by Joanne O'Sullivan / photography by Rimas Zailskas

There’s a scene in the first season of the hit cable series Mad Men in which the lead character, Don Draper, defends the advertising industry. The show, set in a top New York ad agency in the early 1960s, captures a long-standing image of the advertising world: a high-powered, old-boy network that centers around three-martini lunches and sexy secretaries. "People want to be told what to do," Draper says, as a way to justify advertising’s slick and sometimes under-handed strategies. "So badly that they’ll listen to anyone."

A Mad Man dropped into present-day Asheville might be in for a bit of a shock. For starters, the women aren’t the secretaries anymore. They’re in charge. And their approach to advertising couldn’t be more different from that "tell the people what they want" philosophy. It’s about listening, says Marla Tambellini, Director of Marketing and Public Relations at the Asheville Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, part of the Asheville Area Chamber of Commerce and the Buncombe County Tourism Development Authority. When the bureau came up with a new campaign for the area, they focused on "trying to get at the heart of what our guests were telling us about Asheville and find that emotional tug" behind what motivated them to visit the mountains. A far cry from the hard-sell, agency-knows-best strategy of yesteryear’s ad world.

A consumer-focused foundation is the key to successful advertising today, says Karen Tessier of Market Connections, one of Asheville’s oldest full-service ad agencies. "Creating a brand comes from understanding the consumers’ experience, involving their actual perceptions," she says. While Tessier’s office in the new downtown high-rise Capital Center may be the closest thing in Asheville to a chic New York ad agency, what goes on there is hard work. "It’s not all about what’s cute, pretty and popular anymore," she says. "It’s about the integrity of the product and how it resonates with consumers."

Identifying who those consumers are today isn’t as straightforward as it was in the past, when advertisers started from basic demographics: old, young, man, woman. The starting point now is desired behavior, says Biltmore Company’s Julie Hanser, the estate’s vice president of attraction marketing. To generate the desired behavior—in her case, a visit to the Biltmore Estate—she starts with identifying those whose interests align with what the Biltmore offers: art, architecture, history, gardening, food and wine, entertaining. While those people have tended to be educated, affluent women in their 40s or 50s, these days they might also be Gen X’ers and Millenials. Her goal: to get into the heads of enough young people to get them interested in a historic estate. It’s all about "establishing relevance for the next generation," she says.

Coming up with the message to get to that audience is another story. For the Convention and Visitors Bureau, the result of all that research was a "brand promise" that each visitor would have a life-enriching experience when coming to the area. That translated into a slogan that rolled out in 2005 and cost the Buncombe County TDA close to $200,000: "Asheville, any way you like it."  

But when the economy started to tank in 2008, affordability became the overriding message that companies across the board wanted to get out to their target audiences. Leslie Sloan, sales director at The Big Bridge Advertising agency in Asheville, says that with decreased revenues, many businesses started to see advertising as something they couldn’t afford. It was one of the first areas where businesses started to cut back. Ad agencies themselves had to get leaner and meaner, making a pitch to businesses that they couldn’t afford to pull their ads (and therefore buzz and customers) at a time when they needed the revenue the most. "We try to help clients reinvest in themselves, but do it a little more wisely, with marketable returns," she says.

Sometimes building the right image can start out as an exercise in avoiding the wrong one. A few months ago, Stewart Coleman approached Big Bridge for marketing and PR help. Coleman’s development group, S.B. Coleman Construction, had scrapped a controversial plan to build the Parkside condominium complex on Pack Square in downtown Asheville. Instead, he’ll turn the Hayes & Hopson building, which he bought in 2006, into a bar called Pack’s Tavern that’s slated to open in the spring. "They’ve had to change their story from bad press to good press," Sloan says. The upscale condos—which would have been built on the footsteps of City Hall—represented many things Ashevilleans didn’t like, whereas Pack’s Tavern, a green-built space with beer on tap from every local brewery, will represent many things that they do. "There’s still some difficulty overcoming the story," she says.

In addition to fighting fires, another step an ad pro has to take is helping clients choose their media mix. "Gone are the days when you run a series of print ads and send out a brochure," says Stephanie Smith, who, with partner Gary Broome, started The Brite Agency in downtown Asheville in 2001. Online advertising and social media are becoming the go-to media for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is accountability. It’s easy to track clicks on online ads or trace cookies, letting advertisers assess the effectiveness of their ads immediately. Though they know they’re important, many businesses don’t know exactly how to use emerging media effectively, Smith says. "People know they can’t ignore it anymore, but really, we’re still in a learning phase," she says.

That might be a factor that plays to the advantage of a smaller city like Asheville, which has an unusually large, thriving creative class. Christine Sykes Lowe, who has her own one-woman marketing, public relations and event-planning firm, T3 Creative Group, says that with the wealth of independent creative professionals here, it’s easy to pull together a team of talent in voice, sound, video, graphic or web design that can produce high-caliber work without a lot of overhead. Add to that the scenery and natural resources, and you’ve got an attractive location for national advertisers—such as outdoor clothing companies—to do their photo shoots, says Belinda Thomas of Intelligent Design. She and Asheville photographer Steven McBride are making that pitch to catalog companies like Orvis and Woolrich. This fall, they’re orchestrating photo shoots at various scenic Western North Carolina locations with professional models wearing clothing from a local retailer, Diamond Brand Outdoors. Thomas says the Southeast is rarely represented in national catalogs, but she and McBride are out to change that. "We’re hoping to bring more of that kind of work to this area."

Local and collaborative—it’s an approach that seems tailor-made for Asheville. Rather than see one of Asheville’s oldest agencies close when their boss retired, three employees of Kelso Advertising & Design—Lindsay Hensley, Kristi Whitehead and Kate Gower—recently banded together to buy the business from founder Bob Kelso. Each of the three women brings complementary skills to the table, says Hensley, and although they’re still deciding on new directions (they sealed the deal in September), they’re keeping some long-standing relationships with clients like Swain County Tourist Development, the Great Smoky Mountain Golf Association and Bee-3 Vintage Guitars.

But there’s another key piece if you’re doing business around here. "It’s no longer enough to have a good—or even the best—product or service," says Jennifer Maurer, who runs the advertising and marketing consulting firm The Brandinghouse with her husband Toby. The Maurers have both local and national clients, and in creating an image for a local client like online retailer The Littlest Golfer or Morgan-Keefe Builders, Maurer has to take into consideration that Ashevilleans are a rather discriminating crowd. They want companies, large and small, to be good at what they do and be good corporate citizens. "[They] want to know if companies use sustainable business practices, conserve resources, pay a fair wage, produce and use eco-friendly products and give back to the community," she says. Don Draper would have such a hard time finding a job in this town.