When I started covering marketing for the Star Tribune’s business section in 2003, I spent the first few months meeting people in the advertising, marketing and PR business.

And I bet 90 percent of them had a story to tell about the terrible time they’d just been through: 2000 and 2001, when the dot-com collapse, followed by 9/11, sent the whole marketing business spiraling into its worst period since the Great Depression.

It was remarkable to hear so many different people describing this common disaster, like listening to the survivors of a terrible fire or flood recount their experiences.

Now here it is six years later, and the marketing business is once again facing historic challenges. Ad spending is predicted to be down in 2009 for the third straight year, the first time that’s happened since– the Great Depression.

And this time, instead of covering it as an outsider, I’m living it as someone in the business.

I’m not complaining. After all, my old business– newspapers– is itself in a historic downturn. Conditions are the worst they’ve been since– well, you know.

I’m basically hopeful. When the government confirmed recently that we’d been in a recession since December of 2007, my reaction was, great– we’ve been in it for a year, so we’ve gotta be that much closer to the end.

Still, with times as they are, all of us need to work smarter and harder than ever to deliver value for our clients. Here are a few things I’m keeping in mind as I look toward the next 12 months.

Engage with your customers. The decline in traditional media is real and permanent. Newspapers and television are cutting staff monthly; radio (with the exception of public radio) long ago gave up any pretense to being anything other than a medium for lowest common denominator messaging.

Smart marketers will find ways to cultivate interaction with their core consumers and insert themselves into conversations that already exist in online forums. It’s a great time to be a Web developer or social-media expert.

Think big. We all need to do the basic blocking and tackling; that’s a given. But in a time of chaos, bold moves carry less risk. And they’re the best way of breaking through the communication clutter, which is worse than ever.

Make your own news. The bar for news coverage has never been higher. With editorial staffs and news hole depleted, traditional news organizations have less time and space to pay attention to your company. Take time to figure out what you’re really doing that’s new and different. You’ll be ignored otherwise.

Serve your clients. Treat them like your livelihood depends on it. Because, after all, it does.

With hard work and a little bit of luck, I’ll be around to tell my survivor story when we’ve finally stopped using the phrase “the Great Depression” in every conversation about the economy.

Courtesy of K!T's flickrstream

A while ago, I mentioned Brandtags.net, an experiment by Noah Brier that tests the theory that brands exist in people’s heads. A recent trip led me to play with the backwards section where visitors guess the brands based on other users’ tags.

Some brands are dead giveaways (Apple’s popular tags include Steve Jobs, ipod and mac), but other brands’ tags explain why they’re lost in the daily kerfuffle.

Often, no definitive characteristics drove home a brand’s identity. Is it one widget manufacturer or another? Who knows? Who cares?

How did you fare at guessing the brand? Share your experience in the comments.

I don’t use that word lightly. It takes a lot of nerve to launch a real news site, staffed by real news reporters, in the new online world. It’s one thing to be a solitary blogger, with no fixed costs other than a computer and a wireless bill. It’s another thing to attempt to build something substantial, and Kramer put up a big chunk of his own dough to seed MinnPost. I don’t know what their financials look like, but they’re definitely grabbing eyeballs, now reaching more than 125,000 unique visitors a month.

I wrote a similar marketing column, “Selling It,” for the Star Tribune for about three years. Yet I always thought the Strib undervalued marketing coverage. The Twin Cities has one of the nation’s largest, most productive and creative marketing industries. It’s a business that is knowledge-based, well-compensated and clean. It attracts to our region the so-called creative class of worker, which some social scientists (e.g., Richard Florida) believe is the key to vitality in the modern economy. I used to tell my editors, if we didn’t already have this industry in our midst, and we had the chance to offer incentives to attract it here, it would be the biggest no-brainer in history.

Yet it’s right here already, organically grown and basically thriving, despite the rough waters of the short term. I hope to highlight some of the thoughts of our region’s leading marketing practitioners (yes, that will include our competitors) and show how they’re responding to the many challenges of what’s surely the most disruptive era ever in communications. My column is set to run on Mondays, with the first installment on July 21. We’ll also be posting the columns here one day after they run on MinnPost. My duties as a senior director at Fast Horse will continue unchanged, other than the addition of another deadline to the mix.

The next likemind is 8 a.m. next Friday, July 18, at Espresso Royale, 1229 Hennepin Ave. Anyone reading this blog would probably enjoy the gathering. Things usually start cooking by 8:30 and it breaks up before 10. You can come and go as you please — no need to stay for the full two hours.

It’s hard to say whether the change has resonated with consumers. Production of California prunes — excuse me, dried plums — has varied wildly from year to year, based on agricultural conditions more than marketing efforts. There have been some good years and some bad ones.

What I find odd is that, eight years later, the branding of the fruit seems to vary as much as the production. If you go to the Web site of the California Dried Plum Board, you’ll find a press release announcing the 2008 prune crop. The media contact is Richard Peterson, executive director of the California Prune Board. There are references to the year’s prune production estimates and reports from the Prune Marketing Committee. Similar inconsistencies can be found throughout the group’s communications.

If the official marketing organization for dried plums is still calling them prunes, then I don’t see why the rest of us shouldn’t do it, too.