A local agency attracts national attention by expanding the boundaries of advertising - coming soon to an electrical outlet, treadmill, or Christmas tree near you.
In the so - called "TiVo Age," as consumers discover ways to fast - forward through commercials and block out the ever - expanding number of billboards, the little downtown ad agency has been busily inventing new places to throw a message your way. With clients such as Microsoft, Chase, and MTV, BaM has emerged as a standout in the world of nontraditional advertising, a category that includes just about anything that's not television, radio, billboards, or print. While it's not the first agency to hinge its success on that trend (ads have been popping up on everything from manhole covers to shopping carts), BaM has done it with greater success than most. What began as a two - man agency in 1999 now bills more than $20 million annually.

What's more, its work has generated buzz. In 2006, The Wall Street Journal published an article on a series of Chase ads BaM wrapped around airport electrical outlets, and The New York Times and US Weekly, among others, seized upon an Internet video campaign the agency did for MTV's The Hills within a week of the launch.

Of course, not everyone rejoices about the never - ending proliferation of commercial messages. Several national anti - advertising groups consider such work, however inventive, to be a blight on the landscape. Organizations such as the Anti - Advertising Agency, a not - for - profit group of writers and artists in New York City, rage against the growing tidal wave of ads - some 5,000 exposures per person per day - in which they say we're now drowning.

"No business succeeds for very long by making people hate it," says co - owner Scott Montgomery. "The first surge of nontraditional media, when it was just surprising because no one had ever put an ad there, has passed. Now you have to give the viewer some kind of value. It has to be surprising and delightful."

Not dismissing those concerns, the principals of BaM say they're mindful of the line between surprising and annoying.

"No business succeeds for very long by making people hate it," says co - owner Scott Montgomery. "The first surge of nontraditional media, when it was just surprising because no one had ever put an ad there, has passed. Now you have to give the viewer some kind of value. It has to be surprising and delightful."

For the principals at BaM, "delightful" means the medium fits the message. It means stunts like promoting MTV's Two - A - Days, a show about a high - school football team, by fastening ads to treadmills at private gyms - one of the agency's nontraditional gambits in 2006. "The creativity is there in spades," says Craig Wood, a visiting professor of advertising at Indiana University and former ad executive at the New York firm Saatchi & Saatchi. "The challenge for them and everyone else working in this nontraditional space is now measurability. Show me the results."

Founded in 1999 by former Young & Laramore creatives Mark Bradley and Scott Montgomery, BaM billed just $237,000 in its first year. The agency arrived in a market already crowded with creative boutiques and larger agencies, but the two Herron graduates slowly accumulated clients and hired a few employees. In 2004, they moved into a 19th - century brick building on St. Joseph Street. During that period, the principals gathered at a kitchen table one night and made a decision that would change the agency's course dramatically. "A lot of big clients already had a roster of big ad agencies," Montgomery says. "We realized they didn't need us to churn out their print and television ads. But that machine doesn't know how to make money in nontraditional media. To us, that seemed like the future. That's what we wanted to focus on."

Today, BaM employs 24 people and boasts a roster of large clients, 70 percent of which hail from the coasts. Although BaM remains a fairly small group even by local standards, its growth outpaces almost every advertising agency in the market. In their shared office, Montgomery and Bradley sit about five feet from each other, old college friends surrounded by electric guitars and piles of paper several feet high. The two like to bounce ideas off each other and see no reason for cloistered workspaces. They wear the sport coats and jeans you might expect from artistic types who have done well for themselves, but there's not a whiff of pretension from either. Mostly, they seem like two guys enjoying an improbable windfall brought on by coloring outside the lines - and the PR buzz that comes with it.

One of BaM's successes experimenting with nontraditional media was created on behalf of Hansen & Horn in December 2006. The homebuilder was hoping to sell more houses during the holiday season, a tall order even in happier times for the real - estate business - people just don't tend to make that commitment in December when they're nesting. But the agency identified one place it could intercept hordes of customers that month: Christmas - tree farms. After calling a lot of bewildered tree - farm owners, they finally found a dozen willing to sell them a $60 tree, allow them to hang it with Hansen & Horn gift certificates as ornaments, and leave it out front. "Our client saw traffic to its model homes double compared with the same month of the previous year," says BaM chief strategy officer Ben Carlson. "And it was incredibly cheap."

A tight budget also motivated the electrical - outlet portion of the Chase national campaign. Though it had just $65,000 to spend, the company's commercial - banking line wanted to reach business executives. Everyone knows placing an ad in The Wall Street Journal is one way to do that, but at about $129 per 1,000 views, it's an expensive way to go. Executives also travel, so in - flight magazines might work, but advertising in them costs about $100 per 1,000. There simply wasn't a cheap place to reach that audience.

So BaM invented one. Knowing that executives often need to charge their laptops at electrical outlets in the airport, the agency's principals started calling airports to see what was possible. "We were told repeatedly, 'It can't be done,'" Carlson says. "When we come up with this stuff, there's usually no one you can just call and buy the space from. It was an arduous six - month process. The media companies representing the Indianapolis airport all said no, but the people managing the airport finally agreed to the campaign." BaM placed two - foot - high stickers with the Chase logo and marketing messages such as "We empower your businesses, right down to their batteries" around electrical outlets throughout the airport. The ads were intended to be posted for one year, but they are still up nearly three years later. BaM claims the outlets have racked up 12 million views. The cost per 1,000 was $5. "That's the beauty of doing something for the first time," Montgomery says. "No one knew what it was worth."

Ironically, The Wall Street Journal caught wind of the campaign and covered it in 2006. "What Bradley and Montgomery are doing right now is definitely en vogue," says Suzanne Vranica, who reports on advertising for the newspaper. "It's a risky bet because the effectiveness of this kind of advertising is hard to measure concretely. But if you get the eyeballs, it's better than nothing. And these stunts do another thing, which is drum up publicity."

In the wake of the WSJ coverage, an onslaught of requests poured in from companies wanting to buy into the new - media opportunity. The only problems were that BaM didn't exactly own a patent on an entire medium, and its principals didn't want to anyway. "My Dad thought we were crazy," Montgomery says. "He said, 'Aren't you going to capitalize on this?' But we don't want to be famous for being the guys who 'cracked the code' on electrical - outlet advertising. We want to be the guys famous for finding the most appropriate and unusual place to put a brand's message."

Consumers are changing their habits, and advertisers need to engage them wherever they may be says one Bam customer.

And their customers aren't complaining. David Clifton, senior vice president of Chase, believes in the novelty of an approach like the electrical - outlet campaign. "It was a pretty out - there idea," he says. "But we don't shy away from that stuff. We've projected our logo onto sidewalks, sent street teams out into the world. Consumers are changing their habits, and advertisers need to engage them wherever they may be."

Sometimes that place isn't a place at all. Calling upon BaM to promote its DVD release of The Hills Season Two, a show most popular with 12 - to - 24 - year - old females, MTV needed a campaign that would have a high impact on those viewers for a low cost. And it needed it fast. With less than a month to work, the creatives at BaM consulted every 14 - year - old girl they could find. For the people who followed the show, they realized, the characters were a kind of shorthand - every bad boyfriend was a Spencer. So BaM created a medium for that shorthand and put it where the audience was most likely to see it. The agency took clips of the show, attached sentiments like "You need to know he's a sucky person," and put them on YouTube for fans to e - mail to friends as video greeting cards. On the first day, they got several thousand hits. Then US Weekly and Teen Vogue got a hold of it. By Day 12, they were at 250,000 views. "When guys like us are in a bar and something funny happens, we'll quote Caddyshack because it's part of our shared cultural experience," Montgomery says. "This is just like that, but they're sharing it online. We needed a name for it, and 'emoticlip' was just dumb enough to work. But giving it that handle gave the press something to write about. It's really just shared video, but suddenly it had a name."

The critics might have a few words for it, too. While the phenomenon of nontraditional advertising is not entirely new (Coca - Cola provided general stores with red screen doors and a matching cooler out front to market its product in the early 1900s), ads now appear in spots as unlikely as drinking straws and tattoos across a boxer's back. These incursions, proliferating at a greater rate than ever before, do have their detractors. The magazine Adbusters, based in Vancouver, publishes rabid tirades about the evils of wallpapering the world with ads. Members of the Anti - Advertising Agency, a New York organization, describe outdoor messages as particularly "invasive."

"The problem with these ads is that generally they're done in a public space," says Steve Lambert, founder and CEO of the agency. "By definition, that space belongs to the public, not to advertisers. If we're reading through a magazine, we can flip the page. If we're watching TV, we can change the channel. When it's in a public space, we have no choice."

While he admits that he finds many ads clever, Lambert pushes for regulation to limit the places they can appear. His group objects to the advance of advertising into virgin territory. "Once you get used to seeing ads on electrical outlets, they creep into new places," he says. "It always advances just beyond the line of what we find acceptable. If they push too fast, the public pushes back. But if they push slowly, it's not considered a big deal."

For their part, representatives of Chase and BaM claim they haven't heard any complaints from consumers about the electrical - outlet campaign. Clifton, the bank's senior vice president, says he faces the risk of offending customers with any type of advertising. But as long as companies need to reach their customers, they'll find ways to do so that challenge tradition. "Returns from traditional media have been declining, so advertisers are eager to experiment with these new methods," says Wood, the IU professor. "Agencies will put an ad any place it will stick."

Experts such as Wood, however, question whether nontraditional advertising can last without a concrete way to count how many people see it. Mark Bradley argues that not only can the new methods usually be measured, but that occasionally they can be measured more accurately than with traditional metrics such as the Nielsen ratings, which calculate TV viewership. In the case of the Christmas - tree campaign, homebuyers brought those gift certificates disguised as ornaments into model homes, where each one was counted. In the case of the emoticlips campaign, BaM knows right down to the click how many people have seen it. "There are some nontraditional approaches we're still figuring out how to measure," he says. "But some of them are better than the newspaper. You know how many people subscribe, but how many got to page 2 and saw your ad?"

As for the Adbusters and Anti - Advertising Agencies of the world, it's a point of view BaM takes seriously. Carlson suspects that more Adbusters readers work in advertising than in any other profession. But he says the critics shouldn't be railing against a particular new medium, but rather against poor creativity - ads that are boring or objectionable. Some nontraditional work, he argues, can actually be helpful. If you're looking for an outlet to charge your laptop, can it hurt to have one flagged?

"The medium always has to match the message," Carlson says. "Unfortunately there are agencies who don't think that way, who staple ugly flyers to trees and call it nontraditional. That's not what we do. The more we can do to provide value to the viewer, the more successful we'll be. And the market for this nontraditional stuff is only going to get bigger. Everything is media."