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Minneapolis / St. Paul Business Journal - by Chris Newmarker Staff Writer

There may be grumbling that the country is slipping into another Great Depression, but firms in the advertising and public-relations industry want to put the situation in the best light, and treat the economic crisis as an opportunity.

At Fallon Worldwide, a new sign posted in the meeting room at the firm’s Minneapolis headquarters states: “Fortune favors the brave.”

Fallon was started during the early 1980s recession and has come out of previous recessions pretty well. Chief marketing officer Rob Buchner said the reason is Fallon tries to keep its advertising campaigns clever but affordable, and that ad firms that do the same will be served well in the coming year.

Buchner mentioned a recent ad campaign by Hyundai Motor Co.in which the South Korean automaker said it would allow customers who lost their jobs to bring their car back through a 12-month vehicle return program. He said people should expect to see more daring advertising gambits, especially as some companies use the recession as a chance to grab larger market share.

“If you do work with advertising that is memorable and provocative, you’ll be rewarded at the cash register in the end,” Buchner said.

Howard Liszt, a senior fellow at the University of Minnesota and a retired CEO of Minneapolis-based Campbell Mithun, said, “All boats are not going to be lifted.”

Still, there’s opportunity to get clients to try new things.

“Undoubtedly, there will be some agencies who flourish in spite of this economy and that’s going to be a direct result of their ability to be innovative and resourceful,” Liszt said.

Carmichael Lynch President Mike Lescarbeau said he thinks it’s going to be a tough year for everybody. His own firm laid off around 5 percent of its workers in December.

Still, he’s hopeful that the Minneapolis-based firm’s double emphasis on advertising and public relations will serve it well. He said there was a recent case of a public-relations client also picking up the firm for advertising, and a prospective client seeking advertising who instead decided to sign up for public relations.

“They want some efficiencies. They want one-stop shopping. They also want a one-stop idea,” Lescarbeau said.

Public-relations firm Padilla Speer Beardsley Inc. may be handling fewer new product introductions for companies, but the Minneapolis firm’s CEO Lynn Casey said there’s another service that clients need: crisis management.

“You really want to get that critical communication right and PR firms that have that capability, for better or worse, exercise a great deal of that in an economic downturn,” she said.

Boston Business Journal - by Lisa van der Pool

As companies trim their advertising budgets, the ad agencies they work with are also learning how to survive the recession with less business than in recent years.

Jeff Freedman, co-founder and marketing principal of Boston-based ad shop Small Army, says that he has had to tweak his - and his clients’ - strategy.

Many of the agency’s clients, which include Bugaboo Creek Steak House, SolidWorks and Emerson Hospital, among others, are focused more on planning and how to spend their media dollars in this economy. For instance, some clients have trimmed print work, but beefed up their online advertising.

“There might be less ads, but more messaging and positioning work,” said Freedman, who is encouraging clients to be bold with their marketing messages to grab attention during the downturn.

As for his own business, Freedman, whose 18-person shop is on Newbury Street, has a positive outlook.

But Freedman is nevertheless taking precautions to keep costs in check by being conservative about hiring.

“We won’t hire people unless we know we can take care of them for a while. We never want to be in a position where we hire people and then the economy hits us. So we’re more dependent on freelancers,” said Freedman, who notes that there’s a large pool of talented freelancers in the market now.