When Rick Parra's company restricted travel, he still found a way to make his presentation to a supermarket trade association in Argentina this past spring without ever leaving South Florida.

He turned to Audacity Recording Studios in Hollywood, which produced a professional video of Parra, director of retail services in Latin America for the Nielsen Co., delivering his market report. He paid $600 for the project -- a fraction of the cost of travel -- and it debuted on the Web and on a DVD shown at the conference. Parra plans to make more videos at Audacity for trade shows abroad that he can't attend.

``Ideally, I'd love to do face-to-face presentations, but that's not going to be possible,'' Parra said. ``I think these videos are a trend of things to come.''

So do the owners of Audacity, who are embracing video and the Internet to counteract the downturn in advertising and music recording. Audacity gets most of its revenue from producing hit commercial jingles and songs for companies. But with more companies looking for alternatives to traditional advertising to save money, Audacity saw its revenues drop by about 30 percent over the past year.

``Advertisers are spending less, and that means less production work for us,'' said John Jay Martyn, a Berklee College of Music graduate who owns Audacity with his wife, Linda Thornberg.

Producing hit jingles and original music for commercials has been the mainstay of Audacity's business for much of its 24 years. Think of the peppy tune for Cocoa Puffs cereal, the serene notes of the Florida Keys tourism ads, the raucous refrains of the It's all about the U campaign for the UM Hurricanes football team and the current upbeat Nova Southeastern University jingle, Do What You Wanna Do.

Martyn, a composer, pianist, drummer and singer who performs locally with his Hot Java Band, gets credit for writing those original gems.

``People brush off music in commercials like it's no big deal, but the music is 50 percent of the spot, and John is fantastic about being contemporary and keeping up technologically,'' said Dorn Martell, creative director at Tinsley Advertising in Miami.

He and Martyn have worked together on the Keys campaign for years and collaborate on other ads for Nova Southeastern University, the University of Miami and Miami Children's Hospital.

Thornberg handles the business side of Audacity. She is a board member of the Association of Independent Commercial Producers and holds a master's degree in media from the University of Massachusetts.

She met Martyn in Boston in 1980 while both were college students and working at Top of the Hub, the famous restaurant atop the city's Prudential Building. She was a cocktail waitress, and he was a bartender. In 1985, they married, moved to Hollywood and opened Music Works in a two-bedroom apartment. For the first few years, each held a second job. She continued to tend bar; he donned a tuxedo and played drums at weddings and bar mitzvahs.

Audacity is fighting the slowdown with ingenuity. Martyn and Thornberg opened a new division called Creative Web Video. It caters to people like Parra and small business owners who want a professional presence on the Web but don't have big money or technical know-how to make it happen. Companies can use Web video to showcase products and services and offer testimonials. Individuals can make instructional videos or tout their qualifications in a video résumé.

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