By Joe Boomgaard | MiBiz
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WEST MICHIGAN — Many West Michigan industries employ creative types, but that highly touted group is perhaps most often associated with advertising.

The advertising industry employs over 2,500 professionals in the region, including the expected creative directors, writers and designers, but also many sales personnel, business developers, account managers and others not necessarily tied to the “creative class” descriptor.

It’s an industry that can trace its roots back more than a century when the region was a hub for fine furniture companies. That symbiotic relationship between the service-oriented advertising companies and the furniture manufacturers helped put the region on the map. Over time, advertising businesses spread their reach to almost every industry to where today, advertising is simply a ubiquitous part of doing business.

“The ad industry in West Michigan is a lot larger than the community in West Michigan and the West Michigan business community think it is,” said Tim Mroz, VP of the board of the American Advertising Federation West Michigan and VP of marketing and communications at The Right Place Inc. “We have several local agencies that have national and international client bases, and several top $40 million a year.”

AAF is a 125-member organization intended to serve as a central resource for the region’s advertising industry. Their mission is as much educating members and celebrating achievements as it is advocacy of the industry’s importance as an economic driver for the West Michigan economy and as a strategic business tool, Mroz said. For example, in May the AAF will hold it second annual small business workshop to help those companies learn more about the power of advertising.

“If you talk about advertising in general, where businesses see tremendous growth is in the small- to mid-size end of the spectrum,” he said. “The plethora of options has opened up, and there’s also been a further education on the side of small businesses. Many businesses can engage in (advertising) and have it be effective.

“There’s a potential for real business growth if companies engage in advertising and do it right.”

AAFWM’s Creative Crawl, an open house, open-ended tour of several local ad agencies, will commence the evening of Tuesday, Feb. 22. “It’s a great opportunity for the West Michigan public in general to get a look at how ad agencies work. It’s not the perceived Mad Men business structure that you might think it is,” Mroz said. Several agencies will open their doors for tours that night and have principals and creative talent on hand to discuss their best work.

Two days later, Thursday, Feb. 24, the group’s major annual celebration, the ADDY Awards, takes place at the Grand Rapids Art Museum. Part of the ADDY Awards includes awarding the organization’s Silver Medal, which has been awarded locally for the past 40 years to professionals who have made outstanding contributions to the industry.

This year’s award will be presented to Yang Kim, co-owner and executive creative director of Peopledesign. Kim’s story is perhaps reflective of many creative professionals. After graduating from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg, Pa., she came to West Michigan because of the office furniture industry, winding up at Herman Miller in 1991 and working for mentor Steve Frykholm on annual reports. After her position was downsized in 1996, she thought she’d have to move out of West Michigan, but instead, she ended up working with her husband, Kevin Budelmann, also formerly of Herman Miller, to start their own company, then known as BBK Studio. It’s been a steady climb and numerous awards ever since for her and the business.

“We thought it was time to head out of here, and we thought about moving to a different location. But we didn’t leave on bad terms and we got some work from them almost immediately. That kept us around,” Kim told MiBiz. “We were thinking about moving out of town, especially to a city like New York, but you really have to make a lot of money to be comfortable in a city like New York City. It was probably not for me. So we put our shingle up and worked out of our living rooms like a lot of people do when they’re getting their start.”

While she initially thought finding clients would be their toughest job, they actually found qualified talent the hardest to come by. That’s reversed itself as of late, she noted.

“What benefited us is that we were different from a strict design firm in that we had corporate experience. Having worked at Herman Miller, we knew corporate processes and how they operated. Running the business came easier for us,” she said.

Building off their experience with Herman Miller, many of Peopledesign’s first clients were other office furniture manufactures, including Steelcase. Today the company enjoys a diversified portfolio of clients, ranging from auto companies to arts organizations to tech companies.

Two of its largest clients are outside of Michigan, but what keeps Peopledesign grounded in West Michigan is its quality of life, Kim said.

“We’ve thought about moving or having a second office, but as we’ve had kids, we’ve realized this is a very nice place to be with kids. We’re comfortable and we’re not going anywhere. And with the ability to work remotely, (being in Grand Rapids) is not a big problem,” Kim said. “Secondary cities are great because there are a lot of regional opportunities. Larger cities have more opportunities, but they have more competition. People come here and say they didn’t know there was a New York-type agency here.”

AAFWM’s Mroz said Kim had a common story with others in the industry.

“We’ve continued to see designers move from Chicago and Minnesota to Grand Rapids because we have access to other high-level talent and access to high-level clients, but they can live in a very clean, green community that’s very family-oriented,” he said. “I would put some of our creative talent in West Michigan against those in New York, Chicago, San Francisco or Dallas any day of the week.”

More companies in the business community seem to be noticing the local quality, he said. While many agencies developed or switched to niche functions — working with just one type of media, for example — there’s been a shift over the last five to 10 years back to being full-service agencies, “partly due to their clients and the businesses realizing the impact of total brand management. There needs to be a cohesiveness across all media.”

Kim and the Peopledesign team, for one, have seen a marked increase in business this year compared to the previous three years. On the heels of publishing a new book, “Brand Identity Essentials,” she said her company successfully landed a major new client that promises to lead to a considerable amount of new creative work.

“It’s great that things are turning around and companies are doing marketing again,” she said.