ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 7, 1996 TAG: 9601110132
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MEGAN SCHNABEL STAFF WRITER
A new focus on the Internet and continued competition for clients will mark the new year for the advertising industry, local observers say.
"We're seeing the need for a more well-rounded approach," said Rhonda Musselman, president of Musselman and Associates in Roanoke. Today, public relations, advertising and marketing often are done out of the same agency, with all aspects of a campaign working together, she said.
"We're not seeing huge [advertising] budget increases," said Bill Thomasson of The Packett Group in Roanoke. "We're seeing much more focus."
For many companies, this focus has begun to include on-line advertising on the World Wide Web, the most interactive part of the Internet.
"People will want new ways to get their message out," said Sharon Meador, a graphic designer who recently joined with Lisa Frankl to form FranklMeador Creative Group. Their goal for 1996, she said, is to become more involved with multimedia and World Wide Web advertising.
But as long as the technology is unfamiliar to clients as well as to agencies, a risk remains, she said.
"There's a lot of people in the valley who could probably benefit from being on the Internet," she said. "But you don't want to sell them snake oil."
Musselman agreed. She pointed to desktop publishing as a case of a new technology that was hyped and feared - and then turned out to be less threatening than once thought.
Four or five years ago, she said, industry watchers were predicting that the advent of publishing software and the easy access to high-quality printers would signal the end of the advertising business, because clients would be able to produce promotional materials in-house.
But that hasn't been the case. Companies that try to do their own advertising often discover just how hard it is to produce high-quality work, she said, and end up returning to their ad agencies.
"Since nobody really knows exactly how it's going to turn out," she said, "I can't say it's going to be a cure-all."
The computers that most businesses and consumers own today aren't powerful enough to download large amounts of information and high-quality graphics quickly. Until this happens, she said, the Internet isn't going to replace traditional print and broadcast media, she said.
And even when technology does catch up to advertisers' needs, there will always be people who prefer tangible, traditional advertising to on-screen flash. This may be especially true of many top managers, who are responsible for making corporate decisions but typically don't spend much time in front of a computer, she said.
Musselman said, though, that Internet advertising does have its place. Products or services that are aimed at engineers, whose jobs revolve around computers, or at consumers, who may spend hours surfing the Internet, might do very well if advertised on the Web, she said.
Thomasson said his agency has seen considerable interest in the Internet, even from more traditional clients. A client who sells equipment to chiropractors, for instance, recently made his entire catalog available on the Internet.
"More and more people are going to that," Thomasson said. For now, the Internet is being used mainly for information, not for ordering, although that may follow as on-line ordering systems become more secure.
Nationally, analysts foresee an upturn in advertising spending for 1996. Robert Coen, senior vice president and director of forecasting for McCann-Erickson U.S.A. unit of the Interpublic Group of Cos. in New York, predicts total spending for advertising in the United States will rise 7.8 percent over 1995's level, to $174.1 billion. Total ad spending for 1995 is estimated at $161.5 billion in the United States, up a similar 7.7 percent from 1994.
Nationally, the increased ad budgets will be driven by the presidential elections and the Summer Olympics, Coen said.
But the growth will not come automatically. Thomasson said competition for clients remains fierce in Southwest Virginia.
"Whatever we did last year, we need to be smarter this year," he said.
And local advertising agencies must be willing to aggressively recruit clients from outside the Roanoke Valley, Musselman said.
"The days of waiting for business to come to you are over," she said.
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