The Twin Cities advertising community has gotten some serious ink the past few weeks. The June 29 Advertising Age published a much-discussed article on the City of Lakes ad scene. Area agencies (except for those in St. Paul, I suspect) were grateful, though perhaps not for the flyover-land reference to Minneapolis as a “hamlet.” Dang! There are people living down there! (AdAge digital editor Abbey Klaassen, who worked for Mpls.St.Paul a few years back and contributed to TCB, would have known better.)
And on Monday, the New York Times published a sizable piece on MinneADpolis.com, a new Web site designed to lure creative talent to the Twin Cities. The Strib got on board the next day.
MinneADpolis.com is the brainchild of the Minnesota chapter of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, “the Four A’s” for short. Local ad-industry blogger Neal Kielar, who presented some comments he’d heard (not all gushy) about the site, calls the local chapter “the 27 A’s,” after its 27 members. Many Twin Cities shops don’t belong—notably Olson, perhaps the hottest shop in town right now.
Still, MinneADpolis.com is a worthy bid to put the area’s creative community back on the radar screen, particularly for younger talent. Keith Wolf, creative director of Four A’s board member Modern Climate, which developed the site, told me that two of the site’s goals are to “elevate the city” in the creative universe and to dispel some notions about Minneapolis’s quality of life—i.e., it’s not just cold, and there are cool things to see and do.
MinneADpolis.com is still new and will undoubtedly evolve over time, probably in some unanticipated ways. Those changes will reflect how the local ad community is changing.
That community remains vibrant and vigorous. But it has been a little while since it’s gotten much national attention. The glory days, of course, were the ’80s and ’90s, when upstart Fallon McElligott’s nationally renowned work for Miller Lite, BMW, and (a bit later) Lee Jeans put the entire local scene in the spotlight.
These days, the agency now known as Fallon Worldwide still has a pretty good client list. But its 2008 revenues were about half of those in 2003. Fellow big boy Campbell Mithun has also shrunk a bit. (Martin Williams and Carmichael Lynch, two other top shops, have grown.) By and large, it’s the smaller boutique agencies that are on the rise.
I’m still getting the lay of the land here, but I’d guess that small-shop phenom is one reason why Minneapolis hasn’t been a big national deal for much of this millennium. There’ve also been some major shifts in the ad industry as a whole—notably, the decline in mass market models built upon big print and TV buys, as well as a shift to more targeted advertising, under-the-radar viral techniques, and interactive media. (The recession has had numerous powerful effects as well, of course.)
Another possible factor: The ad business in general doesn’t have the glamour it used to. There are probably more than a few creatives and brass who watch Mad Men with misty eyes—and not solely from all that cigarette smoke.
It’s a different world now. Less macho, less mass-cult, more fragmented. And in some respects, more creative.
BTW: I tweet on marketing, beer, media, and semi-related topics at @generebeck
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