Say you’re the chief marketing officer at a local company and your advertising budget gets slashed by 30 percent, but your sales goals for the year remain unchanged. Keeping in mind that executive recruiting firm SpencerStuart recently reported that the average tenure for chief marketing officers is just under 23 months, do you (a) start updating your résumé, (b) make some friendly calls to headhunters you know, (c) fire the director of sales, or (d) call Bangalore, India, and reduce your advertising creative and production costs by 70 to 90 percent?

Eden Prairie–based Four51 suggests that you start with (d).

While most Minnesota businesses are familiar with outsourcing to India for telemarketing and software functions, they might not think that producing marketing materials would lend itself to the same approach. Why not just have a local designer or printer do that kind of work? Why go out of the country? Four51’s answer: Because India is experiencing a rise in its own creative class, and its designers are hungry for work. If you require a significant volume, you could save your company a lot of money by sending your catalog copy and sales data sheets—particularly given how easy it is to send those materials electronically—to India.

Four51 has recently established relationships with creative design, telemarketing, and content-management resources in India. “When you look at the cost dynamics as opposed to the Minneapolis Warehouse District, you say, ‘Wow, that’s a big delta,’” says Tim Morin, Four51’s executive vice president of marketing, sales, and business development. “I’m not saying you want to decimate the creative community in Minneapolis, but it puts a new spin on how you think of creative execution and strategy.”

Four51 was founded in Eden Prairie in 1999 to help printers, distributors, and related firms in the printed communications supply chain do business with each other more efficiently via Web-based software. Four51 currently connects more than 350,000 users. In 2005, it facilitated 2.5 million transactions involving print-on-demand and Web-to-print systems, advertising design, collateral management, and telemarketing. In its expansion into overseas outsourcing, Four51 is focusing on three areas:

››› Sales force enablement—creating, designing, and a company’s brochures, product sell sheets, catalogs, and other sales print pieces

››› Collateral management—systems to manage and inventory these print pieces

››› Corporate identity management—logos, Business CARds, letterhead, And so on.

While the estimated $50 billion U.S. advertising creative production market dwarfs the $280 million of India’s outsourced advertising production (according to statistics from the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India), Morin says that agencies in India can provide “high-value, world-class production values and very cost-efficient capabilities.” One Indian firm Four51 hopes will become a network partner currently produces 7,000 display ads a day for the U.S. market, Morin says.

Some mega-agency holding companies seem to agree with Four51’s approach. The Wall Street Journal reported a few months ago that the WPP Group’s Ogilvy Mather advertising agency was establishing a location in India that will handle production work for all of its other offices around the world. (This writer’s parent company, Omnicom, is sending creative ideas developed in London off to Mumbai to be executed.)

With one of the largest communities of advertising and related marketing-communications service providers in the country, could the Twin Cities eventually lose a significant amount of business to competitors in India? Not to worry, says Morin, who believes this approach allows local agencies to focus more on the strategic side of creative development.

Currently, Four51 is now supporting two Minnesota companies on its networks with India-based marketing and demand-generation resources and is talking with several others in the state. Four51 also has a number of clients outside of Minnesota that have connected with its India resource networks.

Morin believes that Four51’s networks will provide a major source of new revenue for his company, which he says is growing at 30 percent a quarter since 2004. “I think it’s going to be substantial, based on the feedback we’re receiving in the community,” he says. “The opportunity to rethink how you spend your go-to-market dollars is phenomenal.”