Ahead of the curve | After barely surviving the dot-com collapse, The VIA Group relies on big clients and bigger ideas to stay in front of the fast-changing advertising market

Eight years ago, John Coleman could have kicked back and been proud of the company he had shepherded to success. It was the late 1990s and The VIA Group, the Portland-based advertising and marketing company Coleman founded with two colleagues in 1993, had grown into an international firm with offices in San Francisco, New York City, Columbus, Ohio, and Zurich, Switzerland. The company was riding the dot-com boom and experiencing 70% annual growth in those days, enough to twice land VIA on Inc. magazine's list of the top 500 fastest growing U.S. companies.

Little did Coleman know, however, that during the next few years he would face the greatest challenges of his professional career. First, the dot-com market began to crumble in 2000 and imploded in 2001. Within a few months in 2001, more than two-thirds of VIA's revenue disappeared as Silicon Valley clients like Sun Microsystems stopped spending their marketing dollars. Then, before the company could catch its breath, Sept. 11, 2001, arrived and VIA, whose New York office was near the base of the World Trade Center, watched the world turn upside down and more of its business dry up as the economy spun into recession.

That year Coleman watched 80% of VIA's $12 million in annual revenue dry up, and he was faced with some tough decisions. During the course of 2001, VIA slimmed down, closed its offices in San Francisco and New York City, and let go of around 35 of it's roughly 130 employees. Coleman says if he had waited even a few more months before closing the offices and issuing layoffs, VIA might not have survived. "That was, by far, the hardest period of my professional life by a factor of 10," Coleman says.

It seems his hard work has paid off. A scaled-back VIA has in the past year landed a raft of diverse and high-profile accounts, from the Empire State Building and a division of DuPont to the New England Aquarium and restaurant chain Uno Chicago Grill.

And VIA is doing it from an out-of-the-way office on Danforth Street in Portland, bucking the notion that an ad agency needs to be on Madison Avenue to succeed. Indeed, Bradley Johnson, the director of data analytics at Advertising Age, a trade publication in New York, points to the "mini-advertising Meccas" popping up in smaller cities like Richmond, Va., and Portland, Ore. "Advertising is no longer about location, location, location," Johnson says. "If Portland, Ore., can put itself on the advertising map, then Portland, Maine, can do so if there is creative talent that can prove itself to marketers."

But Coleman, 44, is not ready to sit back and rest on VIA's recent successes. He wants to see VIA continue to grow and land big clients. To do so means continually surprising its clients and remaining ahead of the curve ˆ— especially when it comes to the fast-changing market of new media.

In the fickle world of advertising, where tastes can change in a moment's notice, Coleman and Greg Smith, VIA's chief creative officer, know they can never be satisfied with the status quo. "And we couldn't ask for a better market environment to do that because there are so many new ways to communicate with consumers," Coleman says. "I think a lot of big ad agencies are struggling with that because they built their businesses around producing 30-second TV spots or traditional media. We've built it around always looking at the most interesting and appropriate method and medium to go change the way a market operates and behaves."

Mixing messages
Coleman's first exposure to the advertising industry was working in international sales and marketing out of the Portland office for the global engineering firm ABB Ltd., based in Zurich, Switzerland. But Coleman, an Augusta native with an MBA and an undergraduate degree in engineering, wanted to go into business for himself, and hatched a plan for an advertising firm that would do more than produce cool ads and pithy taglines for clients.

His goal: to approach clients' complicated marketing problems with the eye of an engineer. He wanted to dissect and analyze problems, then try to solve them creatively. "That was a great mix for me," Coleman says.

The company's first client was his previous employer, ABB. VIA did some advertising and direct marketing work for the firm, which led to accounts with other ABB divisions in Zurich and Beijing. Revenues the first year surpassed $500,000, and grew quickly. By 1998 ˆ— the first year VIA was named to Inc. magazine's list of the 500 fastest growing U.S. companies ˆ— revenues had grown to roughly $5.7 million. VIA during those first five years worked exclusively with high-tech, industrial and manufacturing clients like National Semiconductor in South Portland and Toronto-based Fraser Papers, which were facing business-to-business marketing challenges.

The portion of the business sustained by the dot-com boom nearly sank the company after Silicon Valley firms like Sun Microsystems tightened their purse strings as their stocks plummeted. But it was Coleman's vision of a diversified company that was equal parts business consultant, marketing strategist and advertising firm that saved VIA after the bubble burst, says Bill Heggie, a group strategy director for VIA's B2B accounts who joined the company in 1995. "Even as we tried to exploit the dot-com boom and benefit from that and grow the company based on it, we never forsook our key industrial and manufacturing-based clients," Heggie says, referring to clients like National Semiconductor and Fraser Papers. "So we always had that baseline revenue when the dot-com boom waxed and then waned."

Coleman says the tough market earlier in the decade reinforced an important lesson: diversify, diversify, diversify. Coleman and VIA took a step back and began applying the company's mission ˆ— to tackle hard-to-solve marketing problems ˆ— to a wider range of companies. "That was such a chaotic time," says Smith, 40, who joined the company as communications director in 1999. "I think we went to the market saying, 'We don't have the answers and we're just as afraid as you are, but we will work like hell to figure it out.' And that really resonated and we were able to get some traction from that."

Since 2002, Coleman says VIA's client list has grown 40% and spans industries from healthcare and restaurants to financial services and consumer companies. Though VIA had no prior experience in the financial services sector, the agency landed Portland-based Banknorth as a client in late 2001. The $40 billion financial services company now known as TD Banknorth is still one of VIA's largest clients. "We took our marketing expertise and started bringing it to other markets," says Coleman.

That strategy helped VIA rebuild itself. These days, the company's revenues have grown to slightly more than $19 million, and its client list is filled with high-profile national firms that spend millions on advertising every year. It opened a 15-employee office in Boston in 2002 and maintains a small satellite office in New York City.

Marketing the unmarketable
VIA is a full-service firm that provides a range of services from traditional advertising ˆ— TV commercials, radio spots and print ads ˆ— to marketing services like online advertising, Web development, public relations and brand-building. Such a wide range of offerings is a benefit in the increasingly competitive advertising industry, says Advertising Age's Johnson. He notes that traditional ad revenues last year grew at a 4.2% clip in the United States, but that revenue from marketing services grew 13.1% from the previous year. "If you're an agency that can offer the whole portfolio to clients you have an advantage," Johnson says.

In September 2005, VIA landed its highest profile account yet ˆ— marketing the World Trade Center properties for New York real estate developer Silverstein Properties.

Coleman points to one of those properties ˆ— 7 World Trade Center, the third building to fall on Sept. 11, 2001, and the first to be rebuilt ˆ— as the toughest marketing challenge VIA had faced. In fact, VIA had no experience in real estate marketing before landing the account, but the firm's creativity and the broad branding strategy sealed the deal, says Dara McQuillan, marketing director at Silverstein. "What impressed us the most about VIA was that they really researched this project and its history and came to New York and presented us with some phenomenal ideas," McQuillan says.

Coleman says VIA looked closely at the difficulties leasing office space in the building and found that the largest impediment was fear: What kind of boss would want to move his employees to a building that was destroyed in a terrorist attack? So VIA worked to change the conversation. It released a traditional advertising campaign appealing to business leaders' sense of bravery. A large fold-out ad in The New York Times Magazine debuted during Thanksgiving weekend that year, showing a sweeping view of the Manhattan skyline from where the top-tier offices of the 52-story building would be. The tagline included the simple message: "To leaders with vision, your office is ready."

Meanwhile, VIA's marketing approach went beyond traditional advertising, and beyond targeting just business leaders. The company opened the building to events like fashion shows and concerts to introduce the building to the city's residents. The result? The building is now 70% leased, which McQuillan says is "absolutely" a product of VIA's advertising campaign. In the process, VIA also landed the marketing account of the building's first tenant, The New York Academy of Sciences. "[VIA has] established quite a niche for themselves here at the World Trade Center," McQuillan says.

Smith, who previously ran his own marketing and independent film production company, Front Porch Productions, in New York, says being able to land high-profile accounts like Silverstein Properties drives his New York ad industry friends "crazy," and says VIA's ability to surprise clients has been an important component of the firm's recent success.

And though VIA often is many times smaller than the firms against which it competes for clients, Smith says the company has an advantage over many of the larger, more established firms. That's because many of those firms, he says, are content to rest on the success of their past campaigns. "What we're trying to sell is the creativity of innovation," Smith says. "The creativity begins before you create an ad, TV spot or a website. It begins with, 'How do you creatively solve a problem?'" (For more on how VIA develops its ad campaigns, see "Here comes the pitchˆ…" see below.)

One way VIA aims to creatively solve clients' problems is through brainstorming sessions, held early and often with employees from several departments. Whereas many ad firms will reserve such exercises to its creative department, Coleman stresses a collaborative approach that will bring together, say, members of the firm's interactive development, creative and public relations departments. For example, Karla McGowan, the head of VIA's PR group, says PR has traditionally been the "redheaded stepchild of communications" and is often brought in only after a marketing campaign has been developed. "PR should be there at the beginning," McGowan says. "That is the difference here. There are other agencies who tap into that, but it's the exception rather than the rule."

The company since late last year has landed more than a dozen new accounts for regional and national firms like Chelsea, Mass. dairy company H.P. Hood and New York-based employment website firm Monster. VIA also inked a deal to market the most iconic of New York landmarks, the Empire State Building, to potential office tenants and tourists alike. "In today's world where it feels like you've seen everything and everything's been done and everyone's jaded, to surprise somebody is a rarity and it really breaks through," says Smith, who on a recent morning sat in his office wearing jeans and a dark blazer over a white "New York City" t-shirt.

photo/david a. rodgers Coleman and Smith say being located in Maine hasn't been a hindrance for the company, but that it can be difficult for an out-of-town firm to convince potential clients to send money away from Madison Avenue. The trick, says Coleman, is getting noticed. "Being in Maine, frankly, you have to be damn good to compete nationally," Coleman says. But exposure from firms like VIA and others in Portland landing national clients ˆ— Swardlick Marketing Group boasts Mott's and Dole Frozen Fruit as clients and Garrand does work for Sylvania and Segway ˆ— means Portland is getting noticed. "There are agencies here playing at as high a level as VIA is," says Brenda Garrand, principal at Garrand. "[When] any of us bring clients to Portland it does nothing but increase the recognizability of Portland as the place that's next." At the same time, there are other advantages for an ad agency doing business in Maine, says Advertising Age's Johnson. "It costs less to do business in Portland than it does on Madison Avenue and that should give agencies a competitive advantage at a time when chief marketing officers are getting pressed hard by CFOs to control costs," he says. Another issue for VIA is human resources, as a city the size of Portland isn't necessarily a hot destination for the best and brightest in the ad world. But VIA has been successful attracting the talent needed to compete on an international scale, says Coleman. Take Ben Deily, an associate creative director who came to VIA just over a year ago from the San Francisco office of McCann Erickson, one of the larges ad agencies in the country with nearly $523 million in revenue last year. Sitting in his office on a recent morning in a t-shirt and jeans, with black spiked hair, Deily says VIA was "the sort of agency that I always imagined was possible." He initially was attracted to VIA while still at McCann through VIA's 2005 Year in Review. The annual presentation, produced as a Flash video, highlights the previous year's happenings ˆ— new clients, successful campaigns, new hires ˆ— and is one of VIA's most successful recruitment tools, says Smith. Deily, who in the 1980s was a co-founder of punk-rockers the Lemonheads, watched it and was hooked. "It reminded me of why I got into advertising," he says. "They were sophisticated and smart, but they also had this seat-of-the-pants, home-grown feel about them." VIA has 67 employees in the 160-year-old Portland warehouse that serves as its headquarters. Most of those staffers are "young, curious and surprisingly genuine, though pretty hip," Smith says. With its exposed wooden beams, the office sports the trendy décor befitting an advertising firm. Bookshelves full of colorful design books line the walls of a small library separated from the lobby with glass walls, and a round room located downstairs serves as a gallery for all the VIA ads that never saw the light of day. Deily even keeps his drum kit in the corner of one conference room. In the next few years, Coleman would like to see VIA grow to two or three times its current size so the company would have "the scale to tackle any project." Still, in the incredibly competitive and volatile advertising industry, Coleman says an agency is "only as good as its next idea." But he isn't concerned that VIA's creative juices will dry up. In fact, he's confident that VIA's biggest selling point is its people and its ability to attract big talent. "In today's world great ideas get noticed and do well, and that's what we really think our strength is," he says. "This is the kind of place where the next great work is going to happen."