New Orleans 100: Interview With Trumpet Group

All Day Buffet has compiled the New Orleans 100, a list of innovative and world-changing ideas that have come out of New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina. Designed to encourage discussion about the rebirth of the city, the NOLA 100 highlights the good that has grown out of the tragedy.

PSFK sent a few questions to 5 of the groups from the New Orleans 100 list who are making change for the better in New Orleans.

Today, we bring you a Q&A with Robbie Vitrano of Trumpet, a “Recovering ad agency specializing in the success of startups, launches and turnarounds by helping business ideas become sustainable and profitable brands”

What does Trumpet do?

We use communications to take ideas to market. Much of our work has implications beyond strictly commercial objectives. We call ourselves a recovering ad agency. Our expertise is with startups, launches and turnarounds - A business model honed within the complexity of post-K New Orleans, working at the center of the recovery with for-profit startups, social entrepreneurs, helping to stand up economic development, public health, public safety, public education and the tourism industry. Our brand design, strategic planning and distillation skills have been stunningly effective in this compressed, high-stakes environment.

We found that it transcends all of our work around the country. We’re working much deeper within our clients’ business, with communications at the core of business strategy, broadening our services to include product design. As such we have changed our compensation structure to include equity and revenue sharing, including bringing financing to several projects. It’s a place much deeper than advertising or maybe it’s where advertising was always supposed to go.

How did the tragedy of Katrina provide a unique opportunity for innovation, change and growth?

We were the first agency and among the first businesses to return to New Orleans after Katrina. The near-death experience forced us to reexamine our purpose and priorities. The nature and complexity of the work, encouraged greater development in areas of business strategy, product design, venture funding, anthropology, social media, etc. Before the storm, our goal was growth through national clients with 70% of our business out of town. Unfortunately, much of this business was pursued on the basis of billings rather than an alignment with our core vision. After the storm, we resigned our largest clients in L.A. and New York to focus on the reinvention of New Orleans. Fortunately, there was considerable work to do. There was and remains a new appetite for innovation in the city. For us, it was a clear choice of meaningful work and a commitment to authentic purpose. As a creative company we must bear witness to the rebirth of New Orleans.

What about New Orleans inspires you?

By circumstance, necessity, and economic opportunity New Orleans is an innovation laboratory. Social, economic, political, cultural, environmental - every significant issues facing every community are being examined and/or reinvented in urgent, hard focus. At the center is social innovation - where institutions like government have failed, bottom-up, citizen-led innovation has succeeded. Anchoring these new dynamics, are the eternal, omnipresent conviviality and humanity of New Orleans. That which is responsible for our cultural richness in architecture, food, and music. We are entering an economic age - what Dan Pink call’s the Conceptual Age - that will prize conceptual, empathetic and right-brain capabilities. At it’s core, New Orleans has always understood the place and value of such timeless elements of human interaction. It has always been a place to be fully human; a sentiment generally out of step with a practical, legislated, measured and technology-linked world.

Today, that foundation and these circumstances are in play, being tested and studied by virtually every major foundation, think tank and b-school in the country. It is attracting waves of young, engaged people - the fourth sector - to an historic place and time. Our own network of creative, committed, generous collaborators has exploded, covering virtually every corner of the globe. Assuring nothing, but holding enormous promise - the ultimate lure for the creative problem solver.

“New Orleans is where elegance met an undefined wildness to encourage the flowering of creative intelligence.” Wynton Marsalis

Thanks Robbie!

Trumpet Group