Advertising and marketing: today's ever-changing digital world has posed many opportunities and challenges to the advertising and marketing industry. Area experts discuss how they are revamping their methods to keep their work relevant and impactful to a diverse audience.

• Position: Industry Outlook - Interview

Advertising and marketing is sometimes a key indicator of the economy. In light of that, do you think the economy is improving for Utah businesses?

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BLACK: In our office, we often say, "What recession?" More than ever, our clients are willing to spend. Our ad spends are a little bit down and a little more cautious, but companies' willingness to spend money on marketing and advertising is at an all-time high. We've been doing this since 2001 and I think this is way different than the recession of '01, '02, where people kind of stopped spending all together. This time, they really haven't stopped. So if this is any indication of the Utah economy, we have no concerns.

PENNA: This is our 29th year in business, and last year was our best year. So that was a good indicator for us.

YOUNG REN: I would echo what others have said in the room--our clients by and large have come through the last couple of years feeling pretty good. We represent a lot of retail accounts in this market and the budgets remain at least steady.

ROBINSON: At Mozy, four years ago was the dark time for us, so to speak We went through one minor round of layoffs. For me, a barometer of the economy is the competition for talent. And I'd say it is as competitive as it ever has been trying to find and keep good people. In our space, in technology, some really exciting companies have popped up here in Utah, and they are aggressively hiring. Based on that, it does seem to be improving. Not drastically, but it is.

PLOQUIN: Like many of you, last year and 2011 were the best years that STRUCK has experienced. I think it's because of the diversity of our services and our digital forwardness. It's been great because a lot of the budgets are moving toward digital.

That said, we now have clients who are recovering from the recession. We just secured a relationship with a home builder, for instance. But the word on the street is we're going to continue to do more for less. Because they feel like they're not completely out of the woods yet. And they've also adapted--they've done very well with less, so they're continuing to be very cautious in the way they're spending their marketing budget.

SNAVELY: At CHG Healthcare, we are seeing pretty aggressive growth in our marketing spend, in the range of 20 to 40 percent a year.

What did 2008/2009 do to us? We got a lot smarter. We are working to stretch our dollars--if we're spending 20 percent more, we're getting 50 percent more. And that's not just the marketing spend, it's how we're approaching every element of our operation. That shift has been a really good one for the health of our company because it's aligned us all to grow our EBITDA at much faster rates than we're growing our volume.

DeNAUGHEL: I absolutely agree we're doing more for less. That's in terms of both the clients' dollars and internally--we're much more efficient, much more streamlined. More than ever, there's extreme pressure, and rightfully so, from clients to make sure that we are extremely good stewards of their budgets and showing the return on investment and measurable results.

KNIGHT: Vivint is certainly spending a lot more on advertising than we ever have. Part of that is because we never have spent a lot of money on advertising, so it's really easy to grow from that perspective.

In making the case for advertising dollars at the board level and the executive level, as long as I can show the return on investment, I can spend money all day long. Advertising and marketing has been considered discretionary in the past because it was really hard to measure. When the economy gets challenging, then you cut down on discretionary spending. So as long as you can show the benefit to the business, that's where the economy has actually helped us get smarter because you have to be able to prove the ROI in metrics.

MELCHIOR: We've definitely seen our clientele recovering over the last couple of years. In 2008 and 2009, we saw a sharp cut in budgets and spends. But as the economy began to recover here in Utah, we've seen an increase in spend. Particularly, we have also seen a transition of budgets with our clients. They're pulling budgets from direct mail and from traditional media and focusing on the online space where it's easier to track ROI. Our clients are very ROI based right now. We absolutely have to show them that every dollar they're spending is showing them results and showing them customers and showing them traffic.

I'm excited to see what happens in the next five years here in Utah. The economy is growing, and we're experiencing tremendous growth as a company as well because of that.

JONES: Most of our clients are out of state and international. We probably have a 65 percent out-of-state customer base. But we have a very vital, strong Utah customer base as well. We were one of the first interactive agencies specializing in CD ROM offerings. Today, our sweet spot has been in tech, healthcare, travel, tourism, professional services, with a focus on robust technology tools that back up communications objectives for sales, marketing and training.

This is my third recession. We had to get nimble from the get-go. Our agency has never been in that wow-the-budgets-are-really-great space. Budgets have been tight ever since I started the business. What I'm seeing now is very encouraging. We made it through all three of these major financial implosions and are here still to talk about it. And we've stayed focused on innovation. I think that's really helped us.

We're seeing more and more activity the beginning of this year. 2012 was fine. We continued to be in growth mode again, getting over 2009, but 2013 looks like it's going to be very, very promising, very active. We're getting longer-termed commitments and a little bit more easing on budgets.

Some of you jumped into the digital media space early on. You've been in it for 10-plus years. How has it affected you? How have you responded?

SNAVELY: The biggest thing that we've changed in the way we put our marketing together is our speed to message. Because of the world of 140-characters-or-less, people's attention span to deep messaging has decreased. So we have really fine-tuned our capability to write messages quickly that can be used in mediums that don't take a lot of time to respond to. That is one big shift in skill set and work in our team.

Secondly, the financial capability of marketers has had to grow dramatically. The ability to think about linkage to business results in sales--that's a journey, and I wouldn't say we've solved that equation as an internal marketing team. How does what we do link to sales, to gross margin and ultimately to growing the company's EBITDA?

In most of my new employees, that skill set is nonexistent. Otherwise, we're just looking at data all the time with no analytics behind the data, no analysis of business impact. So training that and thinking about that as a marketing leadership team has been a big change.

KNIGHT: The other thing from a digital standpoint is the ability to learn quickly. We often test two different messages. Marketing is an art, but there is some science associated with it as well. Being able to test things and measure them very quickly and to automatically shift the audience to what is working is where the digital has really made a substantial difference from a marketing discipline perspective.

ROBINSON: First and foremost, you've got to be in social media. That's just an axiom at this point. But one thing we've learned is it's really about quality over quantity It's not a matter of, you know, we need to tweet five times a day or three Facebook posts or whatever it may be. It's really about understanding your target audience and putting out stuff that's going to be relevant and interesting to them.

For the first few years with social media, we were just tweeting or posting or YouTubing about ourselves. "We do this. This is something new we've done. This is who we are." And that gets old. We made a shift to really leveraging third-party content. Our customers are tech savvy. They're interested in technology. They're interested in software. They're interested in gadgets. We made the shift from just strictly talking about ourselves to talking about other things technology related. And it's been huge. Our followers have gone up. Our likes and everything went through the roof when we started doing that.

MELCHIOR: Outside of social media, I don't think there's been any significant revolutions in the digital space since 2000. Everybody is always talking...