northlich staffer who handled the Ohio Tobacco Prevention Foundation account until state lawmakers dismantled the foundation in a budget-cutting move. Northlich laid off 27 employees when it lost the account.
• Empower’s relationship with the University of Missouri gives agency executives a window on the world of young consumers, whose technology habits and social networking skills could redefine the landscape of advertising. Stephanie Padgett, Empower’s executive on loan to Mojo Ad, said the relationship is “definitely a competitive advantage” for the agency. Another academic relationship is at an early stage with Central State University in Ohio. Empower executives hope to trade industry expertise for insight from African-American students.
“We have the ability to tap into a group of folks who understand the 18- to 24-year-old market more thoroughly and deeply than we could without that relationship,” Padgett said.
