Hanon McKendry buys into alternative media firm for online advertising growth

By: Deborah Johnson Wood

Bob Blanchard, CEO of Grand Rapids-based marketing firm Hanon McKendry, ran across an interesting bit of information last week: the top 100 advertisers in the United States, which represents 41 percent of total advertising spending, last year shifted a billion dollars from television, radio and print advertising to advertising on the web.

That information supports Hanon McKendry’s decision to purchase interest in Mindscape, a successful Grand Rapids Internet marketing and alternate media company with 13 employees.

“Now we can offer clients anything to do with the web — design, building, marketing,” says Blanchard. “We outsourced all of that before, and we found that very few firms, if any, did all three of those components very well. We used one firm just to do search engine optimization and used another firm to actually build the web site.”

Now called Mindscape at Hanon McKendry, the partnership brings all those capabilities in house, says Blanchard.

“Partnering with Hanon McKendry made sense for us because their strategic approach to client work is very consistent with our own,” said MINDSCAPE at Hanon McKendry Co-Founder Pete Brand.

Blanchard says spending on alternative media will climb 21 percent to $81.67 billion in 2008, and in 2012 will account for 26.7 percent of total advertising and marketing expenditures. That’s up from 6.9 percent in 2002.

“Before we closed the deal Mindscape was 11 people,” Blanchard says. “We’ve hired two new people since they’ve been here and we feel we are staffed well now to maintain and grow. We’re really thankful that we’re growing in this crazy economy.”

Source: Bob Blanchard, Hanon McKendry; Pete Brand, Mindscape at Hanon McKendry

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Deborah Johnson Wood is development news editor for Rapid Growth Media. She can be contacted at deborah@rapidgrowthmedia.com.