UM | RSS

Universal McCann Is Ad Age's Comeback Agency of the Year

11:24:15 PM

Ad Age
Universal McCann Is Ad Age's Comeback Agency of the Year

Formerly Viewed as Just a Media Arm, Aggressive Approach Landed Shop a Host of New Business

By Michael Bush
Published: January 25, 2010

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- BMW North America's nine-month-long media review was one of the longest and most-drawn-out of the year. Patrick McKenna, manager-marketing communications and consumer events at BMW, said there were a few reasons for the holdup. One one was Matt Seiler, global CEO of Universal McCann, the agency that eventually wrestled the business away from four-year incumbent GSD&M Idea City.

The automaker says it was "very happy" with GSD&M but decided to review the business because of the ramifications of the economic downturn on the media market. "It was a case of us just going to market to see what the market would provide," Mr. McKenna said. What the market wrought, he said, was a one-man crusade for BMW's business.

"When I say 'crusade' I mean two-page unsolicited e-mails on Sunday night at 10 o'clock about his passion and commitment to the business, what [Mr. Seiler] would do to secure the business and then back that up with his plans for the brand," Mr. McKenna said. "We loved his passion, and ultimately [Univeral McCann] prevailed."

And Along with the $200 million BMW account, Universal McCann also notched its belt with wins from Dyson, Charles Schwab, Applebee's and Chrysler.

The parade of new business coming through the doors must have been the equivalent of culture shock for those who had been at Universal McCann before Mr. Seiler's arrival, because for a few years before -- and even for a little while after -- he left Omnicom Group's PHD to join Universal McCann in July of 2008, the agency hadn't won much new business. It didn't help that UM was largely viewed as just the media arm for creative giant McCann Erickson and unable to land accounts unless they came through there. But in 18 months, Mr. Seiler helped turn Universal McCann into a powerhouse using an aggressive approach much like he took with the BMW review.

And Mr. Seiler last week was tapped to join the new management structure at Mediabrands, Interpublic Group of Cos.' umbrella unit for its media agencies, called Office of the Chairman. This new management group, which will report directly to Interpublic CEO Michael Roth, also includes Richard Beaven, CEO of Initiative; Tara Comonte, Mediabrands' COO and CFO; and Matt Freeman, CEO of Mediabrands Ventures.

Rethinking
Mr. Seiler's desire to create an earlier and more strategic relationship between media agency and media owner on behalf of his clients is unusual, as is tapping someone with no prior agency experience, Jacki Kelley, as North American president.

While Mr. Seiler's immediate and significant problem was fixing Universal McCann, his vision is to more broadly rethink the media-agency business. "I've always believed the media portion of the industry needed to be rethought ... to think about what the hell we offer our clients and how to differentiate ourselves from other agencies," Mr. Seiler said.

Ms. Kelley has helped carry out Mr. Seiler's vision for a more strategic relationship with media owners. "As a former media owner, it wasn't news to me that Matt's concept would add value because media owners have been frustrated for years with agencies that provide limited information and very short time tables for ideas that have never been done before," she said. "Seeing someone on the buying side that would actually change the way they were structured in order to really alter the way the agency engages was radical." One of those restructuring efforts includes hiring media-owner-relationship managers for North America.

Becky Saeger, exec VP-CMO at Charles Schwab, tapped Universal McCann in July to be its media-planning and -buying agency. Ms. Saeger said the company was looking for a media partner that was willing to do more than plan and buy media and push it to ensure the company wasn't looking at things in a compartmentalized way.

"They did a great job from a tactical perspective in terms of buying and executing but also brought great perspective on the digital landscape," Ms. Saeger said. "They have a good knowledge of the market, and over the six-month period they have learned a lot and every time we have gotten together, there has been an obvious cumulative impact of the knowledge. "

BMW's Mr. McKenna has also been so pleased with the agency that he gave Universal McCann his blessing to pitch the Chrysler media account, which had many in the industry screaming conflict. Mr. McKenna said after a "very open and candid conversation" with Ms. Kelley about how the agency would not pursue it without BMW's blessing and how the shop keeps the J&J and L'Oréal accounts separate and firewalled, he was comfortable there would be no conflicts.

He also sees the increased buying clout from Chrysler, which it won, as a benefit to BMW. "It could help us from an overall buying-clout standpoint, the tide lifting all boats so to speak," Mr. McKenna said.

Universal McCann: U.S. Media Agency of the Year '09

11:24:15 PM

Adweek
Universal McCann: U.S. Media Agency of the Year '09

CEO Matt Seiler on the power of momentum, his best decision and why he has no mentors

Jan 18, 2010

- Steve McClellan

For much of the past decade, Interpublic's Universal McCann was one of the most beleaguered media shops in the industry, having lost huge accounts like General Motors, Coca-Cola and Lowe's. By 2008, the agency was stable again, thanks largely to the efforts of then-worldwide CEO Nick Brien and his team. When Brien was promoted to CEO of IPG's media management arm, Mediabrands, he hired Matt Seiler to succeed him as UM's CEO in August 2008. The stage was set for UM to complete its turnaround and Seiler delivered in 2009, his first full year running the company. Seiler revamped the management team, hiring media company veteran Jacki Kelley in April to run North America. Seiler and Kelley immediately went to work on the offering. The biggest change: a new approach to working with media owners in a bid to maximize those relationships. In May, the wins started coming in quick succession -- Dyson, BMW, Schwab and others, capped by the the Chrysler account in December. All told, UM added nearly $1 billion in new business (excluding Chrysler, which takes effect this month) and posted an impressive 11 percent revenue gain to $191 million. For completing its turnaround with its best winning streak in seven years -- without a single loss -- new management and a fine-tuned offering, Universal McCann is Adweek's U.S. Media Agency of the Year for 2009.

Adweek: A lot of things went right for your shop in 2009. What was the most important lesson you learned?
Matt Seiler: The criticality of getting the team right. And that when the team is right it shows in everything that you do. From a new business perspective, there is nothing more appealing to a prospect than a team that is absolutely consistent. At least as important is that we really like each other. It's very seductive to a potential client, I think, to see how much the agency team has confidence in each other and likes each other. It makes the client feel comfortable and happy and liked.

Other lessons?
The power of momentum. It's that "when you smile, the world smiles with you" thing. Once we had the team right, it felt fantastic. The first exposure the team really had to a prospect was Dyson and after that BMW, and immediately after, Schwab. It feeds on itself.

What was the biggest surprise last year?
The whole thing. I keep pinching myself because I can't quite believe how much this team accomplished in a year. The adopting of the new positioning, the esprit de corps, picking up nine new pieces of business. We retained all our existing business and grew in lots of different directions with existing clients.

What's the best decision you made in '09?
Hiring [North American president] Jacki Kelley. [The fact] that she comes from a media-owner background is part of what makes her a phenomenal leader for the agency. And she reflects the promise of what partnering with a media owner is. She sort of represents the other side of the table in everything we do. The [Media Owner Relationship] team underneath her is all about that. ( READ AN INTERVIEW WITH JACKI KELLEY)

Describe your management style
Hopefully trusting. I absolutely believe that the people of UM are beyond capable of delivering. I believe that Jacki [Kelley] and I are here to empower people to do what they're great at doing and not to stand in their way.

Who are your mentors?
[Bewitched's] Darrin Stephens is my mentor [laughs]. I don't think that's a very rich vein for me, sadly, and I really should analyze that. I haven't had mentors. I've had a few really terrific bosses and without pandering [current boss Mediabrands CEO] Nick [Brien] is the best that I've had, but it's a little late in my long-toothed career to be considering Nick a mentor.

Any missed opportunities?
We have not yet hired the head of the team that will oversee our Media Owner Relationship team. That kind of troubles me. I'm very anxious to do that.

Did you have someone in your sights?
There's been a couple of people we liked a lot. It's a really critical hire, though. It's a big statement to the media owners, the clients and the people here. So the importance of the individual is great.

Would you call that your most innovative move in 2009?
Yes, and it will be the most innovative thing we do [this] year.

Who do you least like going up against in a pitch and why?
It's not so much an individual agency. I least like being in a pitch that has been called for cost savings and pits everybody against each other. I least like being defined by our peer set. I would love to have more opportunities to compete with creative agencies. All media agencies should define the business that we're in specifically enough that we have a competitive advantage to make it impossible to throw us all together.

Beside your CrackBerry, what's your favorite digital gadget?
I would say my DVR. I do not watch television when television is on, ever.

Describe yourself in three words
The first three that popped in my head were "in a hurry." This is going to sound totally gross, but as I envisioned [my Christmas break] there was a big part of me that didn't want it. I'm so excited about what's going on here [in some ways I was thinking] let's hurry up with this whole Christmas thing because there's a lot of cool stuff that we'll be implementing in the new year that I can't wait to do.

Talk about the new Media Owner Relationship initiative.
The connection between agencies and media owners hasn't worked as well as it could because the link [has been] the buying group. There's tremendous power, influence and connectivity between media agencies and media owners, but the right people weren't necessarily talking to each other. The relationship shouldn't be just about going to the upfront and buying television and running messages. That's missing the opportunity of the incredible stuff that exists ... that we ought to be taking advantage of, [such as] what's coming out of the studios, what's possible on the airwaves. To not tap into that is ludicrous.

So it's about resetting the whole relationship?
Yes, start again. The truth is all the media owners are very siloed by their P&Ls so the opportunity to get the best content out of the media owner doesn't necessarily come from the media owner himself. Or herself.

So you're hiring your own people to figure that out.
Yes. And you have to change your process to allow for the time [it takes] to go to the media owner with an intelligent strategy and to not presuppose that last year's plan is right for this year. There's too much of that in the business. We need to be asking a new set of questions to start big conversations about audience connections. That's more relevant. We're expert on the identification of and the romancing of an audience, and then matching this up with the deliverer.

Romancing the audience?
Yes, it's not just about adults 18 to 49. We have all the data. We know everything about audiences and where to go and find them. But we need to be in love with them and really get inside their heads. The media owner is excellent at creating content that stimulates those people. So it's really about identifying the necessary audience for the client's objective and finding that same audience on the media-owner side and then plopping those two pieces together. It requires thinking differently.

The Chrysler win, coming in December, topped off a terrific year. Interestingly, duties on that account also include creative responsibilities at the retail marketing level. How did that assignment come about?
What Chrysler was looking for is not dissimilar with how we work with a couple of our other clients, notably Microsoft, Sony and J&J where we function as, I won't say the AOR but the backbone. As more and more clients are looking to work with multiple creative agencies, it makes sense to have somebody be responsible for the totality of the business. And the more innovative and fresh-thinking clients are recognizing that the media agency can allow all of the creative agencies to plug into that common backbone. So it's easier for them to have a Fallon or a GlobalHue to do specialized work that can come and go and be plugged into the consistent thing, which is the media agency.

But how did you end up with the creative retail advertising assignment?
It works across all four brands [Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge and Ram] and they could have had it done by the different creative agencies, but the communication requirements and the integration needs and so on suggested that was a much harder way of doing it. Housing it in one place to support all four brands was just smarter.

So UM will be creating the ads at the local dealership level?
Yes, we'll create them. We picked up a number of people who had been working on that portion of the business and plopped them back down at UM. Also, the agency has a lot of account management experience and people who come from full-service agencies. So what a lot of us have done as individuals elsewhere we'll now get to do again as an agency.

UM and not McCann Erickson?
Just UM.

Do you create ads for other clients?
We do not, but I imagine that we will do more of it. I want to be careful in how this comes out in that we're not looking to become a full-service agency or take work from our brothers and sisters on the creative agency side. Our push is really with the connection with the media owner and content creation. However, we have great flexibility and can manage a variety of tasks for clients. The retail work for Chrysler just makes sense. It's more locally focused, especially where there's potential for addressability. More and more that's going happen.

Is this the beginning of a rebundling trend?
I don't think so. What it does do, though, is beg the question of what is an AOR relationship? We have tended to think that the AOR was the creative agency and I think there is a need to rethink that.

Would you elaborate on that?
If you look at a lot of clients there's a pattern of a pendulum swing where, for example, Coke had all its work with one creative agency and then shifted out to many creative agencies and then began to concentrate it a bit again. Microsoft had all of its business with one creative agency and then started working with multiple creative agencies. And that's been going on for a decade or more. I think right now we're in the midst of a trend that is more towards working with multiple creative agencies and the need therefore to have consistency around your business and the transmission of your messaging. And that's where the media agency comes in to serve as the backbone to which the different creative agencies can plug into.

What about the crafting of messages?
I think that the days of thinking that messaging necessarily comes from your creative agency are also numbered. There's been a lot of talk about the work that consumers are doing to generate their own content and there are myriad cases where work is coming from media owners. So a client can be expecting to get communications done by a big creative agency or a [boutique] shop, or from media agencies or media companies or consumers. The really good thing is that it will lead to better entertainment all around and that the choices that clients have and that we as audiences have are greater. There's value in all of the competition that comes from multiple players.

Entertainment in the sense of the messaging that goes out?
Yes, and where it goes out. I think the NBCU-Comcast deal is fascinating for what it portends content wise, and how much it will look or feel like advertising, and how much of it is going to be embedded content. We have talked for so long about addressability and not done it, and this is a real big step toward that. And with addressability comes whole new ways of integrating content. As those who transmit communication also become those who create the communication, there is much greater chance for sharing information about whose house you're transmitting stuff into and what messages are right for them and what they do with those messages.

So, it's not just targeted advertising, but targeted content opportunities as well?
Right, and that's why none of the models that have existed historically should be considered to be the models for today. There's lots and lots of ways to get great entertainment. The more people that the client can engage to create content for them, the better the content is likely to be.

Media Research Transformers

11:24:15 PM

Research exes at the nation’s largest media shops are morphing into money-marketing managers

- Katy Bachman, Mediaweek

Research titles at media agencies used to be simple. “Head of research” pretty much said it all. But today, there is a whole new crop of titles populating research department org charts at media agency shops: “marketing accountability,” “consumer insights,” “analytics,” “business intelligence” and “marketing science.”

These new handles aren’t puffery. They represent a real shift in the role and scope of research in media planning and buying.

Not too long ago, the bulk of agency research centered around TV ratings and other media currencies. Media researchers focused on how to invest clients’ dollars. They calculated cost per points, focused on finding the right reach and frequency for campaigns, and figured out the most efficient CPMs using age and sex stats.

While those core practices still exist within research divisions, media research has given way to consumer marketing and business focuses. Research divisions at the biggest shops now offer services that are more proactive, helping clients both determine and execute media and marketing strategies across a growing number of traditional, nontraditional and digital platforms.

In many ways, the research divisions at the nation’s largest media shops see themselves as consultants or “money-marketing managers,” more akin to the role of a McKinsey or Accenture.

“Research used to be a stand-alone group that worried if the TV data was good and what the top programs were. As the years moved on, research has evolved to how can I solve the business problem? It’s gone from a more academic to a more business approach,” says Lyle Schwartz, managing partner, director of implementation research and marketplace analysis for GroupM. “We’re playing a bigger role.”

The shift in focus has not been without its casualties. A good number of veteran media research execs, many among the most notable and quotable, have exited these organizations. Some have ended up at media companies, others in research firms. To some industry observers, it’s an alarming trend, particularly at a time when video is more prevalent than ever online and ratings data streams from Nielsen are proliferating.

“Some of those roles that used to be very TV-centric are still important, but the focus has changed,” says David Shiffman, evp of connections research and analytics for MediaVest. “We need to go beyond how clients plan and buy media. We need to help shape market strategy. We’re going 20 leaps forward to how you predict the marketplace.”

In order to make those leaps, huge divisions are being assembled to provide clients with a fuller range of services to support both media and marketing campaigns. OMD has about 60-70 “research” people, MediaVest about 35-40, Starcom about 30, Universal McCann about 14, CARAT about 20 and MPG about 15. GroupM has 18 but also has several people embedded within each planning group.

“Practices such as marketing science and analytics used to live in the full-service agency. Now it’s in the media agency,” says Joe Masucci, national director of business intelligence for OMD. “We’re breaking down the artificial barriers that existed between media and marketing. We want to be seen by our clients as the central intelligence arm.”

These firms now employ econometricians (experts who employ mathematical systems on data to determine the cause and effect of business outcomes), statisticians and even MBAs.

“I want the guy who tore apart his telephone, people who want to know how things tick,” says John Lowell, svp of research and analytics for Starcom USA. “We’re not divesting from the traditional media research areas; we’re just demanding something more.”

None of these shops have wiped out media research competency. A lot of the functions have moved to desktop applications. While there may be fewer people devoted to media research handling the syndicated data from firms such as Nielsen, Arbitron and MRI, divisions are growing in other areas such as consumer insight, brand and market research, and competitive/marketplace analytics to handle specialized databases to create media mix and other predictive models.

“We are spending more time advising about media mix and marketing versus media research. We’re going beyond how clients plan and buy media; we’re helping to shape market strategy,” says MediaVest’s Shiffman. Joe Abruzzo, evp and director of research for MPG, agrees: “We’re spending money differently in a lot more areas like competitive and strategic analysis.”

Like everything else in the agency world, the changes in analytics start with the client. You’d have to be living under a rock to not see how the economy has altered client thinking about media and marketing. Return on investment is the new mantra, and, increasingly, clients want their media and marketing campaigns tied to the same metrics by which their business is judged, whether it’s sales, awareness or engagement.

“The pressure on [client] marketing departments forces an ROI discussion,” says Huw Griffiths, evp/global director of marketing accountability and research at UM. “We’re orienting more toward the clients’ business measures. As soon as you do that, it introduces an area of analytics such as forecasting and linking measures together. That in turn creates a need for analytics to build predictive models.”

If the old media research focused on CPM, the current media research is a synthesis of metrics around the consumer. “It includes data on the purchase funnel, segmentation, awareness and tracking data, combined to show return on investment,” says Mike Hess, evp of research, marketing science and consumer insights for Carat. “There is a new paradigm emerging around synthesizing and integrating agency mix models with clients’ proprietary information,” he adds.

Agencies are looking to the Web for metric models that throw off enormous buckets of numbers in real time. In some cases, that allows clients to price their campaigns by outcome or response or to change a campaign midstream if it’s not producing the desired response.

“Because of digital data, everything is getting more and more granular. Clients expect answers in real time,” says Starcom’s Lowell.

Clients also want all their marketing and media efforts knit closer together, seeking connections among the data in order to create integrated campaigns that deliver measurable results. And collaboration across disciplines has become essential to today’s accountability-driven clients.

“‘Research’ almost doesn’t feel like the right word for it,” says Joel Rubinson, chief research officer for the Advertising Research Foundation. “We’re moving to a blended competency kind of model.”

However, there are some questions about the trend, which is evolving and morphing rapidly as technology makes it easier to handle exponentially larger quantities of data.

It’s easier than ever to have access to and crunch behavioral data from the Web, second-by-second tuning data from set-top boxes -- plus myriad daily consumer panels, product distribution or sales data. Seduced by bigger boxcar loads of numbers, some believe the basics of good research may take a backseat. Just because research can produce a number doesn’t make it a number that clients can take to the bank.

“There is a lot of pressure from client procurement departments on the agency to produce more and more for less and less. Clients appear generally uninformed or unconcerned about the real foundations of the media and marketing recommendations,” says Tony Jarvis, a media research consultant. “Regrettably, this is leading many agencies to wonder if they can afford to have someone assessing and driving the quality of research data.”

There is also a disconnect between where research divisions are going and what happens when it comes down to placing a buy. While agencies may be connecting research to a clients’ business metrics, buys are still being made based on the traditional currencies. The comfort zone, it seems, is still back with traditional GRPs and CPMs.

“There’s a split between the way media is bought and the way it is evaluated,” says UM’s Griffiths. “That has to change. We’re trying to structure buys based on outcome, but we’re dealing with a massive legacy of vendors and partners that aren’t used to working like that.”

For now, buys continue to be negotiated the old-fashioned way with traditional metrics. Buys based on nontraditional metrics are few and small in scale, and are subject to how willing a media company and its clients are to trialing out new approaches.

Says OMD’s Masucci: “It’s the key riddle to solve...There is a lot of inertia. Unless we figure it out, clients will be backing agencies in a corner.”

----

Research Disciplines

1. Business intelligence: Competitive and marketplace info and systems including advertising spend; syndicated and proprietary sales and marketing data from the client.

2. Syndicated media information from research: Data from firms such as Nielsen, MRI, Arbitron, ComScore; market research from AC Nielsen; and related applications provided by third-party processors.

3. Specialized databases and analytics: 360-degree planning and media mix models, return on investment, prediction and simulation models.

4. Consumer research, brand and market research: Includes syndicated research from firms such as Scarborough and Experian Simmons, as well as the client’s own proprietary databases.

5. Custom research: Unique studies usually executed in close collaboration with the client and sometimes the media company as an enhancement or cross-check on insights/findings from existing data.

Context Optional Launches Social Marketing Suite

11:24:15 PM

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 22, 2010 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ ---- Context Optional, the social marketing company, announced today the launch of its Social Marketing Suite, a customizable software solution for brands and agencies to manage and build brand presence on Facebook.

The Social Marketing Suite brings together Context Optional's enterprise-class social marketing modules -- Applications, Moderation, Publishing and Analytics -- into one easy-to-use platform that is now available on a subscription basis. The Social Marketing Suite is the first offering that integrates campaign creation and management, fan engagement and measurement into a single product. The modules allow brands to:

Easily build and launch engaging branded applications on Facebook Pages

Moderate conversations taking place across Facebook Pages

Publish and schedule Facebook posts and track media and links

Analyze engagement and conversation taking place on Facebook

"Efficiently and cost effectively harnessing conversations that are happening on social media platforms are key components of our marketing efforts," said Heidi Browning, EVP, Microsoft & Global Digital Officer, Universal McCann. "We look for solutions that allow us to seamlessly manage, moderate and analyze our social media efforts at scale and in one place to help us better understand and serve our customers on an ongoing basis."

The Social Marketing Suite addresses the growing need for enterprise-class social marketing tools, particularly as studies are showing that 'conversationalists' are engaging in social networks at staggering rates and making themselves more accessible to brands. About 59% of online consumers are active on social networks at least one a month, according to the recent Forrester Research study Introducing The New Social Technographics.

"Brands that have taken social seriously need to find more efficient ways to stay involved in consumer conversations while keeping pages interesting and free of profanity," said Kevin Barenblat, co-founder and CEO, Context Optional. "Marketers are demanding workflow and analytics solutions for Facebook that are on par with what they use for television, email and search."

More than a dozen global brands and agencies have licensed Context Optional's Social Marketing Suite including Fortune 500 companies in the retail, technology, entertainment and financial services sectors.

To learn more about the Context Optional Social Marketing Suite, please visit http://www.contextoptional.com/products/ or contact info@contextoptional.com.

About Context Optional

Context Optional is a leading provider of social marketing software and services to global brands and advertising agencies. The company provides marketers with comprehensive solutions to build, manage, monitor and measure brand presence across the social web to meet their acquisition, engagement and retention goals. By combining industry expertise, a leading technology platform, and comprehensive analytics into an integrated approach, Context Optional delivers the most effective social CRM and marketing solutions to Fortune 1000 brands and agencies. Context Optional is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in New York and Seattle. For more information, please visit http://www.contextoptional.com.

Contact: Kasey Fleisher Hickey, +1-415-738-7997, ext. 34, kasey (at) contextoptional (dot) com

SOURCE Context Optional

MSN-Vet Mike Siegenthaler Jumps to UM

11:24:15 PM

MSN-Vet Mike Siegenthaler Jumps to UM

Feb 7, 2010

-By Mike Shields

Mike Siegenthaler

Mike Siegenthaler, who most recently led MSN’s Branded Entertainment and Experiences Team (BEET), is making the jump to UM to become executive vp, head of the agency’s burgeoning MOR group.

MOR (media owner relationship) is charged with helping the agency’s clients conceive and execute on large-scale, breakthrough programs that run the gamut from branded entertainment series to highly integrated, custom sponsorship packages. To do so, MOR aspires to connect with the agency’s media partners much earlier in the creative process—meeting with programmers and researchers rather than just sales executives.

Siegenthaler, a 10-year MSN veteran, started at UM last week. (MSN officials were unavailable for comment on a potential replacement.) He now oversees a four-person team tasked with serving all of UM’s U.S. offices, which includes Scott Laine, formerly of Wired magazine.

Siegenthaler, 42, who had a brief run as a media planner at J. Walter Thompson earlier in his career, said he saw a unique opportunity in returning to the agency world to help reshape how media gets bought and sold. The ideal is for his team to be included in most major planning and creative briefings, as well as new business pitches—rather than receiving a planning budget after most major strategic decisions have already been made.

“This is not a group with a ‘special’ budget that works on a ‘special’ plan,” he said. “It’s not about, ‘Send me your out-of-the-box ideas in 48 hours.’ It’s holistic. And it’s not just branded entertainment. It’s about using every tool in your box. If you want something breakthrough and completely custom, you’ve got to get in early. And everyone needs to embrace this.”

Embracing the MOR concept is so core to the UM culture that the company is placing logos on its office walls and Web site with the word “vendors” circled with a slash through it. That directive comes from CEO Matt Seiler, who first conceived the MOR approach back in 2008 when he noticed creative agencies expanding their offerings to become more integral to their clients’ business.

“I felt we needed to rethink what a full-service agency could be,” Seiler said. “I thought there was a real opportunity [for media agencies] to be a one-stop shop because of the money we manage. You have a partnership with the media owners that isn’t being leveraged now. But media owners can really be your creative department.”

They can even be your market research department, said Carolyn Everson COO, executive vp, strategy and operations at Viacom. “Matt’s vision is to be more closely aligned with media owners to tap into our creativity and our consumer insights,” she said. “We have expertise in certain markets. For example, we know millennials, men or kids.”

Everson said that most media companies are glad to ditch the vendor/buyer relationship. “McCann is looking to change the model—that is really inspiring to work with,” she said. “It’s refreshing, frankly, to have a media agency think about us in this way.”

Chrysler Confirms UM Hire

11:24:15 PM

Adweek

Chrysler Confirms UM Hire

IPG shop has won 2 car accounts in '09: Chrysler and BMW

Dec 9, 2009

- Steve McClellan

It's official: Universal McCann has now added two car accounts this year, with Chrysler confirming today it has awarded media chores to UM after a review.

Earlier this year, the Interpublic Group shop won BMW.

Sources said UM has been cleared by the clients to keep both auto accounts.

Aegis Group's Carat had also contended for the Chrysler business. Omnicom's PHD is the incumbent.

Like many automakers, Chrysler has cut its ad spending sharply in the last couple of years. It spent $840 million in domestic measured media last year, way down from $1.8 billion in 2007, per Nielsen. The automaker's spending totaled $316 million this year through September. (Spending on the BMW account is estimated at $200 million.)

Sources said that Chrysler defines PHD as a "tier-two" vendor, because it supplies media services through the contract agreement the client has with sibling agency BBDO, the carmaker's lead creative shop.

That contract is set to expire at the end of January, and Chrysler said that UM and PHD would work over the next two months to "ensure a smooth transition."

The client said that with UM, media buying and planning would be primarily run out of Detroit, with the support of offices in New York and San Francisco. The scope of work covers traditional and digital media. In addition to buying and planning, UM will also be tasked with supporting Chrysler's retail marketing initiatives.

"As a new company with a brand-driven focus, we are looking for agencies that can deliver unique ideas and solutions to help us better communicate with consumers," said Olivier Francois, president and CEO, Chrysler brand, and head of Chrysler marketing, in a statement. "These changes will allow Chrysler greater efficiencies and flexibility in the use of its media across all four brands and at the retail level."

According to Nielsen, BMW spent about $150 million on domestic ads in 2008. The UM assignment also includes an estimated $50 million in additional dealer chores.

In addition, Chrysler said today that Meredith Integrated Marketing would manage customer relationship marketing initiatives for both the U.S. and Canada. Meredith has been a custom publisher for the client.

The client chose Publicis Groupe's Fallon to succeed BBDO as the lead on creative.

UM Dubai wins Gold at the Gemas

11:24:15 PM

Media All Stars 2009

11:24:15 PM

Adweek

Media All-Stars 2009

Our annual survey of the best and brightest, featuring UM's Matt Seiler, executive of the year

Nov 16, 2009
by Steve McClellan

Both personally and professionally, Universal McCann worldwide CEO Matt Seiler has mastered the art of the extreme makeover.

On the home front, over the past dozen years, Seiler and his family have bought, lived in, renovated and resold four homes. "I love taking a house that isn't what it could be and help make it to become that...With God's will and our contractor's wallet," he quips. The latest home redesign will wrap up in a matter of weeks.

Clearly a man who deals with building contractors on a regular basis thrives on chaos. But Seiler sees himself more as someone who heartily embraces change: "I love change. A lot of people hate it. But I hate it when things are the way they are. I get bored too quickly."

Seiler's relatively brief but intense career in the media agency business bears out his philosophy. He has advanced by exceeding client expectations and successfully implementing agency redesigns, all the while navigating the constantly shifting media landscape. In the past five years, he's run two holding company media agencies -- Omnicom's PHD and more recently Interpublic Group's larger UM, where he assumed his current post in September 2008.

In both cases, he's refined the offerings, improved the new business track record and boosted revenue -- considerably. This year alone, UM has raked in $650 million in new business, including BMW ($200 million), Applebee's ($155 million), Charles Schwab ($100 million) and Dyson ($40 million), and retained key client Nationwide ($210 million) after a review.

For the results he's delivered for UM in less than two years, Matt Seiler is our pick for Media All-Stars Executive of the Year.

He also generated serious results while at PHD USA, which Seiler joined as president in September 2004. He honed the shop's offering with the development of a robust communications planning capability and reorganized around what he called the lead agent system, which put one senior executive in charge of each major account who could then tap various specialists at the agency in order to service client needs. The upshot: more than $1 billion in net new business and an almost 30 percent revenue jump (to $300 million) in his first two years on the job. For his efforts he was elevated to North American CEO in the spring of 2007.

Meanwhile, as Seiler set about retooling PHD, UM was facing its own serious challenges. The low point, perhaps, was 2005 when the shop lost close to $1 billion in accounts, including Lowe's ($315 million) and a portion of the General Motors buying business ($600 million).

When Nick Brien joined the shop as worldwide CEO late in 2005 (replacing Robin Kent, who was ousted earlier that year), he spent a lot of time putting out fires on major accounts, including Microsoft and Sony, which had become dissatisfied. In 2006, the agency effectively declared a moratorium on new business efforts as it sought to shore up its offering and make sure existing clients were being serviced to their satisfaction.

In 2007, near disaster struck when Johnson & Johnson put its $3 billion global media account in review. UM was the incumbent on the lion's share of the U.S. business and spent most of the year defending it (successfully) and putting in place the extra resources it had promised to retain the account going forward.

When Brien was elevated to CEO at Mediabrands in July last year, he hired Seiler for the global UM CEO role.

Brien relates that he was impressed with Seiler's work at PHD to "build a business with a very distinctive proposition." Beyond that, Seiler has a "breadth of experience" that also spans senior level positions at several creative shops (including BBDO New York), coupled with personal traits such as curiosity, drive, optimism and "a fearlessness to take risks" that are necessary today for global CEOs. Seiler, he says, has a "rare combination" of talents. "He is a visionary who can execute, and clients are stimulated by that."

Seiler is the first to acknowledge that his predecessor (and boss) Brien and the IPG financial team laid a solid foundation for his most recent agency remodeling efforts.

"IPG cleaned up their act squeaky clean," he explains, referring to the separate P&L that was set up to separate UM from McCann World Group a few years back. "Nick stabilized the big clients, and I came into a really healthy opportunity."

The first thing he set out to do was to create a new positioning statement for the agency that let the outside world know "who we are and what we stand for," recalls Seiler. Before he joined the agency, he was asked what his impression of it was. "My response was I didn't have any impression of UM," he bluntly declared. As a way of communicating the shop's worldview to outsiders, Seiler came up with the positioning statement "Curious Minds for Surprising Results."

And clients like it. "It's really true of them," says Steve Petitpas, general manager for Microsoft's global marketing communications group. "I do think Matt is transforming UM into an agency that is grounded in curiosity and intelligence about customers and how they interact with media."

Earlier this year, Seiler put his new management team in place -- a combination of new and existing managers at the agency, which has estimated worldwide billings of $15 billion. In some cases UM veterans took on new roles. Case in point: Scott Tegethoff, an account executive who is now chief marketing officer but who still oversees the global Coca-Cola account.

"Sometimes you have to redeploy people in order to stimulate them," says Seiler. "Here's a guy that is so creative and energetic and passionate about the brand, and we hadn't used him for that. So we moved him into the CMO role, and he's terrific."

In May, Seiler hired Jacki Kelley from the vendor side -- she had run the sales operation for Martha Stewart Omnimedia -- to run UM U.S. as president.

And while some in the industry didn't completely get the hire at the time because Kelley lacks agency experience, Seiler counters that her experience makes great sense given his "deep interest in connecting with media owners in a way that nobody else has." And he made a similar move in Europe for the same reason, hiring Jim Hytner, the former ITV and BskyB executive, to oversee UM's Europe/Middle East/Africa region.

Petitpas applauds Seiler's decision to bring in new people from outside the media agency world -- to him, Kelley is a "great hire." The shop has "a lot of people that we can get into the really good discussions" that run the gamut of strategic marketing and communications. While Microsoft may have been dissatisfied a few years back, that's clearly no longer the case. "UM is a very important relationship, and I'm a genuinely happy client with Matt," he adds.

Those words clearly constitute a client view Seiler hopes doesn't change.

Clients: Sony, Microsoft, BMW, Charles Schwab, Nationwide, Applebee's

Years in Biz: On the media agency side: 5; in advertising: 25 years

Signature Achievement: Landing or defending $850 million in business for UM

What the Boss Says: Nick Brien says Seiler possesses "a fearlessness to take risks" and calls him "a visionary who can execute, and clients are stimulated by that.

UM Turkey named Agency of the Year

11:24:15 PM

UM Hungary Wins Effies

11:24:15 PM

Mini USA Moves TV, Radio Buying to McCann

11:24:15 PM

Advertising Age

Mini USA Moves TV, Radio Buying to McCann

Automaker Follows Parent BMW's Media Agency Pick Without a Review

Posted by Michael Bush and Jean Halliday on 10.22.09 @ 04:46 PM

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Mini USA has shifted its national and spot TV- and radio-buying business to Interpublic Group of Cos.' Universal McCann without a review.

Trudy Hardy, marketing communications manager at Mini USA, said the brand made the move to take advantage of BMW's group buying power. In May, Mini's parent company awarded planning and buying duties for its national and regional dealer groups to Universal McCann.

Mini took a backseat during that review, deciding not to be included in the process. "We wanted to wait a few months to evaluate [Universal McCann]," Ms. Hardy said. Apparently, it liked what it saw from the agency.

Universal McCann referred calls for comment to the client.

Ms. Hardy said Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners, Mini's creative agency of record, retains planning duties on all of Mini's media and retains buying responsibilities for print and online. Out of Home Pitch buys Mini's out-of-home media, she added.

In 2008, Mini spent nearly $20 million on measured media, and it has spent almost $7 million in the first six months of 2009. Mini sold 34,996 new cars in the U.S. in the first nine months of the year, a 14% drop from the same period a year ago, but it was less severe than the total industry drop of 27%, according to Automotive News. In comparison, Toyota had the nation's best-selling car, the Camry, tallying sales of 264,351 units through September, though that was 26% lower than a year ago.

Universal McCann is also said by industry executives to be one of the shops talking to Chrysler as the embattled automaker gets set to review its media business. Last month, Universal McCann was handed Applebee's $150 million-plus media planning and buying account, also without a review, from incumbent Publicis Groupe's Starcom.

Why MySpace's Heidi Browning Returned to the Agency World

11:24:15 PM

Advertising Age

Why MySpace's Heidi Browning Returned to the Agency World

Q&A: Universal McCann's Global Digital Officer on Her New Role and What Working in Social Media Taught Her

by Michael Bush
Published: October 19, 2009

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- After getting a taste of all three sides -- agency, client and publisher -- Heidi Browning has returned to the agency world and landed at Interpublic Group of Cos.' Universal McCann as global digital officer, another newly created role by Universal McCann global CEO Matt Seiler. Ms. Browning will be based in San Francisco but will spend the majority of her time over the next few weeks traveling the globe and meeting with clients.

In between her recent jaunts to Redmond, Wash., to visit Microsoft, one of the agency's biggest clients and her primary assignment for now, Ms. Browning spoke with Ad Age about what her role will entail aside from working with Microsoft, the challenges media shops face in the digital space, what brought her back to agency life and why she left MySpace to come back.

Ad Age: What's your role going to entail?

Ms. Browning: The role has two parts to it. The first is as the global digital officer lead, and that is taking my experience from the digital agency world as well as the social media space and infusing that into all of our media. The second part is a strategic role on the Microsoft account. I'll be working in partnership with [Universal McCann Exec VP-Global Managing Partner] Kristi Argyilan; she focuses on the operational side of the business and I'll be working on the strategic and digital side of Microsoft. And we're working across the entire portfolio of Microsoft products, which gives us a really great opportunity to see trends and insights and learnings from product to product.

Ad Age: Is Microsoft going to be your first project and primary client?

Ms. Browning: It's the first client I'm working with now so it's the primary focus of the bulk of my time for now. But I'm also focused on this global digital role and how can we build, shape and create a media agency of the future that has these digital and social sensibilities.

Ad Age: What drew you back to the agency side of things?

Ms. Browning: I've been on all three sides -- client, agency and publisher -- and I came to this point in my career and where I asked myself what was the most rewarding and exciting part of my career that I really liked, and the agency work is where I found my creative passion and satisfaction. I also thought it was a great time to get back into the agency world because there is such a transformation happening right now and agencies need to change and the changes need to reflect some of the learnings and insight we gained on the digital side of the business.

Matt Seiler's vision and philosophy of how do we create the agency of the future was really attractive to me because it's built on insights, built for digital sensibility and a rigorous practice around ROI and that to me is what's really exciting about digital and eventually all media.

Also, agencies are facing a challenge and I like to take on a challenge. And having been on the publisher side I had such great access to amazing brands, but for me, on a personal level, I couldn't go deep enough. I was able to connect with them and solve business problems with MySpace as my toolkit but when you're on the agency side you have entire suite of marketing, advertising and communications solutions at your fingertips. And I wanted to be able to go deep with the client and be able to bring that toolkit and really drive new learnings and better results for clients.

Ad Age: What are the biggest challenges facing media agencies in the digital space?

Ms. Browning: It's for all types of agencies period because this world is morphing at such an incredible rate where clients are bringing a lot of media practices in house. You're seeing publishers cerate their own versions of media agencies and the traditional models starting to erode.

The vision behind Universal McCann is: Let's create this new agency for the future that's built on agility and data-driven insights around the customers that's built on collaboration, and really have digital and social at the agency's core. Traditional media is evolving so digital and social sensibilities are going to be applied throughout. I have those experiences so it can help shape how that impacts our media planning, buying, optimizing and measuring practice.

Ad Age: What's the relationship with David Cohen, Universal McCann's U.S. director of digital, going to be?

Ms. Browning: David and I will partner throughout the digital world here and we have a number smart digital leaders in the organization, and I see us as a collective gathering together to contribute our experiences to help shape the digital influence on the future of our business.

Ad Age: What did you learn at MySpace that has equipped you for this role?

Ms. Browning: A lot, like the notion of how, when and why to think about social in campaigns and what it actually takes to deliver on that, because, as we know, a lot of people think about social media on a campaign-by-campaign basis and it's really much bigger than that. It's infused into your entire business: how you communicate with customers, how you influence your product, how you market and how you do promotions. There's so many different aspects that touch your business that are social and so taking that experience and knowledge and knowing what works and doesn't work and being able to apply that to Universal McCann's clients is going to be enormously useful.

Ad Age: Why leave MySpace?

Ms. Browning: There are two reasons I left, one being that there's a lot of opportunity in general and I was really excited to get back in to the agency world here in San Francisco in particular. San Francisco has been a really strong media-agency world, especially on the digital side, and the city itself has seemed to have lost a lot of business over the years. And I wanted to start to infuse the agency connection with Silicon Valley into Madison Avenue so that we can continue to drive San Francisco on the map as a digital innovation leader that is a natural driver for global digital practice.

And MySpace is in its second phase of life and will emerge in a really interesting and differentiated place. I'm really happy to see where they are going and I can't wait to see where they ultimately end up.

Ad Age: What will it look like when it finally emerges?

Ms. Browning: It won't look drastically different from where it is today but I do think you're seeing the signs of where it's going in terms of really focusing on entertainment. Of course you'd have to talk to them about what their official positioning is but they are at this interesting crossroads in life in their world and they are moving into a new, differentiated spot.

How AOL Is Trying To Sell Itself To Advertisers (TWX)

11:24:15 PM

The Business Insider:
Silicon Alley Insider

How AOL Is Trying To Sell Itself To Advertisers (TWX)

Michael Learmonth|Oct. 19, 2009, 8:47 AM

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- "Keith Urban stood right there!"

It was, actually, just a TV studio and the assembled execs from Mediabrands had seen plenty of those before. But this was a tour of AOL's New York studios off lower Broadway, and Mike Rubens, AOL's director-production, was trying to make a point: We're not just another portal aggregating and syndicating entertainment and information -- we are producing it! Lots of it!

As if to prove that, AOL Music's editor in chief and former Rolling Stone editor Bill Crandall invited the group to watch Beyonce perform "All The Single Ladies" on a monitor in the studio.

Then AOL Sales President Jeff Levick got right to the point. "What I'd like you to do is take everything you know about AOL and just sort of put it aside for a moment."

This is one of five so-called agency summits AOL held with the media-buying arms of holding companies to cast itself as a content company built from the ground up to entertain and inform web audiences and to deliver them ad messages.

Crucial omissions
The three-hour drill-down included a whistle-stop tour of its media properties from The Boombox and Spinner to Politics Daily and Daily Finance to Engadget. Only scant reference was made to AOL's ad network and technologies -- the onetime Platform A, now known as AOL Advertising. AOL's cash engine, the internet-access business, came up only when a Mediabrands executive brought it up. And Bebo, AOL's $850 million prize of last summer? Well, that didn't come up at all.

Most startling, however, was that the event -- attended by the braintrust of AOL execs including CEO Tim Amstrong; Mr. Levick; Agency Relations Chief Erin Clift; Jon Brod, head of AOL ventures and maps; Brad Garlinghouse, head of communications, e-mail, AIM and ICQ, and Bill Wilson, head of content -- was happening at all.

"We didn't have these kinds of meetings nine months ago. We didn't have the relationships," said Mr. Wilson, the only member of Mr. Armstrong's posse who has been on the job more than nine months. Mr. Garlinghouse is just a month into his job, having jumped to AOL from Yahoo.

"Normally we don't go on tours of AOL; it's not part of my day job," said Bant Breen, president-digital for Initiative Worldwide. "Part of it was to re-educate key players on my side on what AOL is."

And part of that is a give and take between AOL and the agencies. David Cohen, exec VP-digital at Universal McCann asked what makes AOL think it can make a business of web content when there's "a whole bunch of carcasses by the side of the road of people who have tried and failed?"

Branding ahead
AOL responded that its new approach is about addressing the fragmented web by launching many, many niche properties. "Where others in the space are focused on creating a few starting places, we are taking the exact opposite approach where we are creating starting places on your interests ... hundreds of them," Mr. Wilson said.

On the agency side, one of the hurdles is that so many of AOL's branded sites are still a mystery to consumers. Those "unknown brands are the hardest part right now," said Ben Winkler, senior VP-digital at Initiative. "It's hard enough to get [clients] to commit to digital spend; then once you do to say, 'Here are some brands [to buy] you haven't heard of,' it isn't really worth the effort."

AOL's answer: We know we have a huge branding effort ahead. The AOL brand will be present on most sites, and where it's not obvious the sites will share a look and feel.

It would be hard to overstate the importance of these summits to AOL. With the spinoff from Time Warner coming in December, it is laying the groundwork to be a standalone company, and while revenue from its legacy dial-up business declines each quarter, growth, if it comes, will come from advertising.

In Talks With Agencies, AOL Plays Up Its Role As Content Producer—

11:24:15 PM

PaidContent.Org
The Economics of Content

In Talks With Agencies, AOL Plays Up Its Role As Content Producer—While Downplaying The Ad Net

David Kaplan
Oct 18, 2009 11:30 PM ET

Chances are, most major media buyers are not likely to be impressed by seeing a media company’s TV studio. But when the company showing it off is AOL (NYSE: TWX) TV studio, there’s a chance some might take notice. As the company’s current executive leadership settles into place, content is the chief focus and AOL wants advertisers to recognize that. AdAge has the rundown on a recent three-hour meeting at the company’s Manhattan offices, where AOL promoted music properties like The Boombox and Spinner, along with news blogs Politics Daily, Daily Finance and Engadget. But unlike AOL’s past agency outreach efforts, AOL appears to be shying away from talking up its ad network.

The meeting was led by CEO Tim Armstrong; AOL Advertising and Strategy head Jeff Levick; Agency Relations Chief Erin Clift; Jon Brod, head of AOL ventures and maps; Brad Garlinghouse, head of communications, e-mail, AIM and ICQ, and Bill Wilson, head of content—the only holdover from AOL’s old guard. A year ago, Wilson teamed with then Platform A President Lynda Clarizio for a traveling agency roadshow that served to defend the company’s relevance in the face of display advertising’s downward spiral. Even despite the poor ad market, AOL’s advertising properties were the star of the show.

With a slow recovery expected for online advertising, it makes sense for AOL to lean forward to with its content face. And while AOL’s steady stream of prominent hires and trumpeting of its high traffic numbers—albeit still driven by its dial-up service to a large extent—have helped give the content side more of a glow then its ad business. But AOL, which is currently working on a brand revamp with help from Publicis Groupe’s Leo Burnett, has a lot of doubt to overcome. David Cohen, EVP-digital at Universal McCann, put the question directly to AOL execs: what makes the company think it can build a content business when there’s “a whole bunch of carcasses by the side of the road of people who have tried and failed?”

Wilson’s response was that while others are creating a few broad destinations, AOL is banking on blanketing the web with hundreds of niche-focused sites. Be that as it may, it will take more than niche sites and a TV studio to convince advertisers that the new AOL really is new.

How Bloomberg Can Benefit From BusinessWeek's Ad Sales

11:24:15 PM

Advertising Age

How Bloomberg Can Benefit From BusinessWeek's Ad Sales

Opportunities for 'Good' Synergy Between Two Business Brands

by Nat Ives
Published: October 16, 2009

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Bloomberg LP's acquisition of BusinessWeek may provide both parties benefits on the editorial side: Bloomberg is promising to give BusinessWeek more news pages and coverage from Bloomberg reporters, while BusinessWeek reporters' access to high-level executives may expand Bloomberg reporters' entrée in turn. But Bloomberg ad sales efforts also stand to gain from BusinessWeek's relationships with marketers and agencies.

And ad sales, along with those planned editorial improvements and higher subscription prices, are going to play a big role in determining what happens to BusinessWeek one or two years from now.

"What will be interesting to see, and important for Bloomberg to articulate to people like me on the agency side, is where the differentiation stays and where there will be a natural intersection, and why that would be meaningful," said Jeffrey Fischer, senior VP-managing director at Universal McCann's print-activation group. "We're looking forward to 2010. We talk to the people at Bloomberg about clients like institutional investors. We talk to BusinessWeek about accounts like auto. It will be interesting where that comes together and where that doesn't."

There are opportunities here for "good" synergy, according to Steve Farella, CEO of independent media agency TargetCast and former CEO of the Media Planning Group at Havas. Some media companies try to sell across diverse properties, leading marketers to buy things they don't particularly want, but this tie-up brings together similar audiences, he said. "Anybody picking up anything to do with Bloomberg or BusinessWeek, we know they have money and want to spend it and invest it."

Some BusinessWeek advertisers that hadn't previously considered Bloomberg.com, Bloomberg Markets or Bloomberg TV might take another look now, agreed Eric Blankfein, managing director for channel insights at Horizon Media. But it won't be automatic, he said. "It's still going to going to be a jump to bring a more general marketer using BusinessWeek to a Bloomberg property."

BusinessWeek's top print advertisers in 2008 comprised IBM, Dell, Accenture, Sprint Nextel, T. Rowe Price, Breitling watches, Samsung, Verizon, Honda and Dun & Bradstreet, according to TNS Media Intelligence. TNS doesn't track Bloomberg Markets, but the November issue includes some general consumer advertising -- for Porsche and Toyota, for example -- along with a lot of narrow financial products and services, like the CBOE marketplace, NYSE Euronext, Knight Direct and Townsend RealTick trading systems. The Oct. 19 issue of BusinessWeek includes ads for wonky business plays such as Korean Free Economic Zones and SAS Business Analytics, but also broader advertising for the Chase Sapphire card, Sprint and Sharp.

A Bloomberg spokeswoman said the company is in the midst of putting together teams to evaluate issues including cross-platform strategies for BusinessWeek, Bloomberg Markets magazine and Bloomberg's multimedia properties.

The outcome will matter to more than just Bloomberg. Bloomberg's acquisition may have been BusinessWeek's best possible outcome from the sale effort McGraw-Hill began three months ago, but it did not deliver BusinessWeek, as a print weekly to any sort of Promised Land. Call it a promising reprieve.

"The thing that surprised me the most was that they plan to continue operating it as a weekly magazine," said Reed Phillips, managing partner at DeSilva & Phillips, an investment bank specializing in the media business. "That's a significant commitment."

The weekly print schedule probably isn't an eternal commitment for Bloomberg, said Ken Doctor, the media analyst at Outsell. "Keep print?" he said in an e-mail. "Probably for 12 to 18 months, testing out how much of the major drop in magazine ad pages is cyclical and how much is structural."

Ad pages in BusinessWeek's issues this year through Oct 6. fell 34%, worse than the 22.7% decline seen across weeklies as a whole, according to the Media Industry Newsletter.

BusinessWeek's print edition collected $112.6 million in ad revenue over the first three quarters this year, down 31.5%, according to the Publishers Information Bureau, whose estimates are based on openly quoted ad rates and don't reflect discounts. BusinessWeek ad revenue in full-year 2008 totaled $236.1 million, down 12.7%, according to the bureau.

UM Czech Wins Gold

11:24:15 PM

It’s 10 P.M.: Do You Know Where Your Online Ads Are?

11:24:15 PM

The Wall Street Journal

It’s 10 P.M.: Do You Know Where Your Online Ads Are?

October 13, 2009, 8:46 AM ET

Click fraud, in which a person or automated computer program clicks on ads repeatedly to make them seem more effective than they are, has long marred Web advertising.

But marketers often buy display ads based on the number of times they are loaded onto a page, rather than the number of clicks they get. That model was harder to sabotage, until the last few years, when the invisible-ad phenomenon emerged.

The problem has given rise to a group of companies, such as DoubleVerify, Anchor Intelligence and AdXpose, which audit online-ad campaigns for marketers. These companies say they regularly find instances of fraud or other pitfalls, ranging from invisible ads to marketers buying ads on pages that could include inappropriate or risqué content.

“There really is no way of checking to make sure that your ads are showing up where they should be,” said Mitchell Weinstein, director of ad operations at Interpublic Group ad agency Universal McCann.

In August, Universal McCann started working with DoubleVerify, which has found several instances of ads for McCann’s clients showing up next to inappropriate content, Mr. Weinstein said. “That is wasted money on our end and our clients’ end.”

Concerned about their reputation, some ad networks have started to offer guarantees of where marketers’ ads will end up. Undertone Networks promises advertisers space on high-quality Web sites — and that it will pay them $50,000 if it doesn’t come through.

It's just business. Or, is it?

11:24:15 PM

The Huffington Post

It's Just Business, Or, is it?

Jarvis Coffin

CEO & President, Burst Media

Posted: October 6, 2009 02:13 PM

Advertising Age reports on the game of musical chairs that has been taking place over the past 18 months among the top media buying agencies. According to the report, 10 of the top 14 companies in the space have swapped-out their CEO.

This is what comes of living in the real world. It wasn't always thus for ad agencies. Before the era of leveraged buy-outs made consolidation possible, ad agencies were private companies owned by partners living in places like Connecticut. Now, they are public companies, most of them, and when times get tough the tough re-arrange the deck chairs.

Whither client relationships in all of this? I liked Phil Cowdell's reported statement to boss Scott Neslund that he would only take-over Mindshare's North American operations if he could do so as an "old-fashioned client man." But what does that mean today? Do relationships matter? Matt Seiler at Universal McCann reportedly thinks it's more complicated than that.

Maybe so, because the clients themselves, perhaps taking their cue from the itinerant nature of things on the agency side, are as prone to sweep the decks by changing one agency for another in costly account reviews.

Is it the business or is it simply business that has the agency world doing so much deck chair re-arranging? Is it the complex realities of the new media world, or the realities of the world, period? What problem is getting fixed by all these changes? Performance problems? In which case it's being argued that among the top 14 companies in the media planning and buying industry 70% of the leadership was - well - not right for the times.

Really? Recessions have always taken their toll on the advertising and media business. Technology, on the other hand, while disruptive, has done nothing but help. Radio? Television? Very disruptive, but they helped make multi-millionaires out of the leading agency executives of the time.

Adaptation can be brutal. We are a full fifteen years into this Internet thing, however, and the conversation is still about how to make it work, meaning there is no evidence that adaptation is occurring at a faster rate today versus the past. Indeed, the IAB's report on Internet spending for the first half of this year issued last week with Price Waterhouse Coopers indicates nearly 90% of media spending still occurs on the top 50 web properties.

How complicated is that? But, maybe, that's the point of so much change at major buying companies. No more skimming the surface of the new media opportunity and hanging around the shallow end. Time to wade deep and really connect with the possibilities - starting at the top.

It which case, maybe the 70% overhaul leads somewhere. But, only if you believe it's about the business, and not just about business.

Media-Buying, Planning Agencies Shake Up Top Executives

11:24:15 PM

Advertising Age

Media-Buying, Planning Agencies Shake Up Top Executives

Why The Majority of Leaders in the Space Have Changed Chiefs in Recent Past

Posted by Michael Bush on 10.05.09

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Ten of the 14 major media-buying and selling agencies have installed new chiefs at the global or North America leadership levels in the past year and a half, creating a period of management flux that hasn't been seen since these firms were spun out a decade ago.

Of course, it makes sense that all this is happening now, because 2009 has been hammer time for media agencies. Major marketers have been launching procurement-driven reviews to lop off cost, pushing some agencies to drop fees, in some cases to nothing. And as they flirt with commoditization, there's more pressure on shops to recruit the kind of talent that create sophisticated strategies for marketers in a complex digital age.

Some agencies have looked to put more digital-savvy leaders in control. Others have used the recession to accelerate succession plans for old management. Still others have simply been looking to put some oomph into limp new-business operations.

Louis Jones, who was recently named CEO of North America for WPP's Maxus, replacing Carla Loffredo, now chief operating officer for Maxus North America, said that was a key consideration in his placement.

"We recognized a need to shift the gravity within the media department so that digital strategy sat more centrally within how we thought about everything," said Mr. Jones, who is also the first African-American to head a major media agency. "It was a move that the industry needs to take a bigger step towards by integrating online and offline and having a real sound repository of digital experience."

Less golf
What there's less room for is purely relationship-focused management arrangement based on secret handshakes, golf outings and the like.

"The cult of the individual is not as powerful as it used to be," said Martin Cass, who replaced Scott Sorokin as U.S. president of Aegis' Carat last October. "I get the sense that the marketplace is a lot less clubby and more democratic than it was."

Due to significantly slashed media budgets and fees, just about every other agency is down anywhere from low to high double digits in terms of revenue, according to industry insiders.

"It was an extremely challenging year for everybody and almost every agency is down in major numbers," said one media agency CEO. "It's bad everywhere and very few agencies will end the year with the same number of staff or more than they had last year."

With less time allotted to prove oneself, Lisa Donohue, who replaced John Muszynski as U.S. CEO of Publicis Groupe's Starcom USA about 100 days ago, said one needs to create impact that's not only positive, but immediate.

"Provide value from day one and advance the momentum from there," she said. "It's easier said than done of course, but I've wrapped my head around ways to do it like listening, acting decisively and with conviction and providing perspective and a clear point-of-view."

Leading by example
When asked by Dominic Proctor, Mindshare's global CEO, to fill the agency's top spot in North America after Scott Neslund stepped down, Phil Cowdell said he would only do it if he was able to remain true to his roots of being an "old-fashioned client man."

Mr. Cowdell doesn't believe the role of today's CEO is sitting in the office managing profits and losses and hiring. "That's not an efficient use of what I do," he said. He describes his philosophy on the role of today's media agency CEO -- being out front and solving client problems and having a point of view -- by quoting George Patton: "I have never seen men managed into battle. I've only seen them led."

Matt Seiler, who replaced Nick Brien as global CEO of Interpublic's Universal McCann in July 2008, said relationships will always be critical but it's the work that's really important. Universal McCann recently won the Charles Schwab business, an account Mr. Seiler had when he was at Omnicom's PHD, and was awarded, without a review, media duties for Applebee's, whose sibling company IHOP currently works with Universal McCann.

He said the implications of these personnel changes are beneficial to clients and the media industry, which is evolving faster than any other marketplace.

"To think the same people that were doing it well when it was simpler should or could be the same people doing it today is probably naïve," Mr. Seiler said. "You have to bring in different perspectives, and that's not a criticism of the people who were in leadership positions before. This is the natural evolution that must take place if you are going to think differently about how you manage your business and what services you provide for your clients."

Costly reviews
But personnel changes aren't the only things impacting client-agency relationships. The drawn-out, costly and sometimes pointless review process, has become more of an exercise in putting agencies through the ringer to squeeze them for every penny they can.

"These reviews certainly aren't making our lives any easier," said one media-agency president. But the executive said these procurement-driven pitches also have a negative domino effect felt throughout the agency world when competing agencies cut and slash fees to nearly zero to either hold on to or win a piece of business.

"The risk comes when people get desperate," the agency president said. "There will be a comeback and you'll find over the next year or so that people have done deals that are impossible to maintain."

UM wins at the MFA

11:24:15 PM

UM wins at the MFA Awards! Click here to see the full list of winners.

Agency Innovators 2009

11:24:15 PM

The Internationalist

Agency Innovators 2009

October 2009

Daryl Lee

Global President, Communications Planning & Strategy

Universal McCann New York

CURRENT CLIENTS: Microsoft, Sony, MasterCard, Bacardi and UPS

BORN: South Africa

WORKED IN: New York, South Africa and the United Kingdom

Daryl Lee’s efforts are insuring that Universal McCann is a leading destination for integrated marketing and communications strategy solutions.

His strengths include specialization in integrated marketing communications strategy, marketing plan development, channel planning, 360-degree messaging architectures, advertising metrics and ROI. As UM’s Global President of Communications Planning & Strategy, he oversees both the communications planning and research teams — two areas which are playing an integral role in the evolution of the Universal McCann brand.

Communications Planning at UM is dedicated to generating profound consumer insights that yield the most surprising results for its clients. As the head of the discipline, Daryl is responsible for directing the agency’s Communications Planning specialists around the world to make the most of their innate curiosity, ultimately turning media insights into marketing breakthroughs for the agency’s global brands.

Before joining Universal McCann, Daryl was a Senior Partner and Worldwide Group Director of the IBM Strategy Group, and Joint Operating Board member at Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide. He pioneered the IMC strategy function on IBM, the agency’s flagship global account, and developed a channel planning methodology called “Combustion,” which was piloted in the US, Japan and China, and has been adopted across Ogilvy globally as the channel planning standard.

Prior to Ogilvy, he was a Marketing Strategist for healthcare and financial services clients at McKinsey & Company, where he provided strategy and marketing consulting to senior management of Fortune 100 clients.

Interesting Insight: Daryl returned to his native South Africa to participate in setting up and running the nation's first democratically-elected transitional government. He found that the experience of working with such diverse cultures contributed significantly to better understanding the issues facing global clients and their challenges in cross-border communications.

Other International Background: A Rhodes Scholar, Daryl earned a D.Phil. in English Literature from Oxford University, where he has taught American Drama and Modern Literature. (DPhil is an advanced research degree awarded on the basis of a thesis and oral examination, modeled on the German and American Ph. D.)

View Daryl's UM Bio

OMMA Award

11:24:15 PM

And the winner is… UM LA for their work on Sony’s District 9 at the 2009 OMMA awards for Integrated Online Campaigns/Media & Entertainment!

Bringing the movement to ban non-humans from Sony's sci-fi film District 9 to life, the campaign to generate early buzz about the film (and make clear that it was different than Peter Jackson's long-rumored Halo project) utilized social media, a fake blog, web site portal, videos, a participatory video game, and even a hotline so fans could relay non-human sightings. The end results were unprecedented: hotline calls, fan-created videos on YouTube, a Facebook fan base and 90% positive buzz online.

Congratulations to all who worked to make this campaign a success.

Fantastic job!

Applebee's Hands Media Account to Universal McCann

11:24:15 PM

Advertising Age

Applebee's Hands Media Account to Universal McCann

Moves Duties From Starcom in Cost-Efficiency Consolidation Play

Posted by Michael Bush on 09.15.09 @ 04:03 PM

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Applebee's has moved its $150 million-plus media planning and buying account from Publicis Groupe's Starcom to Interpublic Group of Cos.' Universal McCann without a review, the company said. Following the example of other major advertisers, Applebee's is taking the route of consolidation for more cost efficiencies.

The fast-casual chain is the latest to consolidate accounts.

Applebee's, the largest player in the casual-dining space, already works with Universal McCann sibling McCann Erickson on the creative side. Patrick Lenow, executive director-communications for Dine Equity, parent company to Applebee's and IHOP, which also works with Universal McCann, said the company consolidated its media and creative responsibilities as a way to capitalize on opportunities in the market while creating more cost efficiencies.

"We thought there were good opportunities in the marketplace by bringing creative and media buying under the single [McCann] banner," Mr. Lenow said. "We appreciate the work Starcom has done for us and we think it will be a smooth transition over the next 90 days."

"We are delighted to be adding such a well-recognized brand as Applebee's to our roster of New York clients," said Universal McCann's North American president, Jacki Kelley. "In partnership with McCann, we see this as an opportunity to better serve Applebee's and are privileged to work with such an engaged group of franchisees. Having worked with IHOP in Los Angeles since 1996, we are excited to expand our relationship with Dine Equity with one more of their divisions."

Mr. Lenow said that pricing was not a factor in the company's decision.

Along with Omnicom Group's OMD, Universal McCann has been one of the busiest shops this year in terms of collecting new business. Since May, the agency has won the $40 million Dyson account, BMW's media-planning and -buying business and the $100 million-plus Charles Schwab planning-and-buying account. The agency retained its media-buying chores for insurance and financial services provider Nationwide during that time as well.

In November of last year Applebee's brought Rebeca Johnson aboard as senior VP-marketing. IHOP purchased Applebee's for $2.1 billion in July of 2007. Applebee's, not unlike its competitors, has struggled some since the time of the IHOP acquisition, but recent same-store sales improvements have led some experts to speculate that the sector may be staging a recovery. In recent months Applebee's has put a greater focus on value-deal offerings, such as two entrees and an appetizer for $20.

Universal referred calls to the client.

Starcom, which has worked with Applebee's since 2005, confirmed the departure and said the agency "remains proud of the work it did with Applebee's and wishes them well."

~ ~ ~
Emily Bryson York contributed to this report.

Grand Prix for UM EMEA

11:24:15 PM

Applebee's Consolidates Chores at McCann Worldgroup

11:24:15 PM

Adweek

Applebee's Consolidates Chores at McCann Worldgroup

Media and below-the-line assignments shift into IPG camp

Sept 15, 2009

- Noreen O'Leary

NEW YORK Applebee's has consolidated its marketing and media business at Interpublic Group's McCann Worldgroup, sources said.

Media buying and planning and below-the-line chores are now moving into the Worldgroup camp, where Universal McCann and MRM will likely work on aspects of the assignment, per sources.

In 2008, the Lenexa, Kan.-based restaurant chain spent $154 million in domestic measured media; through June, the client spent $76 million on ads, per Nielsen.

Media planning and buying duties have been at Publicis Groupe's Starcom in Chicago.

Reps at Applebee's, McCann and Starcom could not immediately be reached.

McCann Erickson won creative duties on the business in 2007 after IHOP, already an agency client, acquired Applebee's in a $1.9 billion transaction.

UM's Jacki Kelley Swims in Other Side of Upfront Pool

11:24:15 PM

Advertising Age

UM's Jacki Kelley Swims in Other Side of Upfront Pool

Q&A: Former MSLO Exec Discusses How Agencies, Media Handled Protracted Ad Talks and the Role of Scatter

by Michael Bush
Published: August 13, 2009

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Since Jacki Kelley joined Universal McCann as its North American president a little less than four months ago, the agency has pulled off an impressive run of new-business wins totaling more than half a billion dollars, helping the Interpublic Group of Cos. shop mount a comeback from its troubles a few years back.

Starting in May, when Ms. Kelley joined Universal McCann, the agency quietly won the $40 million Dyson account. A few weeks later it made a much bigger splash, winning BMW's media-planning and -buying business. In July it kept the momentum rolling by bringing in another $200 million in business through the $100 million-plus Charles Schwab planning-and-buying account win and the retention of media-buying chores for insurance and financial services provider Nationwide.

Even if some good luck followed Ms. Kelley when she came aboard, she refuses to take much of the recognition and instead credits agency CEO Matt Seiler and his mission of creating more strategic relationships between media owners and agencies.

"Matt gets much of the credit," she told Advertising Age. "But our formula is really based on collaboration. On these new-business pitches we are demonstrating our willingness and expectation to create a higher level of collaboration between the media owners and ourselves."

The former exec VP-media sales for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia spoke with Ad Age about the biggest challenge she's encountered so far at the agency, the way the upfront is playing out, and what it's like being on the agency side of the table for the first time in these negotiations.

Ad Age: How are marketers and media owners responding to the new collaborative approach Matt Seiler and you are pushing?

Ms. Kelley: Media owners are very excited about this, because they recognize that there is a lot of value that can be created that is left on the table based on the way agencies historically engaged with them. There's a tremendous appetite.

Ad Age: How has the upfront been going for Universal McCann?

Ms. Kelley: It's been a slower market. But we're very pleased with the way in which we have been able to invest and shepherd the client's investment that we are accountable for. We feel that we got to the right place. It took a little while for sellers to reset and realize the marketplace was not going to move at the rate they were initially asking for, but I think we are really pleased with [the deals] that we locked in and the rates at which we have done [them].

Ad Age: Do you get the sense that a happy medium was found for marketers and media owners?

Ms. Kelley: The market always finds its balance. The agencies are always pushing on behalf of clients and recognize the climate we are in, and sellers are appropriately trying to garner the best rate for their products. I have a lot of trust that the marketplace will find the right balance, and I believe it has in this case. There's always a desire, mind you, on the agencies and clients to continually get more, and in some cases we have not put money on the table because we believe it's better to wait and manage it through scatter, but that paragraph has yet to be written in terms of how that turns out. They will find the right marketplace.

Ad Age: Are the reductions where you'd thought they'd be?

Ms. Kelley: They were a little less than I anticipated they would be at this point.

Ad Age: Are any media owners doing or offering anything really unique?

Ms. Kelley: There were a couple that did some really interesting stuff, but the things we are working on with them are not yet public, so we can't talk about them. But they are really great examples of rich content integration that really provide a different level of collaboration that we're seeking. But there definitely were some media owners that brought something new to the table this year. And when I say new, I mean the back-and-forth we created with them, the level of transparency we gave them in what needed to be accomplished and the very creative in which we worked with them and the creative agency to bring that to market.

Ad Age: How surprised were you by the length of time it took for things to move?

Ms. Kelley: I wasn't surprised at all, coming from the media owners' side, because in a climate like this you are going to hold as long as you possibly can. So it's not surprising that it has been this protracted.

Ad Age: Did the upfront stalemate cause the agency to alter its approach?

Ms. Kelley: Our approach was always around scenario planning, so we had several scenarios we knew we would execute on if the market went one way or the other. A lot of pre-planning went into that so we just managed the scenario plans we created in advance and executed on those as the market moved.

Ad Age: How has it been sitting on the other side of the table for the first time?

Ms. Kelley: I always say we swim in the same pool we just see slightly different shades of water. It's the same game but playing it slightly different. It was certainly interesting, but you continue to appreciate both sides of the coin.

Ad Age: What's the biggest challenge you have encountered so far?

Ms. Kelley: There is so much appetite to create meaningful change, but there are simply not enough hours in a day. So the biggest challenge, like anything, is to pace yourself for the right combination of productivity and results and recognizing you have to keep wheels on the bus as you go through this transformation.

Before You Base Your Business Plan on Paid Content, Read This

11:24:15 PM

Advertising Age

Before You Base Your Business Plan on Paid Content, Read This

Not Everyone Will Enjoy the Spoils of Murdoch's Favorite Online Revenue Model

by Nat Ives
Published: August 10, 2009

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- For a moment last week, it seemed like paid content was really on the march. Rupert Murdoch announced his intention to charge for every News Corp. news site. DirecTV, the second-largest pay-TV provider, was found in talks to launch a web-video service -- for its paying subscribers. And a comprehensive new forecast reported that consumers were spending less time with media that's heavily subsidized by advertising -- and more with media they pay for.

"No longer are newspaper- and magazine-subscription purchases and network prime-time viewing the norm," said John Suhler, president and general partner at Veronis Suhler Stevenson, the private-equity firm that authored the forecast. "Instead they are declining and consumers are spending more time with media which they support and pay for, as opposed to ad-supported media. This development is a culmination of two decades of this secular shift towards consumer-controlled media and shows no signs of slowing."

Newspapers' print circulation is expected to fall from about $10 billion this year to something more than $8 billion in 2013. Consumer magazines, which typically offer readers cheap subscriptions and rely on advertisers for most of their profitable revenue, got about $9.8 billion in circulation revenue last year, Veronis Suhler said. That figure will be $9.7 billion in 2013. Meanwhile, subscribers spent about $55 billion on basic pay TV last year, but will be paying $72 billion by 2013. And video games and internet access will continue to grow as well.

But while it's clear that paid content's campaign will advance, it's also apparent it will not deliver spoils for everyone.

For one thing, Veronis Suhler considers every website that you call free -- The New York Times, People.com or TMZ for example -- to be paid media. That's because Veronis Suhler looks at what people pay to access a particular medium, not where those dollars actually go. Web-access revenue may climb from $17 billion last year to $21 billion in 2013, as Veronis Suhler forecasts, but that money isn't reaching The Times, People or TMZ.

Ad dependence
"In the cable TV model, the money you pay to Comcast trickles up to the content providers, so you are paying for your content as well as your access," said Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired and author of the new book "Free," an examination of modern pricing opportunities and threats. "In the internet model, you are not. It's closer to the telephone model: You pay for your line but not the information you receive over it."

So cable and the web are thriving because they offer specialized content for which people will pay -- but in the case of the web, content providers still overwhelmingly depend on advertisers for revenue.

For another thing, Mr. Murdoch may be overstating his plans -- or over-estimating the demand for some of his sites. News Corp. is going to have a hard time charging for, say, the New York Post's site, whose content competes with free offerings from Gawker, Gothamist, the New York Daily News and plenty of others.

Maybe Mr. Murdoch has a clever plan that gets around that. Until we see one, however, it looks like specialized professional content, like his Wall Street Journal model online, will remain the chief winning front for paid content.

Taunton Press, for example, says it has more than 80,000 people paying for memberships on sites from Fine Cooking, Fine Homebuilding or Fine Woodworking.

'Freemium'
The sites use a "freemium" model: There's some free content, but you have to pay for access to, for example, intricate long-form video on specific projects, most magazine articles, or experts who will answer members' questions. "Anything that's not a commodity," said Jason Revzon, VP-interactive at Taunton Press. Prices vary, but people who aren't subscribing to the print edition of Fine Cooking, for example, pay $29.95 for annual subscriptions to the site.

Specialized content that's disappearing under the old models, in particular, can find new individual buyers, said Tyler Brûlé, founder of global-news magazine Monocle. Subscribers get 10 issues for a hefty 75 pounds, or $125 at today's exchange rate.

"Without us even having to articulate it on the page, people have said, 'I'm paying a premium for Monocle because news gathering in the old sense is an expensive business.'"

Again, this isn't necessarily a portrait of paid content taking over the world. Monocle says it has about 11,000 subscribers.

Media brands need to be subtle about paid content and its limits, as well as its opportunities, said Josh Macht, group publisher at the Harvard Business Review, which offers material outside its online pay wall and lots more behind it. "If we don't want to be only ad-supported and we really want to find our way to a paid model, I don't think the question is, 'Would you pay $5 for this?' The question is, 'What do need us for and what are we best at?'"

Former 'Ad Age,' 'Entertainment Weekly' Publisher Donaton To Lead

11:24:15 PM

Mediapost

MediaDailyNews

Former 'Ad Age,' 'Entertainment Weekly' Publisher Donaton To Lead Interpublic's Branded Entertainment

by Joe Mandese, Thursday, July 30, 2009, 4:19 PM

Interpublic has re-branded its branded entertainment operations, and it has tapped a well-known ad industry brand to manage it. Scott Donaton, former publisher of Entertainment Weekly and Advertising Age, will lead "Ensemble," the new name of Interpublic's Mediabrands' branded entertainment unit. Donaton becomes president-CEO of Ensemble and a full-time company associate.

Interpublic said the new unit, which includes Universal McCann, Initiative and Media Link, would operate in an alliance with advertising and media industry consulting firm Media Link LLC, headed by Michael Kassan. As such, Donaton will have a shared reporting structure to stakeholders in the new unit.

Interpublic said Donaton would work with Mediabrands agencies and their clients to "bridge the gap between marketers and the entertainment industry."

Specifically, Interpublic said Donaton would be working with the existing entertainment teams inside Initiative, UM and Interpublic's Specialty Service Groups in an effort to bring "first-look" opportunities to their clients.

While editor at Advertising Age, prior to becoming its publisher, Donaton championed the concept of "Madison & Vine," a publishing and event franchise that has lost some steam within the industry and Crain Communications, but it spawned a lot of energy and excitement around the field of branded entertainment marketing.

Ironically, two of Donaton's "Madison & Vine" colleagues, Ad Age journalists Richard Linnett and Hank Kim, bolted the magazine at the height of the frenzy to form a branded entertainment unit within Interpublic rival Havas. They have since moved on.

New Day, New Way for Resurgent UM

11:24:15 PM

Adweek

New Day, New Way for Resurgent UM

After a series of setbacks, the IPG company's refocused efforts are finally paying off

July 20, 2009

- Steve McClellan

NEW YORK After years of drought (some of it self-imposed) and armed with a different new business development formula, Interpublic Group's Universal McCann has won four pitches in the last two months with combined ad spending of $550 million. The shop, which stumbled badly a few years back with a string of major client losses, has implemented a series of changes in management and processes that appear to be reviving the agency's fortunes.

Last week alone the shop won the $100 million Charles Schwab account and successfully defended its $210 million buying account with insurance company Nationwide after a review that kicked off in December 2008.

In May, UM wrested the estimated $200 million BMW media business away from GSD&M Idea City after a review that started in September 2008 and, earlier that month, was awarded the $40 million Dyson media account.

Even discounting Nationwide, which was retained, the shop has already won more net new business this year -- $340 million -- than it did in the previous five years. The year is still young, but so far the shop has not suffered any client losses.

Jacki Kelley, who joined the agency as North American president in late April, credited worldwide CEO Matt Seiler with making a series of moves to better position the shop, including the hiring of Jen Hohman as svp, managing director of new business about nine months ago. An IPG veteran, Hohman was imported from McCann Erickson, where she worked on the U.S. Army account.

The shop, according to Kelley, now picks a separate business development team for each pitch, with many of those team members sticking with the client if UM wins the business -- a strategy increasingly being used by a number of media companies. "We're putting people in front of the client that they will ultimately work with," said Kelley.

Consultants say that's a smart move as it can be frustrating for clients to watch those who made the winning presentation suddenly disappear, leaving them with an agency team they hadn't bargained for.

"When a client is hiring an agency, they're hiring a team," said New York-based search consultant Joanne Davis, founder of her eponymously named company. "It's, 'Who's my one back to pat, who's my one throat to choke?' We tell our clients to make sure they know who the team is going to be" before selecting a shop.

Kelley said the ability to reach out to media oversight unit Mediabrands (formed a year ago) for an assist with specialized services like outdoor (OSI) or newspapers (NSA) as well as several new tools have also helped.

The shop has poured significant resources into a live consumer insight panel with 170,000 participants, and upgraded channel-allocation tools and a process for monitoring what consumers are saying about marketers and their competitors.

Jennifer Hanley, svp of marketing services for Nationwide, who oversaw the company's media review, said UM's analytics and tracking tools were among the reasons the insurer stuck with the company. Also, she said, the shop has worked well with the client's new creative agency of record, independent shop McKinney. "Their chemistry is good and they each understand how the other works," said Hanley.

Other key factors, said Hanley, included account service, agency management, and overall personality and culture. Nationwide, she added, tends not to spend as much as competitors in the category and they "want to make every dollar work hard."

The road to recovery has been a long one for UM. The nadir, perhaps, was 2005 when the shop lost close to $1 billion in accounts, including Lowe's ($315 million) and a portion of the General Motors buying business ($600 million).

When Nick Brien joined the shop as worldwide CEO late in 2005 (replacing Robin Kent, who was ousted earlier in the year), he spent a lot of time putting out fires on major accounts, including Microsoft and Sony, which had become dissatisfied. In 2006, the agency effectively declared a moratorium on new business efforts as it sought to shore up its offering and make sure existing clients were being serviced to their satisfaction.

In 2007, near disaster struck when Johnson & Johnson put its $3 billion global media account in review. UM was the incumbent on the lion's share of the U.S. business and spent most of the year defending it (successfully) and putting in place the extra resources it had promised to retain the account going forward.

When Brien was elevated to CEO at Mediabrands in July of last year, he hired Seiler, former CEO at PHD USA, for the global UM CEO role.

Earlier this year, Seiler put his global team in place.

"A lot of agencies go through peaks and valleys," said Davis. "There's a lead and a lag. A lot of people were saying, 'UM, not doing well.' But they've accomplished a great comeback. It starts with shifting management and talent and making sure you have the right people in the right jobs."

Kelley, who joined UM from Martha Stewart Omnimedia, where she was evp, sales, is in the process of hiring a new team that will be specifically tasked with forging stronger ties with individual media companies.

N.Y. Ad Club Names Gruhler President

11:24:15 PM

Adweek

N.Y. Ad Club Names Gruhler President

July 17, 2009

- Adweek Staff

NEW YORK The Advertising Club here said it has named C. Thom Gruhler, who serves as evp, worldwide global account director at McCann Erickson, president.

Gruhler (pictured) succeeds Ian Parminter, svp, integrated ad sales and marketing at Discovery Networks, who now becomes chairman of the trade group.

"One of my goals for the club will be to strengthen the dialogue among the board in addressing the bigger issues that affect us right now and ensure that our initiatives directly meet the shifting needs of our membership," Gruhler said in a statement. "The Ad Club's early legacy was to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas by industry executives and I am hoping to make this an even more prominent cornerstone in the months ahead."

In addition, Beth Ann Eason, general manager and COO, Beliefnet, moves to svp from vp; Laurel Rossi, president, Strategy Farm, ascends to vp from director; Ron Fierman, CEO and president, Digital Pulp, continues as treasurer; and John Partilla, evp, president of global media sales, Clear Channel Communications, remains vp.

The club also named seven new board members:

• Michael Duda, partner, chief corporate strategy officer, Deutsch
• Gerry Frascione, CEO and presidnt, BBDO North America
• Carl Fremont, evp, Global Media Director, Digitas
• Heide Gardner, svp, chief diversity and inclusion officer, IPG
• Jacki Kelley, president, Universal McCann North America
• Rob Master, director of North American Media, Unilever
• Greg McCastle, svp, advanced ad solutions, AT&T

The seven executives who are receiving the Ad Club President's Award for outstanding contributions and commitment to club initiatives and programs are:

• Peter Bopp, partner, Leadership Strategy Group
• Frank Dudley, CMO, 'mktg'
• Wright Ferguson, president, Ferguson & Associates
• Tony Jones, senior copywriter, McCann Erickson
• Mari Kim Novak, senior director, global marketing engagement, Microsoft Advertising
• Jay Sears, evp, strategic products and business development, Context Web
• Mark Waites, joint cd and founding partner, Mother, London

Ori Zohar, account executive, Universal McCann and a former Ad Club intern, is the recipient of the Rising Star Award for his involvement in program development and social and educational event planning for the club's young professionals committee.

The club also offered thanks to these board members retiring this year: Dawn Bullen; Colleen DeCourcy, TBWA Worldwide; Todd Harvey, Activision; Carla Loffredo, Maxus; Diego Scotti, Conde Nast; and John Vail, Pepsi.

Texas Instruments hands regional media to UM

11:24:15 PM

Media

by Anita Davis 16-Jul-09, 12:00

ASIA-PACIFIC - Texas Instruments (TI), an American semiconductor and electronics company, has reportedly awarded its regional media planning and buying account to Universal McCann.

According to sources, UM will be TI’s regional agency-of-record with the account headed out of UM Shanghai under CEO Manpreet Singh.

In the past, TI worked with MEC Taiwan for one year to handle its account across the region, excluding Japan. That account was taken from UM.

A source close to the brand said TI shifted its regional business to China because of a “change in strategy” that will see China become a more prominent market.

It has not been disclosed whether TI held a pitch for its account, nor a timeline or a price tag for the business.

TI, ranked number 215 on the Fortune 500’s 2009 list, has 26,200 employees worldwide, with 8,900 in Asia-Pacific and 2,000 in Japan.

In April, the company posted first-quarter revenue of US$2.09 billion, a year-on-year drop of 36 per cent and a quarterly plunge of 16 per cent. The news prompted TI to announce a shift in its business strategy, downplaying its wireless baseband division, which produces chips for mobile phone networks, to emphasise its analogue and embedded-chip business, used in a range of devices from smartphones to large machinery.

Universal McCann Keeps Nationwide

11:24:15 PM

Adweek.com

Universal McCann Keeps Nationwide

And the IPG shop even adds some chores following a review

July 14, 2009

- Steve McClellan

NEW YORK Nationwide has opted to stay with incumbent media shop Universal McCann, a unit of Interpublic Group, after a seven-month review, the client confirmed today.

The insurance company spent $210 million in major measured media in 2008, according to Nielsen.

MediaCom, owned by WPP, was the other finalist for the business.

In addition to UM's previous media buying duties, which included national and spot TV and radio, Nationwide said UM would now also handle print and out-of-home media. McKinney, the client's creative agency, will continue to handle media planning.

"Periodically we review the work of all of our agencies to ensure that we are being as efficient and effective as possible in optimizing our strategic resources," said Jennifer Hanley, senior vice president of marketing services for Nationwide. "In this process, UM confirmed that they continue to be the right fit for Nationwide's media buying needs. We look forward to building on the good work UM has done in the past to help us reach consumers with messages about the personalized On Your Side service Nationwide offers customers."

"We are thrilled that Nationwide has chosen to continue our partnership and has, in fact, increased our responsibilities," said Jacki Kelley, UM North American president. "We look forward to continuing our long-term relationship and working with McKinney to provide Nationwide with more than they expected, delivering surprising results,"

The client launched parallel creative and media reviews in late December.

In May, Nationwide awarded the creative business to Durham, N.C.-based independent McKinney. Interpublic's TM Advertising had been the incumbent.

It could not be determined which shops had been eliminated earlier from the competition. ABA Consulting, Dallas, oversaw the review process.

UM has been on a roll of late, adding several pieces of national business, including Charles Schwab's $100 million account just yesterday, BMW in June and Dyson in May.

UM Wins Charles Schwab

11:24:15 PM

Adweek.com

UM Wins Charles Schwab

July 13, 2009

- Steve McClellan

NEW YORK Discount brokerage Charles Schwab has awarded its estimated $100 million media buying and planning account to Interpublic's Universal McCann after a review, the client has confirmed.

Other contenders included Aegis Group's Carat and the incumbent, PHD.

The win is UM's third big score in recent weeks, following its additions of Dyson in May and BMW in June.

PHD won planning and buying duties on the account after a consolidation review in 2005. Up to that point, PHD had been the planning incumbent for all of the client's offline advertising, and had managed print and out-of-home media.

Quantcast Shakes Up Ad-Targeting Model

11:24:15 PM

The Wall Street Journal

Quantcast Shakes Up Ad-Targeting Model

JULY 6, 2009

By JESSICA E. VASCELLARO

In a test of the viability of small online-ad companies, Quantcast has launched a new online ad-targeting service that is being closely watched by advertisers and investors.

Quantcast, a high-profile San Francisco start-up, is one of dozens of young companies helping broker targeted display ads -- which typically contain both text and images, and are aimed at audiences selected for such characteristics as age, income or even probable personality traits.

Some of these start-ups sell targeted ads directly on behalf of media companies and other Web publishers. Others -- like Quantcast -- provide data to help companies, such as General Electric's NBC Universal and Time-Warner's Time Inc., sell targeted ads on their own.

Investors have poured millions of dollars into the fledgling businesses, hoping to discover the next Google or Yahoo that could change the way ads are sold online.

View Full Image

Quantcast CEO Konrad Feldman, left, and Chief Revenue Officer Todd Teresi.

So far, few of the ad-targeting and data-brokering companies -- which also include AudienceScience and BlueKai -- have become big, or even profitable. And lawmakers and regulators have stepped up inquiries into whether the ways they collect and crunch data on Web users' online behavior ought to be more tightly regulated to protect consumer privacy.

Quantcast, which has 65 employees, is attracting attention because it entered the ad-targeting business by the backdoor. In 2006, it started out by offering a free service that allowed Web publishers to track the types of people visiting their sites through software code it placed on the sites.

The service put Quantcast in competition with Nielsen and comScore, which track audiences based on the Web-surfing behaviors of panels of Internet users, among other methods.

Now Quantcast plans to translate the technology it has installed on more than 10 million Web sites into revenue. Its new media-buying service, known as Quantcast Media Program, begins by allowing advertisers to create a detailed profile of the types of people they want to reach. Then Quantcast finds Web sites using its measurement technology that are attracting those types of people. It takes a cut of the revenue from the resulting ads sold by the Web sites.

Independent online-media analyst Barry Parr says Quantcast's model of giving away audience data, and charging only when an advertiser buys ads, is likely to appeal to advertisers more than other services that charge publishers upfront for their data.

Some Web sites question whether Quantcast sees enough online activity for its data to be valuable, noting that it still doesn't measure some of the largest sites on the Web. But Quantcast Chief Executive Konrad Feldman says roughly all U.S. Internet users hit a site it tracks every month, and that the real strength of the service is that it allows advertisers to build a custom target audience on the fly.

So far, few advertisers have purchased ads through the new service, which was announced last week. Home Depot has bought some on weather-tracking service Weather Underground, according to Richard Lowden, vice president of sales at the weather Web site. However, companies including Kia Motors and Virgin America are using Quantcast data to define the types of consumers they want to target online.

Quantcast faces keen competition in the display-ad market, ranging from smaller companies such as Specific Media Inc. to larger players like Yahoo and Time Warner's AOL.

David Zinman, Yahoo's vice president and general manager for display advertising, says his company recently launched a new ad-targeting service that allows advertisers to show display ads to visitors who searched for certain search terms. "We have data that is only available to Yahoo, and are using it in a very specific and customized way" for advertisers, he says.

Still, some ad professionals are enthusiastic about Quantcast's new service. "Yahoo can do many of the things that Quantcast can do, but they only see behavior on their own networks," says Jacki Kelley, president of North America for Universal McCann, a media agency owned by Interpublic Group. She says one of her clients is testing the Quantcast media-buying program.

Peter Naylor, senior vice president of digital media sales for NBC Universal, says he is more confident of Quantcast's data than that of other ad-targeting companies because it has helped NBC run a "fine-tooth comb" through its own audience. NBC used Quantcast to track its Olympics Web sites last year, for instance, and found significant differences between visitors to the site's gymnastics areas, compared with the equestrian ones.

As a result, NBC plans to roll out Quantcast's media-buying program across its online properties. "It helps us find more of an advertiser's target audience," Mr. Naylor says.

Wanted: One White Knight, Preferably With a Bag of Gold

11:24:15 PM

Advertising Age

Wanted: One White Knight, Preferably With a Bag of Gold

Why Forbes, Fortune Really Hope BusinessWeek Fetches More Than TV Guide Did

by Nat Ives
Published: July 20, 2009

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- BusinessWeek is not TV Guide, OK?

Sure, it may seem like the business weekly's heyday coincided with the time TV Guide was on every house's coffee table, but insiders insist it is poised for a different fate.

Even if ad pages come back, business books need to adjust to an altered landscape.

TV Guide, another formerly profitable major magazine institution to go on the block during this recession, famously fetched a whopping $1 at auction -- in a deal greased by nearly $10 million in sweetheart 3% loans for the buyer. The specter of a dollar sale for BusinessWeek became the master meme last week after the Financial Times quoted one banker calling it "the kind of deal that would be obtainable."

But TV Guide was sold without its accompanying website and reached a very different audience, a BusinessWeek executive retorted. "If you want to reach mothers who buy Nabisco in the grocery store, you have a lot of options," the executive said. "If you want to reach executives and business decision makers, there are more and more options but still only five or 10 good ones."

For all the challenges in the credit market, not to mention the tens of millions of dollars BusinessWeek is said to be losing, its competitors had better hope it can fetch a lot more than a lone greenback. Both Forbes and Fortune are profitable, but a token dollar transaction for their competitor would represent a vote of very little confidence in the future of their category.

That's because, despite specific circumstances that helped BusinessWeek slide into the red, they're all facing pretty much the same questions: If ad-page sales don't regain their old momentum, how well can they make digital compensate? Can they continue to meet the needs, and capture the dollars, of their particular advertisers, who are changing pretty rapidly themselves? What will be their story after the recession ends?

"Offline those brands have an opportunity to be around for some time, but I think they'll be smaller and smaller offline, while online they can be bigger and bigger," said Forbes.com CEO Jim Spanfeller last Thursday, following the news last week that he was leaving after nine years.

"Any business title that is not drawing most of its revenue from digital within, say, three years will most likely not be in business," he added later. "Even with a recovery, I simply do not see huge ad revenues coming back to print."

Jeff Fischer, senior VP-managing director at Universal McCann, where he oversees the print-activation group, said that may well be true. Most magazines cover areas about which readers are passionate and will remain passionate, Mr. Fischer said. So that's a good thing. Business magazines' print editions are perhaps more functional, though -- and that's a space with which electronic media competes very well. "Ad pages will come back, but not to the pre-recessionary levels," he said.

Plenty of people disagree, of course. "I do believe that a lot of the advertisers who value these audiences are going to be back," said Hugh Wiley, publisher of Fortune. "And they're going to be back big."

Can't rely on ad pages alone
Even if that proves to be true, the business books cannot rely on ad pages alone, and need to adjust to an altered landscape. As recently as 2004, BusinessWeek's top advertisers were IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Toyota Motor, Nissan Motor, Oracle, General Motors, Microsoft, Xerox, Accenture and Ford. Last year the equivalent list was IBM, Dell, Accenture, Sprint Nextel, T Rowe Price, Breitling Switzerland, Samsung, Verizon, Honda Motor and Dun & Bradstreet. Obviously the meltdown in Detroit has afflicted all kinds of media sellers, but automakers' cutbacks left the business magazines even more exposed to financial-services companies -- which have also suffered tremendously in the recession.

That's probably almost entirely a cyclical problem, at least, one that will be more or less remedied by any recovery. But the structural shifts are big too. Today's top advertisers in these titles are also increasingly committed to other, often more targeted ways of reaching their customers. IBM, for example, spent an estimated $8.9 million advertising in BusinessWeek last year, according to TNS Media Intelligence. It devoted 16% of its ad spending to magazines, up from 11% the year before. But it also spent 9% on the internet, up from 4% in 2007.

Dell, BusinessWeek's second-biggest spender last year, with an $8.3 million outlay, devoted 10% of its ad spending to magazines in both 2008 and 2007. But it increased its allocation to the web to 15% last year from 10% the year before. IBM and Dell declined to comment on their advertising strategies.

All the business brands are online in major ways by this point, but with varying results and, of course, head-to-head with all the challenges and competition that internet publishing brings. Growth is neither automatic nor never-ending. Unique visitors last May totaled 7.3 million at Forbes.com, down 12% from May 2008; 7.2 million at CNNMoney, the site that subsumes Fortune magazine, down 6% from the prior May; and 3.5 million at BusinessWeek.com, up nearly 1% from the same month a year earlier, according to Nielsen Online.

Internet revenue is even tougher for outside observers to estimate than web traffic. Forbes.com collected $288.1 million in online revenue last year, for example, according to TNS Media Intelligence. CNNMoney got $205.3 million and BusinessWeek.com pulled in $11.3 million.

Insiders said those figures are very generous. But whatever the true numbers are, they are headed in the right direction. Forbes.com revenue grew 69% from 2007, according to TNS, while CNNMoney revenue rose 55%, and BusinessWeek.com revenue shot up 77%.

Leaning on franchise rankings, events
This year, of course, has proved a much tougher market, which is why the business titles are increasingly leaning on -- or maybe squeezing dry is a better metaphor -- their big franchise rankings and events.

Forbes and Fortune each rely on key franchises they can monetize a million different ways, such as the Forbes Global 200 list of the biggest companies and the Fortune 500.

BusinessWeek has less to offer: its well-established business-school rankings and the less influential BusinessWeek 50, a list of the best-performing companies based on data from Standard & Poor's, its sibling for now within McGraw-Hill.

"The lists are a gold mine," said Steve Forbes, chairman-CEO of Forbes Inc. as well as editor in chief at the magazine. "Thankfully we've had a tradition, whether it was our grading on mutual funds going back to the 1950s to the Forbes 400 in the 1980s to the listings we have today, whether it's dead celebrities or the value of franchises or sports valuation."

Those franchises help the other brands, but they haven't really been in BusinessWeek's DNA. "Yeah, I wish the BusinessWeek 50 was more synonymous with great companies, but it's just not what we do," the BusinessWeek executive said. As for lists with perhaps less relevance to running a business, such as Forbes's "The World's Top Earning Models," BusinessWeek has so far shrugged. "We kind of felt like the answer was to go deeper in business, not dilute our audience."

Events are also becoming a bigger part of the magazine brands' businesses. Forbes has a Global CEO Forum planned in Malaysia this September, for example, but also conducts virtual iConferences, such as one it just convened for financial planners. "Even though the numbers are hardly big, it is the kind of thing you give your right arm for as a marketer," Mr. Forbes said.

Fortune's latest Most Powerful Women Summit meets in California this September; its Brainstorm: Green conference last March included first-time sponsors such as AT&T, HP, Qualcomm and IBM. Here, too, perhaps BusinessWeek could do more; it typically offers smaller events built around programs designed for advertisers.

BusinessWeek's costly print schedule
On the cost side, BusinessWeek suffers from a weekly print schedule, which has some advantages but in recession also means putting out issues that lose money. Production and distribution costs haven't taken a break in the downturn, after all. As a result, BusinessWeek has combined issues into doubles two extra times this year; each one gives it an extra week off at the printing plant. But readers still expect to see an issue pretty much every week.

"The truth of the matter is we got hit with an ad depression with a weekly publication with a slightly more robust journalistic model that had worked for many, many years and probably will again," the BusinessWeek executive said.

Depending on conditions going forward, the weekly BusinessWeek and the biweekly Forbes and Fortune might all want to consider reducing frequency as a way to save costs.

It's far from obvious who might buy BusinessWeek in this environment, however powerful its brand may be and however successful it's been in previous years. Even if the sale price were so low that no financing was required, taking on its red ink will be another expense in itself. Mansueto Ventures, which owns Fast Company and Inc., might want to take a look; a spokeswoman declined to comment on the prospect. OpenGate Capital, which bought TV Guide, may not want to take on another money-losing title while it's focused on the one it has. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. has already said it is not interested.

So BusinessWeek may find itself hoping for a new white knight to emerge. Any white knight, however, will definitely need some armor as it sets about evaluating the business model; perhaps cutting the lengthy masthead; likely pushing further into business lines not so reliant on advertising and subscription sales; and, of course, facing the growing hordes of competitors.

The weekly's new competitive set include the likes of The Economist, which has made major inroads in the U.S. in recent years, and more aggressive pushes from dailies such as the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times. And that's before you get to the digital-only competition, which includes everything from social media to portals to marketers' own sites.

For the moment BusinessWeek, understandably, is thinking about its near future and going about its routine. "We're focused on doing what we do best which is serving our audience and our customers," a BusinessWeek spokesman said, declining to elaborate. Editorial's softball team still took the field last Thursday night after work.

Loyal ‘Simpsons’ Fans Fetch Higher Ad Rates on Web

11:24:15 PM

Bloomberg

Loyal 'Simpsons' Fans Fetch Higher Ad Rates on Web (Update 1)
(UM's David Cohen quoted)

By Brett Pulley and Andy Fixmer

June 25 (Bloomberg) -- Television programs such as “The Simpsons” and “CSI” are for the first time commanding higher advertising rates at Web sites including Hulu.com and TV.com than on prime-time TV.

The premium rates in the just-ended 2008-2009 television season are mainly for shows that rank among the most-watched by Nielsen Co., said David Poltrack, chief research officer at New York-based CBS Corp., which is home to “CSI” and owns TV.com.

Marketers, who are now considering commitments for the 2009-2010 TV season, are willing to pay more because TV.com and Hulu.com, owned by investors including News Corp., NBC and Walt Disney Co., provide committed viewers who actively seek out shows. There are fewer commercials, and consumers are twice as likely to recall Web ads, Poltrack said, citing Nielsen.

“The reason people are paying such a high premium for these ads on the Internet is they do have a captive audience,” Poltrack said. “You know you have eyes on the screen.”

The challenge for the networks, whose total prime-time audience shrank 3.6 percent last season, is that Web viewing and ad sales, while increasing, are still too small to replace traditional revenue sources.

CBS’s April 6 broadcast of the U.S. collegiate basketball championship game, for instance, attracted 17.6 million viewers, according to New York-based Nielsen. By comparison, the network’s Webcast of the championship tournament starting in March drew 7.52 million unique visitors, according a statement.

TV vs. Web Rates

CBS, owner of the most-watched broadcast network, gained 19 cents to $7.21 at 4:15 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares have lost 12 percent this year. New York- based News Corp., whose Fox network airs “The Simpsons,” added 16 cents to $9.15 and is little changed this year.

Marketers typically pay $20 to $40 per thousand viewers for a prime-time ad. On Hulu, which began offering shows to the public in March 2008, an ad on the animated series “The Simpsons” costs $60 per thousand viewers, Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. wrote in a June 18 report.

“It ends up being twice as expensive in the Internet world,” said David Cohen, U.S. director of digital communications at Universal McCann, which is owned by the New York-based advertising company Interpublic Group of Cos.

That isn’t deterring companies from buying time.

Intel Corp., the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturer, has shifted spending to sites including Hulu, which streams TV shows from NBC, Fox and soon ABC, as part of a $100 million worldwide marketing campaign, according to Arlene Villanueva, global media director for the Santa Clara, California-based company.

‘All the Comedies’

“Hulu has all the comedies on NBC, Fox and now ABC,” Villanueva said in an interview. “Most of those fans will watch the finale again or catch up on episodes they missed. It’s a great opportunity to be smart and reach our audience.”

General Motors Corp. will direct brand-building dollars to premium videos on the Internet while it works to emerge from bankruptcy, said Betsy Lazar, executive director of advertising and media operations for the Detroit-based automaker.

“As the economy improves, we expect that demand for premium programming on the Internet will increase as well,” Lazar said in an e-mail.

The gains from Web ads only partly counter the loss of traditional advertising for Fox, Walt Disney’s ABC, CBS and General Electric Co.’s NBC. At CBS, interactive revenue amounted to 6 percent of the $2.23 billion in first-quarter TV sales, according to a May 7 company statement.

Siphoning Off Viewers

Nathanson, based in New York, estimates ad sales at the four networks will drop 10 percent this year to $12.8 billion.

Networks also risk siphoning off prime-time audiences to sites with less inventory and lower ad sales, the analyst wrote.

A “Simpsons” episode on Hulu has just 37 seconds of ads, Nathanson wrote. A broadcast episode has nine minutes and produces three times the revenue per viewer at half the price, he estimated.

“The networks should be very careful that the move to the Web does not cannibalize the core business,” Nathanson wrote.

NBC and ABC declined to comment on rate comparisons.

Closely held Hulu attracts clients by delivering “their target audience,” Jean-Paul Colaco, senior vice president of advertising, said in an e-mail. The site “is delivering value that is resonating with our advertisers,” including more than 40 million users a month.

Disney Investment

In April, Burbank, California-based Disney acquired a 27 percent stake in Los Angeles-based Hulu for about $35 million, becoming a co-owner with News Corp. and New York-based NBC Universal and agreeing to supply shows and films.

News Corp., Disney and NBC sites, including Hulu, ranked among the 10 most-visited for videos in the U.S. in March, according to ComScore Inc., the Reston, Virginia-based researcher, showing the companies are retaining viewers migrating to the Internet. Time Warner Inc. and Viacom Inc., both based in New York, also have top 10 sites, as does CBS.

IGN Entertainment, News Corp.’s Web site for video-game fans, charges as much as $45 per thousand viewers and has advertisers including Activision Blizzard Inc., the largest game publisher, McDonald’s and Burger King, said Charlie Barrett, senior vice president of sales for the Brisbane, California- based company.

“The viewer made a selection, and the advertiser knows you are waiting for the selected content,” Barrett said in an interview. “That’s a powerful advertising moment.”

Poltrack said lower-rated shows won’t command the same prices as popular programs, and that ads on those series aren’t any more valuable than basic, static banners on Web sites.

“This is about scarcity,” Poltrack said. “All of the networks who are now streaming online have multiple advertisers competing for a small supply of premium programs. That premium content is what advertisers want.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Brett Pulley in New York at bpulley@bloomberg.net; Andy Fixmer in Los Angeles at afixmer@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: June 25, 2009 16:23 EDT

Cannes Media Festival

11:24:15 PM

UM won many awards at the 2009 Cannes Media Lions Festival.

- Gold in Best Use of Ambient Media for Check Them! Public Awareness campaign for Testicular Cancer in Macedonia

- Silver in Best Use of Television for MasterCard’s “12 Chimes of the Bell” campaign in Spain

- Bronze in Best in Cinema for the short film “Botelya” (The Bottle) by Johnson’s Baby Oil in the Philippines

- Bronze for Best in Mixed Media for “The Power of Nano Innovations” campaign by Tata Motor Car in India (Lodestar Universal)

UM Spain at El Sol

11:24:15 PM

Verizon Offers 99 Cent NYC Cab Rides

11:24:15 PM

Adweek.com

Verizon Offers 99 Cent NYC Cab Rides

June 9, 2009

-By Steve McClellan, Adweek

A typical cab ride in New York City can cost between $10 and $20 -- or more -- depending on traffic and destination.

But tomorrow, for one day only, Verizon is sponsoring 99-cent cab rides that start from select locations (with Verizon-branded taxis) for destinations anywhere in Manhattan.

In two weeks, the phone giant will bring New Yorkers a steeply discounted summer treat: Mr. Softee Ice Cream (from vendor trucks at select points in the city) for 99 cents.

The sharply reduced cab fares and ice cream are part of a guerilla marketing effort by the wireless phone carrier, developed by Interpublic Group's McCann Erickson and sister media shop Universal McCann. The goal is to tout a Verizon business segment that has low consumer awareness: prepaid cellular plans. As you might guess, the pre-paid plan's daily usage fee is 99 cents.

According to Natan Cohen, a UM media planner on the account, research has shown "consumers think of Verizon as more of a contract carrier and not a pre-pay carrier," even though the company has had prepaid plans for years.

That's a problem, particularly in the recession, as more people reevaluate their options and consider whether they can get along with a prepaid plan, which are almost always cheaper than full-service contracts, said Cohen. By raising awareness of the client's prepaid options, he said, Verizon wants to "make sure its customers realize they don't have to sacrifice the network," while cutting back on more expensive wireless features. The guerilla tactics, he said, are a means of "connecting deeper to show the value you can get for 99 cents."

For tomorrow's event, Verizon will use a fleet of 40 cabs to shuttle people from key transit hubs including Penn and Grand Central Stations to their Manhattan destinations in the morning -- and from key various points back to the transit terminals during the evening rush. So-called "brand ambassadors" at each locale will help manage the flow of cab riders and collect the fares.

The ice cream promo, set for June 23, will feature four Verizon Wireless-wrapped trucks at high-traffic locations in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens during the lunch hour. Branded napkins with additional prepaid details will be dispensed with the treats.

The cab and ice-cream tactics are supporting a broader New York-area campaign dominated by print and out-of-home advertising including subway, bus and bus shelter ads, along with wild postings and digital signage. The special events also will be promoted in radio and newspaper ads. The company kicked off a national TV campaign for its prepaid plans on May 26. The branding theme for the entire campaign is "99 cents does more."

Steve Ohler, group creative director at McCann in New York, said the campaign theme was derived from the fact that with the Verizon prepaid plan "you only have to pay for the days you actually use your phone and all your calls to any of the 80 million other Verizon customers are free. That's why 99 cents does more. I think we were able to find some fun ways to bring that value to life for our fellow New Yorkers."

According to Cohen, the client views the taxi and ice cream stunts as a "pilot program" that could lead to additional events in New York and other cities after it reviews the results. "Everybody is feeling the squeeze" of the recession, said Cohen, adding that the campaign's success will be based on sales. "We expect to move the needle in New York," he said.

Source: Adweek.com

Women to Watch 2009: Jacki Kelley

11:24:15 PM

Advertising Age

Jacki Kelley

President-North America, Universal McCann

By Michael Bush
Published: June 01, 2009

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- In her first foray into the agency world, Jacki Kelley has certainly jumped into the deep end of the pool. Not only is Ms. Kelley -- who took on the newly created role of president of North America for Interpublic Group of Cos.' Universal McCann on May 1 -- charged with giving a voice to an agency that has been near silent on the new-business front, she will also serve as the face for agency CEO Matt Seiler's vision of establishing an earlier and more strategic and collaborative relationship between media agencies and media owners.

Mr. Seiler said he chose Ms. Kelley -- who has more than 20 years of experience at media companies such as USA Today, Yahoo and, most recently, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, where she was exec VP-media sales -- to lead this ambitious effort because of her lack of agency experience.

"It's great to have people who don't come from our side," Mr. Seiler said. "They don't know what isn't possible, so they'll push forward trying to accomplish what everyone else might think is impossible."

Ms. Kelley, who will oversee planning and buying across all channels, business development and key North American accounts, knows adjusting to agency life will entail learning on the fly, but for her that's an upside. "I enjoy a very fast pace and variety in what I do, and that has been fulfilled for me in spades here already," Ms. Kelley said.

And she's not stressing over the numerous tasks she has before her.

"I don't internalize it as pressure," she said. "I see it as a tremendous privilege and opportunity. I think [reinventing] that relationship between media owner and agency is an important transition and critical solution for us as an industry."

In fact, having a shot at establishing better relations between the two was a challenge the 42-year-old had been looking to tackle for quite some time. In her initial meeting with Mr. Seiler, she told him she had been waiting her entire career for someone at an agency to propose bridging that gap.

And while she's been on the job only a short time, Ms. Kelley said the clients and media owners she has spoken to have been "very receptive" to the idea.

"The challenge for us," she said, "is how do we operationalize and execute this consistently?"

Searching For The New Heart Of Madison Avenue

11:24:15 PM

MediaPostNews
Online Media Daily

Searching For The New Heart Of Madison Avenue, Interpublic Thinks It's Closer To Wall Street

Joe Mandese, Jun 01, 2009 09:16 AM

Interpublic finally went public with its new digital media trading system, officially joining an expanding field of big agency holding companies that are trying to become Madison Avenue's equivalent of Wall Street's investment banking firms. Interpublic said the new system, dubbed Cadreon, initially will make a marketplace around online display, online video and mobile media buys, but would eventually be expanded to include social media, digital out-of-home media, emerging digital TV platforms, and ultimate, all forms of media that can be transacted digitally. Significantly, Interpublic executives said Cadreon will accelerate the shift from traditional approaches for planning and buying media to a new era of "audience planning and buying across media channels."

Cadreon, which has been operating in beta for about nine months, follows other big agencies that have created systems for trading digital media the way Wall Street's electronic exchanges do. In fact, Madison Avenue's new systems sit on top of and work with a wide range of exchanges, aggregators and broad-based and vertical advertising networks that have grown organically in the online display advertising marketplace, and which have become a major source of transacting the bulk of so-called "non-premium" advertising that goes unsold by the sales organizations of online publishers. With "seats" on the various exchanges, and utilizing sophisticated tools, technologies, and proprietary algorithms, the new agency trading systems seek to leverage the burgeoning marketplace on behalf of advertisers, re-aggregating audiences to match the profiles and targeting needs of their brands, and ensuring that the right advertising messages are served to the right consumers at the right time.

Last November, during a keynote at MediaPost's OMMA Ad Nets conference in New York, then Havas Digital CEO Don Epperson laid out a similar vision for Havas' new Adnetik system, which Epperson said enables the agency to create "virtual brand networks" by mixing and matching audiences tailored for the needs of specific brands.

"We're starting to think of our job at agencies almost as audience aggregators vs. media planners," Epperson, who has since left Havas, told the OMMA conference attendees.

Other agencies have been following a similar route. MDC Partners' Media Kitchen has spun off Varick Media Management, which founder and president Darren Herman likens to a "Wall Street hedge fund" utilizing technology to make real-time investment decisions to build "portfolios" of audiences for advertisers and brands working across online audience exchanges and networks.

Other big agencies, including WPP and Publicis have indicated that they have similar systems, but so far have been less vocal about how they work, who they are working with, and how they are differentiated from others in the marketplace.

The Interpublic team, meanwhile, claims Cadreon is clearly differentiated from others in the field for several reasons including its mix of technology, algorithms, and people, and its plan to eventually transact, not just online inventory, but all media via the system.

One thing Cadreon will not do, says Brendan Moorcroft senior vice president-director global digital strategy at Interpublic's Universal McCann unit, is "arbitrage," a Wall Street term for making a market on the price differences created by simultaneously buying and selling equities and commodities.

Other agencies have alluded that they might seek to make a market around the buying and selling for online inventory by dynamically mixing and matching audience inventory across their mix of clients based on real-time market fluctuations.

"We're not in the arbitrage game," says Quentin George, chief digital officer of Interpublic's Mediabrands unit, which has overseen the creation and management of Cadreon. Instead, George says Interpublic's various media agencies will utilize the system to create proprietary algorithms that will dynamically aggregate and buy audiences for specific clients.

Another key differentiator, according to the Interpublic executives, is that Cadreon does not "pre-buy" inventory, or hedge against the future, potential needs of clients. Instead, the Interpublic executives say Cadreon procures inventory dynamically, and only when actually needed for a specific brand's audience delivery needs. By doing that way, they said they can match the advertising campaign or message with the best possible audience exposure in real time.

Interpublic's George says Cadreon won't replace the "face-to-face" negotiations that Interpublic agencies conduct with the media on behalf of their clients, but he says it will enable them to focus on things that enhance the value of media for the brands, such as branded content integration, sponsorships, and other concepts that require creativity and human interaction.

Interpublic claims to have already processed 55 campaigns via Cadreon, and says it is fully operational in the U.S. and will be rolled out to overseas markets soon.

Put Ad on Web. Count Clicks. Revise.

11:24:15 PM

The New York Times

Put Ad on Web. Count Clicks. Revise.

May 31, 2009

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

ON a recent Thursday, Darren Herman, the president of Varick Media Management, was sequestered in his SoHo office. He wasn’t scrutinizing a television ad or images from a photo shoot. He was combing through graphs and Excel spreadsheets.

Mr. Herman had run 27 ads on the Web for his client Vespa, the scooter company. Some were rectangular, some square. And the text varied: One tagline said, “Smart looks. Smarter purchase,” and displayed a $0 down, 0 percent interest offer. Another read, “Pure fun. And function,” and promoted a free T-shirt.

Vespa’s goal was to find out whether a financial offer would attract customers, and Mr. Herman’s data concluded that it did. The $0 down offer attracted 71 percent more responses from one group of Web surfers than the average of all the Vespa ads, while the T-shirt offer drew 29 percent fewer. And Mr. Herman didn’t just compare the messages in the ads — he also looked at the sites where they ran, when they ran and what groups of people responded.

From the “Mad Men” era until now, advertising has been about a catchy tagline, an arresting image, the Big Idea. But Mr. Herman and his competitors are bringing some Wall Street-like analysis to Madison Avenue, exploiting the huge amounts of data produced by the Internet to adjust strategy almost instantly.

“It’s putting numbers to an industry that never had numbers before,” says Mr. Herman, 27, who started and sold three media and technology companies before founding Varick last summer. “It’s nice to be able to tell your brand manager or the chief marketing officer which audience is interacting with the unit, what time of day, what day of the week, and what the response is on certain types of offers. Before, nobody could really tell you that.”

This approach turns marketing “upside down,” says Ron Proleika, the vice president of marketing communications at Windstream Communications, an Internet service provider and a client of Mr. Herman’s. “It forces marketers to stay on their toes and think of thousands of small great ideas instead of one great big one."

Major advertising holding companies like WPP, the Publicis Groupe, Havas, MDC Partners and the Interpublic Group are starting data practices, hoping to latch onto what is expected to be the fastest-growing category of online advertising in the next five years.

Where the data guys were once an afterthought in a marketing presentation, now they are at the core of the online strategy. What’s more, they can help advertisers save money in traditional media by testing different phrases or images online to see what works before producing an expensive television commercial or magazine ad. Who attracts more clicks in a grape juice ad, for example — the blond girl or the brown-haired boy?

The shift to data-based campaigns is forcing marketers to learn new skills and drawing a new breed of worker to Madison Avenue. While most data executives now in the field came from media backgrounds, they are recruiting Wall Street math geniuses because the job requires hourly adjustments in strategy based on numbers.

Mr. Herman is trying to hire people from Citigroup and Bank of America, and he hopes that the layoffs in the financial industry will help him do it on the cheap.

“It mirrors the financial markets in many ways,” he says, so “that’s where we go."

Still, getting advertising agency employees to rely on data is difficult, agencies say. And as people trained on Wall Street migrate to Madison Avenue, executives anticipate battles between creative types and wonks.

Traditional ad agencies still don’t have budgets that allow for a lot of digital experimentation, Mr. Herman says. He notes that most traditional agencies “make the bulk of their money in print, radio and television.”

So even as this area becomes increasingly technology-driven, old ways of doing business and clients reluctant to embrace radically new approaches mean that the advertising culture won’t change overnight.

“At the end of the day,” Mr. Herman says, “the entire process isn’t digital because our clients aren’t.”

UNTIL the Internet, advertising required heavy research at the front and back ends. Millions of dollars went into television and print ads, so the advertisers had to get the idea right before they produced one. Determining the effectiveness of those ads was hard. It required follow-up surveys and interviews. And once advertisers began a campaign, they were locked into it — they usually booked TV spots four months before the season began, for instance, and even if a show tanked, they couldn’t always abort their plans.

“In the olden days, the consequences of planning were great, so we’d spend nine months before air date” doing research, says Barry Lowenthal, the president of the Media Kitchen, a media planning and buying company that, like Varick, is a unit of MDC Partners. “Then, nine months after we’d been running the ad, we’d finally figure out whether it was working or not.”

Online, though, advertisers get instant measurements and can make instant changes to a media plan.

Varick and its handful of competitors cement their strategies around a system called exchanges, a mechanism that helps online publishers like NBC.com or Yahoo.com sell ad space. While publishers have some ad space no company would bid on in advance — few advertisers would book a random Yahoo mail page, for instance — publishers still want to show an ad when someone loads that page. So the publishers let an ad exchange like Right Media, from Yahoo, or DoubleClick Advertising Exchange, from Google, sell that space instantly, through an electronic auction, and get a cut of sales.

Such random, seemingly unwanted space could be virtually worthless. But because ad agencies can now use multiple sources to gather very specific demographic data about visitors, such space gains value and can be brokered on an exchange.

Among the sources agencies rely on for data-mining is information gathered from other sites. Imagine that every time someone entered a store while shopping, she received a stamp on her hand. By the time she got to Macy’s, the clerk could see she had visited Williams-Sonoma and Home Depot and could direct her to housewares. A similar principle is followed online.

When someone visits a site like Expedia or Autobytel.com, that site captures valuable information: Someone is a first-class traveler, for instance, or shopping for a hybrid car. Those sites have deals with data companies, like BlueKai and eXelate, to place a so-called cookie — a small text file — on that visitor’s hard drive, indicating those preferences. An advertiser like Varick bids on those cookies, instructing an exchange that it will pay a certain amount for an ad when a certain cookie is for sale.

Other companies, like Media6Degrees and 33Across, analyze the world of social media, using cookies and interaction data to find “lookalike” groups among friends on Facebook, Flickr or other social sites. Their theory is that friends share values and are likely to respond to similar marketing messages.

Finally, companies can add cookies for anyone who visits pages on their sites — if someone gets to the checkout page, then abandons his shopping cart, the company will probably pay lots of money to advertise to him again.

This combination — real-time data and ad exchanges — has monetized what was once considered throwaway space online. ThinkEquity, a research firm, estimated that advertising based around Web publishers’ extra space brought in $4.1 billion in 2008, up 32 percent from 2007, and it expects it to be the highest-growth segment of the online advertising market between now and 2013, outpacing even search. (It is still a small part, however, of what ZenithOptimedia, a media agency, estimates to be the overall $487 billion advertising market.)

All this tracking has raised privacy concerns. Some privacy advocates have asked Congress and the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the issue, seeking clear policies about sensitive data, more information on the way companies are tracking consumers and options for consumers to avoid online tracking.

So far, the commission has recommended that the industry police itself. But Jon Leibowitz, one of the commissioners, warned in February that the industry needed to do a better job or face new laws and regulations.

Without much regulation, says Michael Brunick, vice president and media technology director for Cadreon, a competitor of Varick’s, “the data game right now is a little bit of the Wild West.”

WITH so much information to trade on, several advertising firms are creating their own data-based practices.

“We have, over the last year or so, gotten more and more interested in the ways that you can use data to make advertising more effective online,” says Matt Greitzer, the vice president of search marketing and auction-based media at Razorfish, which is building its exchange group.

In addition to what an ad should say, and where and when it should run, advertisers have to figure out how much each ad, or “impression,” is worth. The data helps them do that. “You’re making, in some cases, real-time decisions about how much to pay for a specific impression,” Mr. Greitzer says.

In a simple example, if an advertiser knew that his ads attracted more clicks on profiles.yahoo.com than on movies.yahoo.com, he would pay more when space was auctioned for the first site.

Edward Montes, the managing director for North America at Havas Digital, who oversees its exchange group, says that his data analysts are “basically looking for anything that affects performance — any time they find variance in the matter of how the media performs, that’s what they go in and exploit, and that’s what the exchanges are perfectly set up to do.”

As data executives continue to build on their research, this arena could resemble Wall Street even more: yield managers could hedge their purchases, buy futures to lock in prices and use other trading strategies. And this type of sophisticated testing and trading will require changes in clients’ attitudes.

Mediabrands, a unit of the Interpublic Group, has been quietly running a data practice called Cadreon for nine months that it soon plans to roll out more publicly. In addition to buying standard Web site ad space, Cadreon also buys mobile advertising, online video slots and, soon, spots on digital billboards and other new media.

Traditionally, marketers allocate certain amounts of money for each medium. Quentin George, the interim chief executive of Cadreon and the chief digital officer of Mediabrands, says Cadreon instead would base its strategy on the audience, not the medium.

For a campaign it’s now running for a technology client, Cadreon bought data on visitors to Web sites of the client’s competitors. It divided them into groups that its client already used to segment existing customers offline — like new parents, gamers or designers.

By examining clicks and other data, Cadreon determined the demographic profile of groups that were most interested in the ads. In this particular campaign, new parents responded at high rates so Cadreon emphasized pitching ads online to that group.

As more ads are bought and sold through exchanges, it could transform the ad marketplace. “It is foreseeable that you can go into the system, select an audience and not know whether you are ultimately buying” a cellphone ad or a video ad on a Web site like Hulu, Mr. George says. “That’s a very, very big change.

IPG Unveils Cadreon Digital Ad Network

11:24:15 PM

Mediaweek

IPG Unveils Cadreon Digital Ad Network

Unit is geared to purchase multiple forms of digital advertising

May 30, 2009

-By Steve McClellan, Adweek

After nine months of testing campaign executions, Interpublic Group's Mediabrands will unveil on Monday a new ad network called Cadreon. It is geared to purchase multiple forms of digital advertising such as online video, mobile, social networks and digital out-of-home, among others.

Cadreon is first launching in the U.S. and will roll out in key markets in Europe, the Middle East and Africa by year's end, said Quentin George, chief digital officer at Mediabrands. George is overseeing the project and also serving as the network's interim CEO while he searches for an exec to take on the job full time.

The plan is to use the new network to capture as much client digital business -- both creative duties and media chores -- as possible, said George. He noted that currently about 20 percent of client digital budgets in the U.S. are earmarked for networks, while the comparable figure in EMEA markets is roughly 70 percent.

In addition to buying, Cadreon will provide real-time dynamic ad creation to help clients build and serve units on the fly. The system utilizes a host of different parameters, tailoring both creative content and messaging to specific client audience profiles.

"The burden of proof is on us" to demonstrate the network's superiority compared to competitors, George said.

To avoid conflicts, the network is being set up as a separate company with a distinct P&L under the Mediabrands roof.

What the new network won't do is package client data for group buys or acquire inventory directly from publishers for resale to clients, said George.

The network system is designed to eliminate waste by focusing on target audiences, not just sites or inventory. "In every instance, the algorithms, data and all buying activity will only happen for one client at a time, so there is no pollution of your algorithm by someone else's buy," said George.

George has been working primarily with Microsoft during the test phase. So far, the client seems pleased. "The idea of buying audiences and not inventory is a new way of operating and has delivered us great results," said Bill Capodanno, director of customer experience architecture at Microsoft, in a statement.

"Data is key," said George, and the more data the client shares "the more narrowly we can define the audience. Other networks are geared toward delivering yield for publishers. The only thing we care about is performance for the advertiser."

George said the network would be hiring staffers with nontraditional backgrounds: "We're recruiting people from Wall Street and other areas because what we are creating is closer to investment and portfolio management than it is to traditional media buying."

Plans call for the network to have a staff of 30 by year's end, but that could change depending on the amount of client buy-in, George said.

Right now, nine staffers are on board, including Nicole Craine, Cadreon's vp, operations, who George hired from Organic where Craine held a similar role. (George was with Organic before joining IPG in 2006 and brought Craine aboard there as well.)

To one degree or another, the other holding companies have launched or intend to launch proprietary ad networks. Publicis Groupe is developing the Audience on Demand network under VivaKi. WPP Group has a network in 24/7 Real Media. And prior to its purchase by Microsoft, Razorfish's parent company aQuantive operated the DrivePM network. --additional reporting by Brian Morrissey

UM Netherlands Agency of the Year

11:24:15 PM

BMW's U.S. Media Travels to UM

11:24:15 PM

Adweek.com

GSD&M, which had been adding more creative work from automaker of late, parts with the media business

May 28, 2009

-By Steve McClellan

NEW YORK BMW has selected Interpublic Group's Universal McCann here to handle media chores after a review, the client has confirmed.

The other finalist was the incumbent, Omnicom Group's GSD&M Idea City in Austin, Texas.

The assignment includes national media duties for the Woodcliff Lake, N.J., carmaker and some dealer group chores.

All told, the work moving to UM is worth about $200 million, according to sources. BMW spent $150 million on domestic ads in 2008, roughly in line with the previous year's spending, per Nielsen.

"We are thrilled to have UM onboard as our new media buying and planning partner," said Jack Pitney, vice president of marketing, BMW of North America. "The agency has a solid reputation for excellence, and we look forward to a very productive relationship."

Commenting on the win, UM worldwide CEO Matt Seiler said: "It's an absolute privilege to work on a brand with the stature of BMW and a personal thrill for me to work on it twice and being able to share that experience with every one at UM." Earlier in his career at Ammirati & Puris, Seiler worked on the account when it was parked at that agency, which came up with the iconic "Ultimate driving machine" line for the brand.

The client confirmed the media review in September and by November had winnowed the field of contenders down to five. Beside the two finalists, that mix included independents Horizon Media and Targetcast:TCM and Aegis Group's Carat.

GSD&M is the lead national creative agency for BMW. Those chores were not part of just concluded media review.

Earlier this month, the shop expanded its creative BMW assignment, with the automaker naming the shop its lead global agency for duties previously shared among various resources. BMW's first international work via GSD&M will use the central theme "Joy." It will be adapted across all media worldwide including the Internet, car shows and events, the client said today.

That work rolls out in Europe this summer and hits the U.S. in early 2010. The global assignment came just a week after the client unveiled a new creative campaign dubbed "Expression of joy" to help launch its Z4 Roadster.

The media competition was overseen by Manuel Reyes of Cortex Consulting Group in Ocala, Fla., an affiliate of London-based consultancy AuditStar.

On the positive side for GSD&M, in addition to adding the global creative work from BMW, the agency won Ace Hardware's $40 million-plus ad business yesterday.

BMW Finally Picks Media Agency for Dealer Groups: Universal McCann

11:24:15 PM

AdAge.com

BMW Finally Picks Media Agency for Dealer Groups: Universal McCann

Win Over GSD&M Idea City Helps End Long New-Business Drought

Posted by Jean Halliday on 05.28.09 @ 04:18 PM

DETROIT (AdAge.com) -- BMW of North America tapped Universal McCann, New York, as the media planner and buyer for its national and regional dealer groups, helping end a long new-business drought for the Interpublic Group-owned agency.

The incumbent, Omnicom Group's GSD&M Idea City, Chicago, was one of two finalists for the account. The agency's media contract with BMW expires at the end of June, when Universal McCann will start handling the business, a BMW spokesman told Advertising Age.

BMW started the review last September and narrowed the list of four finalists to two months ago. The decision took so long because it was trying to get the most advantageous financial deal amid the global auto industry's worst slump in decades, according to industry execs close to the situation.

Financial efficiencies were a consideration but not the only one, the BMW spokesman said. "We wanted to make sure whoever had our account has a very good understanding of our brand and how best to talk to people -- that's crucial."

The company said the media review was part of a regular process put in place by its parent company, Germany's BMW AG, "designed to maximize efficiencies and increase the effectiveness of BMW's media-planning and -buying spend worldwide." The automaker spends some $150 million in U.S. measured media annually.

Jack Pitney, VP-marketing of BMW in North America, said Universal McCann "has a solid reputation for excellence, and we look forward to a very productive relationship."

BMW's other agencies
GSD&M, Austin, Texas, which won BMW's creative account in fall 2005 and was awarded the media account without a review a few months later, will keep the brand's national creative account. Two weeks ago, the agency won a jump ball to be BMW's lead global creative agency (and this week was awarded the creative account of retailer Ace Hardware as well).

WPP's Grey West, San Francisco, won BMW's regional-dealer-group creative account last fall.

For Universal McCann, the win is a coup. With no major news coming out of the agency other than layoffs -- the agency laid off 8% of its U.S. staff in March -- and the hiring of Jacki Kelley as president of its North American division, this win is significant on two levels. First, it marks the first major new business for the agency since Matt Seiler took over as global CEO last July. And second, the win -- combined with a recent $40 million Dyson account win earlier this month, according to executives close to the matter -- signals that the agency may finally be getting itself on track.

~ ~ ~
Michael Bush contributed to this report.

4As Task Force Tackles Interact Ads, Data Ownership

11:24:15 PM

MediaPostNews - Media DailyNews

4As Task Force Tackles Interactive Ads, Data Ownership

(UM's David Cohen mentioned)

David Goetzl, Mar 04, 2009 05:59 PM

NEW ORLEANS -- A task force under the aegis of the American Association of Advertising Agencies and the Interactive Advertising Bureau that examined how to alter business practices for interactive advertising failed to come to an agreement on who owns performance data generated from online campaigns. It was not a surprise--given GroupM's recent push to ensure campaign data is the exclusive property of the advertiser and the agency. But it highlights how difficult it may be to reach consensus on how the industry should overhaul the way it does business.

Formed in 2007, the task force is part of the 4As "Project Reinvention" initiative, which looks to upgrade practices in all media, starting with the interactive and spot TV areas. Trade associations, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Television Bureau of Advertising are key players in their respective sectors.

""It's going to be bloody and ugly," IAB chief Randall Rothenberg quipped about the looming industry battle over data ownership, implying that it would emerge as a central conflict on Madison Avenue. However, he said the online industry is agreeing to changes in practice. Rothenberg said the two sides have a mutual interest and some common goals.

In addition to the data-ownership issue, the interactive group failed to agree on recommendations for how the industry should handle aspects of makegoods, and how to deal with creative that is submitted late. The task force is searching for ways for the industry to cut costs; late creative is a drain on resources.

Rothenberg spoke on a panel at the 4As annual media conference Wednesday in New Orleans, where the recommendations--or lack thereof--were discussed. GroupM chief Irwin Gotlieb also participated.

Interactive task force members include Universal McCann executive David Cohen and CBS Interactive's Zack Rogers, along with many other top buyers and sellers.

The separate task force seeking changes in the spot TV arena appears to have had a far easier time reaching agreement on what must be done. As expected, the group urged the industry to drop its decades-old negotiating currency of a cost-per-point metric and move to a cost-per-thousand--which would put it in line with other media from network TV to newspapers.

Back in the interactive area, that business ironically continues to struggle to find agreed-upon standards, which would allow it to conduct transactions via electronic systems. The result of using email and faxes--as it is in spot TV--is a backlog of paperwork. That leads to massive time spent manually entering data, which can cause numerous errors.

The interactive task force has recommended standard forms for requests for proposal (RFPs), insertion orders and invoices, among other actions, to be placed within an e-business format. And a beta development process is using them, with publishers and system vendors such as Mediabank, Harris Corp. and DoubleClick participating.

One possible benefit: allowing for changes to be made more easily to a campaign while it is still running. Another: reducing discrepancies where a buyer and seller may disagree on whether ads that were purchased actually ran. If there is disagreement, settling on makegoods can take weeks.

In the spot business, its task force recommendation to move to CPMs as currency is viewed as a way to jump-start cross-platform deal-making, where a buyer can purchase on-air spots, as well as banners on a station Web site, in one fell swoop. Buyers could also compare the value of a spot buy with other media more easily, the task force believes.

Similar to the interactive group, the spot task force recommended that the industry adopt a system where the performance of a buy can be monitored once it is up and running. Makegoods can be doled out without waiting weeks.

Spot TV task force members include Starcom's Kevin Gallagher and Hearst-Argyle's Kathleen Keefe, along with TVB executive Abby Auerbach.

Project reinvention has its roots in comments that GroupM's Gotlieb made in late 2006, when he urged the industry to update its business practices on the grounds that its very survival is at stake. On Wednesday, he took that concern to another level, saying changes are more crucial now in a struggling economy. "We really no longer have the luxury of debating some of these issues," he said. "We have to deal with them and get on with it."

He said the troubled economy actually offers a "silver lining," since it could lead to swifter overhauls.

The mild-mannered Gotlieb caused a stir on the panel when he took a swipe at the trade publication Advertising Age. After the IAB's Rothenberg cited an Ad Age editorial this week raising questions about the ad industry's trade associations, Gotlieb said the problem isn't with the trade associations, but with the trade magazine.

"I wouldn't take what that particular trade magazine said too personally, Randy," Gotlieb told his fellow panelist, then added: "I would suspect that their same companies would be asking the same questions about their ROI. They're just trying to pass on the pain."

Gotlieb went on to say that all the trade associations play a very important role in working out conflicts, facilitating industry reinvention, and demonstrating the ROI and benefits of their media.

"As someone who sits on my side of the fence, we wouldn't have it any other way," Gotlieb said, receiving an ovation.

Separately, Rothenberg stridently warned online publishers and agencies that Washington is watching, and urged action. The federal and state governments are "looking for us to protect privacy rights ... in interactive media," he said. He urged industry members to join the six trade associations in creating "an effective and meaningful self-regulatory practice."

Gotlieb said that ensuring privacy is smart business, and protecting it is important for clients: "We can't do the jobs we need to do for our clients if we don't serve the interests of those who protect privacy."

TVB chief Chris Rohrs, who joined Rothenberg and Gotlieb on the panel, said reinventing business practices in the spot business just "comes down to customer service." Agreeing with Gotlieb, he said it's more crucial now than ever.

But Rohrs said that recommendations such as changing the currency and looking for stations to halt preemptions if they can sell inventory for higher rates are "worthwhile and important advances, but they cannot succeed without a robust e-business solution." In other words, changes to how deal-making is done are crucial, but finding the right trading systems to facilitate the negotiations and stewardship of a buy is equally critical.

Smart Phone Users Taking Action on Ads

11:24:15 PM

Mediaweek.com

Smart Phone Users Taking Action on Ads

April 28, 2009

-By Steve McClellan, Adweek

More than a third of high-use smart phone users (defined as those who download mobile content from the Web at least once at day or close to it) are taking action on mobile advertisements, according to the results of a new research study on smart phone usage patterns.

Interpublic Group's Universal McCann, with support from research firm Questus, conducted the study earlier this year. It was sponsored by Platform-A, a unit of Time Warner's AOL.

The study found that smart phone users are clicking on ads (53 percent), requesting more information or a coupon (35 percent) and making purchases via their handsets (24 percent).

Detailed findings of the study will be presented at the OMMA Mobile Conference in New York on April 29.

"The smart phone is a great convenience for many Americans, enabling them to access Internet content anywhere and anytime," said Stuart Rodnick, director of strategic insights at Platform-A.

The study reports Web-enabled devices have helped users to consume media throughout their daily routine, with 82 percent of respondents reporting that they use mobile devices at work and 81 percent saying they use them while shopping.

The mobile Web has also become a ritual with commuters, who use it as part of their workday commute. Currently, nearly one of every seven minutes of media consumption takes place on a mobile device, per the study, and six of every 10 consumers expect their mobile Internet usage to increase significantly over the next two years.

"Much has changed in two years," said Graeme Hutton, director of consumer insights at UM, in a statement. "Our 2007 global mobile study demonstrated just how much the U.S. lagged behind other developing nations. Now mobile is less about 'wireless online' and more about being a highly personal, customized medium. Smart phone users are reaching for their devices to help answer unmet needs. Services that don't have dedicated mobile formats are going to miss out on this huge and continual media consumption shift."

The study polled 1,800 participants online who frequently surf the Web with their mobile devices. In addition, smaller panel samples kept daily usage diaries and video logs.

Sponsor Platform-A owns Third Screen Media, a mobile ad-serving platform and network that enables advertising on mobile devices.

UM said it would use data compiled from the study to provide proprietary insights for the media agency's clients on a case-by-case basis.

UM wins at the Festival of Media

11:24:15 PM

UM has won the “Best Use of Search” award at the Festival of Media Awards for our work on Microsoft Windows OneCare Live.

UM Australia also received special mention for their work on Aussie Lamb, which was an amazing collaborative media partnership.

Media Agencies Still Figuring Out Multiplatform Buys, Social Media

11:24:15 PM

AdAge.com

Media Agencies Still Figuring Out Multiplatform Buys, Social Media

But Top Managers Say Progress Is Being Made on Both Fronts

by Michael Bush

Published: April 20, 2009

VALENCIA (AdAge.com) -- The tenuous relationship between media agencies and media owners reared its head during the day's last session at the 2009 Festival of Media as the heads of some of the largest media agencies gathered here discussed how everything from the recession to social media has affected their operations.

During the "Global CEO Spotlight" panel, the moderator, Advertising Age Editor Jonah Bloom, playing the role of a media owner, took the agencies to task for complicating buys due to their complex internal structure. "We came with a multiplatform [ad buy] and it was an integrated-marketing solution. And then the [agency's] TV guy didn't want to know about parts of it, or he wasn't talking to the digital guy and the digital guy doesn't even know who lives in the TV department." His monologue drew applause from the media owners in the audience.

Sharing talent
Nick Brien, president-CEO of Interpublic Group of Cos.' Mediabrands, said media agencies and media owners need to take part in sharing talent across their organizations to reduce the miscommunication. He said Interpublic's Universal McCann has taken steps to bridge the gap between agency and owner by bringing in Jacki Kelley, formerly of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, to run the agency's North American division.

More 2009 Festival of Media Coverage:

Havas CEO Sees At Least Two More Years of Grey Skies
Fernando Rodes Vila Calls for Focus on Green Initiatives in Meantime

Unilever Wins Two Awards for Axe, Dove Media Campaigns
OMD, MediaCom Also Big Agency-Side Winners at Festival of Media

"That was not by chance but by design," Mr. Brien said. "Universal McCann has a commitment to kick-start the focus on the assets and capabilities of media owners in a more strategic way. Our business comes down to three things: people, process and technology. We need smarter, different people trained differently. ... So by design we are looking at all of our businesses and asking, 'How can we formally establish relationships with our media owner brethren?'"

The recession has obviously caused agencies to step back and assess their internal structures as well. Jack Klues, managing partner at Publicis Groupe's Vivaki, said his agency often has two different groups doing the same type of work and is looking for ways to "standardize and homogenize" that process to eliminate those redundancies.

"The recession has caused us to focus on what's important to clients and the organization and what isn't," Mr. Klues said. "That fosters conversation between the two of us and helps determine what work can be eliminated. We're in a race to standardize things."

Dominic Proctor, CEO of WPP's Mindshare Worldwide, said other types of standardization could be taking place across media agencies, such as the "way we transact things. These are the growing pains of the industry that were happening anyway but the recession has sped it up."

Social media has also made an impact on media agencies.

Can't afford to, can't afford not to
"The number of people and hours we invest in [social media] is huge," Mainardo de Nardis, the new global CEO of Omnicom Group's OMD Global, said. "The revenue is small but we can't afford not to do it but can't afford to do it. There's an imbalance and we have to find a way to rebalance it."

The other hot-button topic always on the minds of media agency folk -- margins -- was also discussed.

Mr. Brien said if media agencies can get to a level of accountability and have a "candid" opportunity to examine all elements of a campaign and determine the contribution the agency made, "why is not reasonable and certainly possible to share in the commercial upside? That's one of the biggest places we can go."

He said the recession has forced his clients further down the sales funnel, as they have become more focused on the point of purchase by trying to determine how customers are behaving when they are in the store.

"[Clients'] equity is strong and can afford to dial down at least 50% [of ad spending] for the next 12 months on the brand as they get through this challenge," he said. "It's a mix change, it's not about spending less."

But what will the agency world look like on the other side of the recession? Mr. de Nardis doesn't believe agencies will come out of this the same way they went in, and one result will be a different array of decision makers. "We will have different players around the table," Mr. de Nardis said.

Universal McCann Changes Media Tactics

11:24:15 PM

Adweek

Universal McCann Changes Media Tactics

Agency's new hire shows stronger commitment to media-owner ties

April 13, 2009

-By Steve McClellan

NEW YORK In the latest sign that Matt Seiler, global CEO of Universal McCann, is redefining the relationship the agency forges with media owners, he has hired Jacki Kelley -- whose career spans two decades on the sales and marketing side of the media business -- as the shop's North America president.

Seiler said he had talked with several candidates at media shops and other agencies about the newly created post, but earlier this year had an "aha" moment when "I realized I'd been looking in the wrong places" for an executive he hoped would transform UM's dealings with sellers. He then added media sellers to his list of candidates.

Throughout the industry, said Seiler, buyer-seller relationships lack depth and focus too much on the final transaction. Instead, he believes the ties have to be forged "early in the planning process to create strategic connections to what the client's business objectives are and using the total resources of the media owners to achieve that."

The hire is the latest move Seiler has taken to reshape the Interpublic Group agency, which he joined eight months ago. And there's more to come: in the following weeks, UM will appoint a handful of North American executives who will serve as liaisons to specific media companies with a mandate to forge deeper, more meaningful ties.

Kelley spent 18 years in various functions at Gannett's USA Today, including circulation and advertising posts at both domestic and international operations before joining Yahoo in 2006 as svp, advertising, just as digital devices and services were gaining critical mass with consumers. In 2007, she joined Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia as evp, media sales, where she led the creation of an integrated media team.

Kelley said she jumped to the buy side because she's interested in the opportunity to transform UM's relationship with sellers. She added that Seiler's take "is in line with the approach I've advocated on the media side, which is to focus on the audience and change the conversation from one about planning and buying to one of strategy, insight and the creation of shared assets." While that sounds fairly straightforward, she said, "it's more uncommon than any of us would like."

And agencies need to focus on audience, she said, or they might find themselves on the outside looking in. "Media companies have bypassed agencies in order to get to clients and execute on a more strategic level," Kelley said. "It's how media owners want to engage."

Seiler said that once the agency's new structure for interacting with media companies is finalized in North America, he hopes to export it to other parts of the world. While sellers across the globe have different setups, with some adjustments, he said, "I think it is template-able."

Kelley is expected to start at UM in late April or early May.

Forebes.Com Interview: Matt Seiler

11:24:15 PM

Interview: Matt Seiler, Global CEO, Universal McCann: Current Ad-Sales System Is 'Ridiculous'

Staci D. Kramer 04.13.09, 11:30 AM ET

Beyond the buzz about TV Everywhere or any of the options being tossed around for making programming available across platforms, lies a simple economic reality: in order to make any of it work, advertisers will have to pay for a viewer’s attention regardless of the platform. That would mean a dramatic shift from a world where value is based on the screen being viewed to a unified theory of advertising. As The Cable Show concluded in Washington, D.C., late last week, I asked Matt Seiler, the global chief executive of Interpublic’s Universal McCann, what it would take to truly sell ads across platforms. Seiler, who took that job last August and has since reorganized the ad agency, bluntly listed the current buying system, including the upfronts, as an obstacle holding everyone back: “It’s ridiculous. It is not consumer oriented. It’s not client oriented. It’s antiquated-industry oriented.” Edited excerpts from our conversation follow:

Staci D. Kramer: You talked a little bit about how to get to a unified audience, a unified sell. You’re interested in accelerating things. What actually has to happen?

Matt Seiler: That’s such a great question. I want to solve for an industry issue but as UM, I can’t really change the entire market dynamics. We’re creating a new division within our organization that gets to the media owners much, much, much earlier in the process than what typically happens. The way that it usually works is there’s a buyer that works with the sales person around a specific medium late in the process so planners and clients have decided what the target audience is going to be and what the media mix is going to be, and too often it’s what the media mix was last year. ... All of that stuff is predetermined so how much can we really do things differently if there are that many givens?

What we’re trying to do is get to the media owner really early in the process, not necessarily the sales person, to say here’s what we’re looking to accomplish on behalf of our client, here’s what the business objective is and here specifically is the target audience and everything that we know about them. … And then allow the media owner the time to come back to us and say, ‘Here’s what’s coming out of my studio, here’s what I’ve got in branded content avails in television, whether that’s broadcast or cable. Here’s what my outdoor locations are.’ If I do a good enough job telling you who my consumer is, talk to me about how you can aggregate all of those resources upon my consumer’s behalf—and then we’ll get into what does it cost and how much of that is stuff that I already have commitments for and how much is it that I don’t already have commitments for. That’s my desire and I want to do that right this second. I’ve got some clients coming along with my right now. I can’t say who. We’re close.

That’s the ideal reality and we’re available to do that today. Cut to what we’re actually doing today: there is the cable upfront and it is a seller’s market that determines how much cable you need to commit to now before you even know what your business objectives are or what your communications spend is. And then you scurry on over to the broadcasters, and you go to their upfront to get you to commit to, as (CBS chief executive) Les Moonves says, even more money for the same sh*t that has fewer people watching it. I’m not sure how that works. And then you go over to another segment and each of those discussions involves a different set of people and a different pre-determined amount of money. It’s ridiculous. It is not consumer oriented, it’s not client oriented. It’s antiquated-industry oriented.

What I’d like to have happen is have all of us on the buying side agree that we’re just not going to do this anymore, that having a system that was set up for U.S. automotives as they launched new models in the fall doesn’t really make sense any more. There barely are U.S. automotives, never mind models that ought to be determining the entire way that we buy. But we as an industry are not quite ready to lock arms because there are basis points that we’re afraid of losing, commitments we’re afraid of losing, there’s all those properties.

Nobody wants to be the one to play Jenga, to pull the little block out and see if the tower will stand.

Because what if we’re wrong.

So is that standing in the way of something like what Jeff Bewkes is talking about with TV Everywhere?

Totally. It’s their big problem because they compensate their people on the silos into which they fall. It’s our problem because the people we have buying fit exactly into those silos. And it’s our clients’ problems because, for the most part, our clients are segmented that way, too. There is their digital person, there is their direct person. They have their own little groups of fiefdoms. We haven’t pushed as far as we need to … I think the consumer isn’t really demanding this stuff yet because the consumer doesn’t really predict the future terribly well so the consumer isn’t saying give me all my programming everywhere I want it all the time. The consumer is saying, ‘I found it over there, so I’ll go there.’

Isn’t there also the issue of which consumer are you programming for? Are you programming for that narrow group that’s the early adopter who knows how to plug in their HDMI—and knows what HDMI is? Or are you dealing with a person who isn’t going to use it until there’s a remote with a text keyboard—and maybe not then?

We are a quick-to-mass society so as we find a way to Twitter, we all find a way to Twitter. Then afterwards we wonder, do I actually care about Twitter? We’re on Facebook because we gotta be on Facebook. Same deal.

I think what will happen is when addressability—and particularly the interactivity of addressability—happens, then you’re going to start doing it and Melanie’s going to find out you’re doing it then I better do it too because you’re doing it. But that hasn’t happened yet. There isn’t this story of how you found your way to interact with your television or how you found a way to get the communications that you most want whenever where ever. We’re almost there.

Is it artificial to have broadcast freely available with ad-support only but then make some cable available only to video subscribers?

It’s confusing as hell, isn’t it?

Is ABC.com’s advertising more valuable to you than ABC on Hulu or ABC on Google or does it matter?

That’s a really tough question to answer. Wherever the audience is most engaged—we all talk about engagement but nobody knows what we mean—but wherever it is that you can find the audience who is most involved with, caring the most about the programming and therefore the advertising that’s attached, that’s going to be of greatest value. Right now, we don’t have a consistent measurement for that—that’s why we all talk about engagement because we can hide behind it—but that’s what we really want to find so if I can find on Hulu or I can find on ABC.com an audience that is paying more attention to my communications, then I’ll pay more for it especially if I can track it.

So tracking is what matters?

Tracking matters a ton. If I’m on dot.com or if I’m on Hulu, I’ve got a much better chance of seeing what they’re doing and who they are and what they’ve done post-my communication, then I do en masse.

If I’m a subscriber who gets TBS or TNT from my cable provider and then I can also get it through TV Everywhere, am I more or less valuable to you than that person who watches ABC on Hulu or online elsewhere? Is there a difference between the broadcast viewer and the cable subscriber online?

The cable subscriber online had the potential to be of greater value because there is more data collected about that audience. Today, is that person more valuable? Not necessarily, because I’m not really getting that data, but it’s there.

So what you really want is if ABC’s going to make that choice or someone else, it’s going to be to somebody who collects that kind of data?

And then serve it up to me in a way I can use.

Universal McCann Taps Kelley as N.A. President

11:24:15 PM

Mediaweek

Universal McCann Taps Kelley As N.A. President

April 13, 2009

-By Steve McClellan, Adweek & Mediaweek

Jacki Kelley’s career spans just over two decades, all of it on the sales and marketing side of the media business. Now, she’s jumping to a media agency, to take the newly created position of North America president at Interpublic Group’s Universal McCann, reporting to Matt Seiler, the shop’s global CEO.

It’s Seiler’s latest move to reshape the agency, which he joined eight months ago, and signals his effort to redefine the agency’s relationships with media owners. There’s more to come: in coming weeks, UM will appoint a handful of North American executives who will serve as liaisons to specific media companies with which they will forge deeper, more meaningful ties.

Seiler said he talked with several candidates at other media agencies about the new post but earlier this year had an “aha” moment when “I realized I’d been looking in the wrong places” for an executive he hoped would transform UM’s dealings with sellers.

He explained that he believes buyer-seller relationships lack depth and focus too much on the final transaction. Instead, he says ties have to be forged “early in the planning process to create strategic connections to what the client’s business objectives are and using the total resources of the media owners to achieve that.”

Enter Kelley, who spent 18 years in various functions at Gannett’s USA Today, including circulation and ad posts at both domestic and international operations before joining Yahoo in 2006 as senior vp of advertising just as digital devices and services were gaining critical mass with consumers. In 2007, she joined Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia as executive vp of media sales where she led the creation of an integrated media team. She will start at UM in late April or early May.

Why jump now to the buy side? Kelley said Seiler’s take “is in line with the approach I’ve advocated on the media side, which is to focus on the audience and change the conversation from one about planning and buying to one of strategy, insight and the creation of shared assets.” While that sounds fairly straightforward, said Kelley, “it’s more uncommon than any of us would like.”

And it’s got to change or agencies could find themselves on the outside looking in, she added. “Media companies have bypassed agencies in order to get to clients and execute on a more strategic level. It’s how media owners want to engage.”

Seiler said he ultimately plans to export this structure for interacting with media to other parts of the world. While sellers across the globe have different set-ups, with some adjustments, “I think it is template-able,” he said.

Give Consumers Reasons to Stick with Your Brand

11:24:15 PM

Advertising Age

Give Consumers Reasons to Stick With Your Brand

Universal McCann Study Finds Categories Vulnerable to Switching

By Michael Bush

Published: April 06, 2009

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- A recent temperature check of consumers' thoughts on the economy and their spending habits reveals that most believe the economy will continue to slide and that personal technology is a necessity most will not give up or reduce spending on.

Universal McCann's Econocurious Consumer Confidence survey, which was conducted in two waves, in November and March, shows that nearly the same number of people said the economy is worse now than it was three months ago (76% in March vs. 78% in November). However, the number of people who said they think the economy will decline even more in the next six months was larger in March (41%) than it was in November (35%).

"I don't think we have seen confidence this low in years, but despite that, people are still loyal to preferred brands in categories that are considered closest to them and their well-being," said Daryl Lee, global president-communications planning and strategy at the Interpublic Group of Cos. agency. "If you're in one of those categories that can provide that to consumers, you will have loyal customers, but you need to keep reminding them of why they should be loyal."

The survey helps shed some light on the factors that drive purchase decisions and which brands consumers plan to continue to buy. In several categories, only about a third of consumers plan to remain brand loyal, and their resolve appears to be wavering. In November, 38% of consumers planned to remain brand loyal when shopping for toiletries, but only 37% still planned to do so in March. The same slight slip can be seen in other categories: skin care (33% in March vs. 35% in November); vitamins (32% in March vs. 34% in November). It does appear that consumers plan to slightly increase brand loyalty to beer, wine and liquor (33% in March vs. 32% in November.)

To the lowest bidder
Items from specific brands that consumers will buy only if they are discounted include groceries (39% in March vs. 37% in November), confectionary and candy (33% in March vs. 31% in November), personal technology (38% in both surveys), home entertainment (39% in March vs. 37% in November), clothing (48% in both surveys) and furniture (36% in March vs. 37% in November). More people in March (33%) than in November (30%) said when it came to over-the-counter medication they would pass on their regular brands for the cheapest deal they could find.

Mr. Lee said Universal McCann's advice to its clients is to behave in a way that inspires trust among consumers, because brand behavior is being scrutinized just as much as brand messaging in this climate.

Mr. Lee said he believes that despite a penny-pinching mind-set, consumers are still looking for reasons to stay with the brands they like. "Brands within the categories consumers are willing to spend in need to be innovative and creative and make consumers feel good about the purchases they have to make," he said.

One of the more interesting findings of the survey was how much consumers view technology as a necessity. Of the 88% of respondents who have the internet in their homes, only 8% (7% in November) plan to cut back on its usage. Of the 82% who have cellphones, only 13% intend to cut back on usage, compared with 9% in November.

Canoe Ventures Ready to Launch

11:24:15 PM

Advertising Age

Canoe Ventures Ready to Launch
(UM's Matt Seiler quoted)

At NCTA: But Are Marketers Ready to Buy Into Cable's Addressable-Advertising Initiative?

by Andrew Hampp

Published: April 03, 2009

WASHINGTON (AdAge.com) -- Now that Canoe Ventures is readying the launch of its first national addressable advertising product, dubbed the Cable Advanced Advertising System, in four to six weeks, just how ready is the industry to start using it? Depends whom you ask.

In a panel at the National Cable and Telecommunications Association's Cable Show in Washington, top cable network executives, distributors and media buyers spoke about the industrywide initiative that has the top six cable operators working in concert with each other to make advertising relevant to TV viewers based on data such as household income, purchasing behavior or demographics.

For the cable networks, Canoe's "creative versioning" technology is an opportunity for incremental revenue, as well as targeting that can make programs and ads more relevant.

According to David Verklin, CEO of Canoe Ventures, "We have the ability to run an American Express Green Card ad nationally, and their Gold Card ad can run in 370 zones in America where the average household income is above Green Card households."

Mr. Verklin said two cable networks are already prepared to use the new CAAS product when it launches later in second quarter.

The remaining question for cable networks is how to sell CAAS's reach to advertisers, said David Levy, president of Turner Broadcasting Sales. "If you get too targeted, what's the premium and is there going to be enough of a premium?" he said. "This is additive; it's not going to shift dollars to 'reach' buys. So for national buys, it's good to have targetability, but it has to have valuable information."

For the cable operators, Canoe presents an opportunity to collect more ad dollars from the internet and direct mail, because Canoe's CAAS will, for the first time in the U.S., add a local ad insertion to national ads. "If NBC Universal wants to make ads more targeted and Canoe can help them do that, it will make the TV platform as relevant as possible for everybody," said Stephen Burke, chief operating officer of Comcast Corp.

But Matt Seiler, global CEO of Universal McCann, cautioned that media agencies' buying groups are still too segregated to properly buy addressable advertising. "One of the things we have got to stop doing is organizing ourselves based on that kind of silo, because our people don't know anything," he said. "I don't think we as an industry are really organized to take advantage of this."

Mr. Verklin argued that addressable advertising is already a boon for direct marketers looking for more transaction-based relationships with their target consumers. It will also make ad engagement much more measurable. "A third of commercials on TV have no rating. Set-top-box data can allow us to put a rating on every break on TV. There is enormous promise with this venture."

Cable Companies Target Comericals to Audience

11:24:15 PM

Cable Companies Target Commercials to Audience

(UM's Matt Seiler quoted)

March 4, 2009

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

The advertiser’s dream of sending a particular commercial to a specific consumer is one step closer to reality as Cablevision Systems plans to announce the largest project yet using targeted advertising on television.

Beginning with 500,000 homes in Brooklyn, the Bronx and some New Jersey areas, Cablevision will use its targeting technology to route ads to specific households based on data about income, ethnicity, gender or whether the homeowner has children or pets.

The technology requires no hardware or installation in a subscriber’s home, so viewers may not realize they are seeing ads different from a neighbor’s. But during the same show, a 50-something male may see an ad for, say, high-end speakers from Best Buy, while his neighbors with children may see one for a Best Buy video game.

“We have, as an industry, been talking about this since the beginning of time,” said Matt Seiler, the global chief executive of the media firm Universal McCann, a part of the Interpublic Group. “Now we’ve got it in 500,000 households. This is real.”

The potential of customized ads worries some privacy advocates, despite the assurance of cable companies that they maintain anonymity about the households.

“We don’t have an objection to advertising that is targeted to demographics,” said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a civil liberties group in Washington. But, he said, there is a need to show “that they can’t be reverse-engineered to find the names of individuals that were watching particular shows.”

Cablevision says it segments its subscribers only by demographics, so that an advertiser can divide ads among various groups: General Motors, for example, could send an ad for a Cadillac Escalade to high-income houses, a Chevrolet to low-income houses, and one in Spanish to Hispanic consumers.

Cablevision matches households to demographic data to divide its customers, using the data-collection company Experian.

Experian has data on individuals that it collects through public records, registries and other sources. It matches the name and address of the subscriber to what it knows about them, and assigns demographic characteristics to households. (The match is a blind one: advertisers do not know what name and address they are advertising to, Cablevision executives said.)

Advertisers can also give their existing customer lists to Experian, and Experian can make matches — so G.M., for example, could direct an ad based on who already owns a G.M. car.

Advertisers are willing to pay premiums for ads that go only to audiences they have selected.

Cablevision tested the technology by promoting its own services with targeted and untargeted ads. In the eight-month test, the targeted ads brought in new subscriptions at a significantly higher rate than untargeted ads.

“The revenue opportunity for the various constituents within television is enormous,” said Irwin Gotlieb, the global chief executive of GroupM, the media division of WPP Group. (WPP is an investor in the targeting companies Visible World and the Invidi Technologies Corporation.)

That is money the cable companies are eager to have. “Penetrations have flattened out, and cable companies need a way to grow,” said David L. Kline, the president of the Rainbow Advertising Sales Corporation, Cablevision’s ad unit.

Cablevision has been testing the system in about 100,000 Brooklyn households over the last year and a half. By summer, Cablevision plans to have it in 500,000 households, and, if the introduction goes smoothly, to extend it to all 3.1 million of its cable subscribers.

Visible World, the New York-based company working on the Cablevision project, was founded in 2000. It initially worked on showing versions of ads based on the weather or general location. Then, Visible World began working on the capability of sending different ads to specific households, starting with Brooklyn.

Cablevision is not notifying customers about the targeted advertising specifically. It last sent its privacy policy, which included information about ad targeting, last May, said a spokesman, Jim Maiella. The privacy policy is also available online.

Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the privacy group Center for Digital Democracy, said this was not enough. “They need to be very clear to the consumer what’s being collected,” he said. “Give people a choice.”

One thing Cablevision will not be doing is sending ads based on what shows a consumer is watching.

But a competitor of Visible World, Invidi, is conducting a test with the cable company Comcast and will soon work with Verizon. It uses data from remote controls to follow what a person is watching, then matches that with ratings information and program guides to infer that person’s gender and age. It can use census data or data sources like Experian for further refining. Then, it shows an appropriate commercial.

Eventually, said Michael Kubin, the executive vice president of Invidi, the company will be able to identify who is watching based not just on what they are viewing, but also how they watch it: whether they channel change frequently or not at all, or immediately turn to CNN or to Bravo. That will help it show the right ads in households where multiple people watch television.

Mr. Kubin said Invidi did not have the capability to store any data, and could not, even if subpoenaed, tell what programs someone was watching.

But Invidi’s access to data has raised some concerns among even its advertisers. In late 2008, Invidi began conducting a test in Baltimore with Comcast, with about 70,000 households.

Comcast sent letters to all households in the trial area when the test began, alerting them to the trial and giving them an option to decline participation.

Advertisers wanted even more caution. While Invidi could have used the remote-control data to target ads, Starcom MediaVest Group, a media unit of Publicis Group, asked it not to.

“We want to make sure that we took a very conservative approach toward data usage until we have an opportunity as an industry to understand the consumer’s desire for more relevant advertising,” said Tracey Scheppach, senior vice president and video innovations director at Starcom Worldwide.

While advertisers are pushing the cable industry to begin offering targeted advertising, it has been a slow process. Cable companies control only a portion of advertising — the bulk is sold by the networks, like ESPN or MTV.

To coordinate their efforts, last year the six largest cable companies announced they had created an entity called Canoe Ventures. It is trying to get national distribution for the targeting technologies, to ensure the networks support targeted ad sales, and to come up with industry standards.

“Television was always big and dumb,” said Seth Haberman, the chief executive of Visible World. “Now, hopefully, we can be big and slightly smarter.”

Alcohol, Sex Ads Get Prime TV Time

11:24:15 PM

Los Angeles Times

"Alcohol, Sex Ads Get Prime TV Time"

(UM's Kathy Doyle quoted)

By Alana Semuels

February 13, 2009

The airwaves are getting more grown-up, and it's not just the shows.

The Absolut Vodka commercials that aired in Los Angeles and 14 other cities during Sunday night's Grammy Awards marked the first time in years that liquor ads ran in prime time on network-owned stations.

Also crowding the airwaves during heavy viewing hours are infomercials once reserved for the middle of the night and ads touting extramarital affairs and the intimate uses of K-Y Jelly.

As the recession takes its toll on firms that rely on advertising, TV stations aren't the only companies running ads once considered inappropriate.

In recent months, the NBA rescinded a ban on courtside advertising by liquor companies. Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. did the same for ads they run on their websites. Billboard operators have allowed more strip clubs to hawk their establishments on roadside signs.

"Given the economy, there are publishers and media outlets that are doing what they have to to survive," said Steve Hall, an ad-industry veteran who publishes the website AdRants.

Standards for advertising have been changing for decades, just as they have for the TV shows they accompany. For example, the number of distilled-spirits commercials on cable TV tripled from 2001 to 2007, said David Jernigan, associate professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University.

But marketing experts say the trend has accelerated since the financial crisis began.

"When you have the evaporation of advertising revenue, you have to look for new and creative ways of getting sellers in the door," said Tim Winter, president of the Parents Television Council. "It's coming in the way of adult-themed products and content."

Listeners of KROQ-FM (106.7) in Los Angeles might have been surprised to hear ads for Ashley Madison Agency, which promotes extramarital affairs, while drinking their morning coffee this week.

"Sign up today and I will guarantee you an affair to remember," the company's president urges, directing listeners to the company's website.

The Canadian company's ads have been appearing in more places, including on a Houston NBC affiliate during the Super Bowl. Cable companies that once rejected the firm's ads are now having second thoughts, said Noel Biderman, president of Ashley Madison Agency.

A year ago, no broadcast TV group would have agreed to run distilled-spirit ads, said Kathy Doyle, senior vice president and director of local broadcast for Universal McCann, a major ad buyer. She pitched them after WNBC-TV in New York ran a late-night ad for Bacardi rum in November 2007. In the last few months, nearly every one has considered it.

"The bottom's dropped out in the market, and they're looking for new sources of revenue," she said.

Some publishers and stations acknowledge that the economy has forced changes in the type of ads they are willing to accept.

"We're looking at a different world than we were three years ago, relative to the economy," said Jim Burke, president of sales for Fox Television Stations group, which owns and operates about two dozen local Fox stations. "We're looking at a number of categories, trying to find ways to increase our revenue."

Alcohol companies are at the forefront of this trend, said George Hacker, director of the alcohol policies project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. His organization, with support from dozens of coaches and schools, has been trying to persuade the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. to ban alcohol ads from broadcasts of its sporting events. The NCAA denied the request in August.

The Absolut ad that ran around 10 p.m. during the Grammys -- on KCBS-TV Channel 2 in Los Angeles -- doesn't show anyone drinking the vodka. Instead it shows a marketplace in which kisses and hugs serve as currency, then fades to an Absolut bottle.

The ad has continued to run this week on KTTV-TV Channel 11 as well as KCAL-TV Channel 9 and KTLA-TV Channel 5, whose parent company, Tribune Co., also owns the Los Angeles Times. It's also being shown in markets such as San Francisco, New York and Chicago.

Mike Nelson, a spokesman for CBS Television Stations, said individual station managers could decide which ads to run, and that they "determined that the [content] for this particular spot is tasteful and appropriate for the stations' late-evening audiences."

Several issues motivated Facebook and Google to change their policies on alcohol ads, the Internet giants said.

Facebook now allows software developers to promote alcohol in programs they create to run on the social-networking website, as long as they prevent anyone under age 21 from accessing them. Google changed its policy in December to let advertisers bid for ad placement alongside search terms targeting hard-alcohol and liqueur drinkers in the U.S. It had relaxed its policies about beer-related ads months earlier.

"It's based on user experience and the fact that many folks have been asking for it for a long time," a Google spokeswoman said.

Letting ad standards slip is as dangerous as doing the same for content, said Mark Fitzgerald, editor at large with Editor & Publisher, a newspaper industry trade journal. He said he had noticed more ads that wouldn't have made the cut, even on the front pages, and that adult-focused companies had become more suggestive with what they depict in their ads.

Ads should "set a tone, have a little bit of class, suggest you're coming into good real estate," he said.

But in all media, the real estate is increasingly up for grabs. That creates new opportunities for companies such as R2C Group, an ad agency whose clients include Total Gym (pitched by Chuck Norris) and an Obama commemorative coin among its infomercial clients.

"Car dealers are pulling off the air, retailers are pulling off the air, which opens more time to our clients," R2C Group Chief Executive Tim O'Leary said. "We had a very good year."

alana.semuels@latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ads13-2009feb13,0,4778111.story

From the Los Angeles Times

Absolut Takes a Shot at Network Television

11:24:15 PM

Brandweek

Absolut Takes a Shot at Network Television
(UM's Kathy Doyle Quoted)

Feb 8, 2009

-By Anthony Crupi and Kenneth Hein

Instead of Katy Perry or Kanye West, Absolut Vodka may get the most attention from its scheduled appearance during the 51st Grammy Awards tonight (Feb. 8). Absolut has taken the bold step of breaking the voluntary ban of spirits advertising on network TV.

In the third hour of the Grammys, affiliates in 14 of the top DMAs were slated to run a 30-second TV spot called “Hugs.” It marked the first time a commercial for a distilled-spirits product would appear on any CBS-owned local broadcast stations.

The move is a controversial one. Advocacy groups claim that children under 21 already see too much alcohol-related advertising and allowing liquor marketers on network TV will only exacerbate this fact.

In 2001, NBC became the first to experiment with carrying a liquor ad on its local flagship station, selling Smirnoff vodka time on Saturday Night Live.

Although that branding spot was meant to be followed by months of pro-social messaging about responsible alcohol consumption, the subsequent backlash from Congress and advocacy groups made it untenable for NBC to continue the arrangement.

Since then, NBC made tentative forays back into the category, airing spots on its New York affiliate from Bacardi and Grey Goose.

According to a CBS rep, the affiliates will run the Absolut ad at their own discretion: “Each of our local station general managers is responsible for evaluating the suitability of ads. In this case, they determined that the creative for this particular spot is tasteful and appropriate for the stations' late-evening audiences.”

Produced by TBWA\Chiat\Day, New York, the “Hugs” ad is an exercise in restrained buoyancy, presenting a softly-lit parallel universe where affection is coin of the realm, a kiss on the cheek the sanctioned currency. Scored with the Louis Armstrong standard, “A Kiss to Build a Dream On,” it ends with the “In an Absolut World” tag and an understated product shot.

The “Hugs” spot, built as the TV extension of a brand campaign that launched in spring 2007, is set to air after 10 p.m. tonight in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and 10 other top-20 markets, an ambitious local buy reaching 31 percent of all U.S. TV households.

This week, the ad will be seen in seven local markets, with the particulars of each buy determined by individual stations. If all goes according to plan, Absolut will piece together a second TV buy in the latter half of the year.

Other spirits brands may follow suit. “We’ve been approached by [stations] to do more liquor business,” said Kathy Doyle, SVP, director of local broadcast at Universal McCann, who brokered the Bacardi deal. “I think the category is getting ready to break open.”

With local advertising in free-fall, broadcasters may no longer have the stomach to turn away liquor patronage. “The world has changed since 2001. People are more accepting of spirits advertising,” said Arthur Shapiro, alcohol industry consultant, AM Shapiro and Associates. “The industry draws the distinction between network, cable or spot. The consumer doesn’t care.”

Absolut was purchased for $8.9 billion by Pernod Ricard last July. Shapiro said the network buy is an attempt to regain some of the brand’s lost cachet. “They want to recapture the equity it once had,” he said.

“The Grammys is our coming-out party. Big events demand to be seen live, so they counteract the ad-avoidance you face in other environments,” said Clare Kanter, Absolut senior brand manager. “So we’re getting the big audience, the right demo and we’re in a party-type atmosphere.”

At 5 million cases sold in 2007, Absolut is the fourth best-selling spirit in the U.S., per Impact, New York. Still, Grey Goose, Svedka and many other brands have slowed its sales.

The network buy may not help its cause, said George Hacker, director of the alcohol policies project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “The brand will certainly be held up to scorn. Obviously, these are tough times and the networks are looking for revenue wherever they can get it. [But], we are less than delighted by this expansion of spirits advertising onto network television.”

David Jernigan, the former executive director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at Georgetown University said, “After 10 p.m. is really heavy usage time for the groups most at risk. So many young people at this point have TVs in their rooms and go to bed watching Letterman . . . This is a step backward.”

Absolut Breaks Voluntary Ban on Liquor Ads on Broadcast TV

11:24:15 PM

Adweek

Absolut Breaks Voluntary Ban on Liquor Ads on Broadcast TV –

Vodka maker raises the ire of advocates by running ads on CBS
(UM's Kathy Doyle quoted)

Vodka maker raises the ire of advocates by running ads on CBS

Feb 9, 2009

-By Anthony Crupi, Mediaweek and Kenneth Hein, Brandweek

NEW YORK Instead of Katy Perry or Kanye West, Absolut Vodka may get the most attention from its scheduled appearance during the 51st Grammy Awards this past Sunday night. Absolut has taken the bold step of breaking the voluntary ban of spirits advertising on broadcast TV.

In the third hour of the Grammys, affiliates in 14 of the top DMAs were slated to run a 30-second TV spot called "Hugs." It marked the first time a commercial for a distilled-spirits product would appear on any CBS-owned local broadcast stations.

The move is a controversial one. Advocacy groups claim that children under 21 already see too much alcohol-related advertising and allowing liquor marketers on network TV will only exacerbate this fact.

In 2001, NBC became the first to experiment with carrying a liquor ad on its New York flagship station, selling Smirnoff vodka time on Saturday Night Live.

Although that branding spot was meant to be followed by months of pro-social messaging about responsible alcohol consumption, the subsequent backlash from Congress and advocacy groups made it untenable for NBC to continue the arrangement.

Since then, NBC made tentative forays back into the category, airing spots on its New York affiliate from Bacardi and Grey Goose.

According to a CBS rep, the affiliates will run the Absolut ad at their own discretion: "Each of our local station general managers is responsible for evaluating the suitability of ads. In this case, they determined that the creative for this particular spot is tasteful and appropriate for the stations' late-evening audiences."

Produced by TBWA\Chiat\Day, New York, the "Hugs" ad is an exercise in restrained buoyancy, presenting a softly-lit parallel universe where affection is coin of the realm, a kiss on the cheek the sanctioned currency. Scored with the Louis Armstrong standard, "A Kiss to Build a Dream On," it ends with the "In an Absolut world" tag and an understated product shot.

The "Hugs" spot, built as the TV extension of a brand campaign that launched in spring 2007, aired after 10 p.m. Sunday in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and 10 other top-20 markets, an ambitious local buy reaching 31 percent of all U.S. TV households.

This week, the ad will be seen in seven local markets, with the particulars of each buy determined by individual stations. If all goes according to plan, Absolut will piece together a second TV buy in the latter half of the year.

Other spirits brands may follow suit. "We've been approached by [stations] to do more liquor business," said Kathy Doyle, svp, director of local broadcast at Universal McCann, who brokered the Bacardi deal. "I think the category is getting ready to break open."

With local advertising in free-fall, broadcasters may no longer have the stomach to turn away liquor patronage. "The world has changed since 2001. People are more accepting of spirits advertising," said Arthur Shapiro, alcohol industry consultant, AM Shapiro and Associates. "The industry draws the distinction between network, cable or spot. The consumer doesn't care."

Absolut was purchased for $8.9 billion by Pernod Ricard last July. Shapiro said the network buy is an attempt to regain some of the brand's lost cachet. "They want to recapture the equity it once had," he said.

"The Grammys is our coming-out party. Big events demand to be seen live, so they counteract the ad avoidance you face in other environments," said Clare Kanter, Absolut senior brand manager. "We're getting the big audience, the right demo and we're in a party-type atmosphere."

At 5 million cases sold in 2007, Absolut is the fourth best-selling spirit in the U.S., per Impact, New York. Still, Svedka and many other brands have slowed its sales. In fact, the brand's sales are expected to be off as much as 6 percent when the final 2008 totals are tallied.

The network buy may not help its cause, said George Hacker, director of the alcohol policies project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "The brand will certainly be held up to scorn. Obviously, these are tough times and the networks are looking for revenue wherever they can get it. [But], we are less than delighted by this expansion of spirits advertising onto network television."

CBS, Absolut Drink to Tough Times in Prime

11:24:15 PM

Mediaweek

CBS, Absolut Drink to Tough Times in Prime

Absolut buys prime inventory on CBS O&Os for first time
(UM's Kathy Doyle quoted)

Feb 8, 2009

-By Anthony Crupi

Absolut’s the first ad in broadcast prime.

Viewers on Feb. 8 who tuned in to CBS’ broadcast of the 51st Annual Grammy Awards were treated to a cross-generational Whitman’s Sampler of live performances, as kiddie-pop artists the Jonas Brothers teamed up with R&B icon Stevie Wonder, and Paul McCartney ripped through “I Saw Her Standing There” with lead Foo Fighter Dave Grohl.

But perhaps the most groundbreaking moment came in the third hour of the program, when affiliates in 14 of the top DMAs ran a 30-second branding spot for Absolut vodka. The event marked the first time a commercial for a distilled-spirits product has appeared on any CBS-owned TV station. As produced by TBWA/Chiat/Day, the “Hugs” ad presents a softly-lit parallel universe where affection is coin of the realm, and a kiss on the cheek is the sanctioned currency. Scored with the Louis Armstrong standard “A Kiss to Build a Dream On,” the ad ends with the “In An Absolut World” tag line and an understated product shot.

Built as the TV extension of a brand campaign that launched in spring 2007, the “Hugs” spot aired after 10 p.m. Sunday in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and 10 other top-20 markets, an ambitious local buy reaching 31 percent of all U.S. TV households. This week, the ad will be seen in seven local markets, with the particulars of each buy determined by the individual stations. In New York, the Absolut ad will run in late-night during CBS’ Late Show with David Letterman and The Late, Late Show. The other TV station to carry the spot is NBC flagship WNBC-TV, which will slate it during The Tonight Show.

According to a CBS representative, the affiliates will run the Absolut ad at their own discretion. “Each of our local station general managers is responsible for evaluating the suitability of ads,” he said. “In this case, they determined that the creative for this particular spot is tasteful and appropriate for the stations’ late-evening audiences.”

While CBS may be taking a step into unchartered waters, NBC is in familiar drink. In 2001, NBC became the first to experiment with carrying a liquor ad on its flagship station, selling Smirnoff vodka time on Saturday Night Live. Although that branding spot was meant to be followed by months of pro-social messaging about responsible alcohol consumption, the subsequent backlash from Congress and advocacy groups made it untenable for NBC to continue the deal.

Since then, NBC has made tentative forays back into the category, including a brief execution with Bacardi North America in 2007.

While the Bacardi buy also was short-lived, the media buyer who brokered the deal said that interest in spirits continues to bubble up. “We’ve been approached by O&Os to do more liquor business,” said Kathy Doyle, senior vp, director of local broadcast, Universal McCann. “I think the category is getting ready to break open.”

National cable is also a major component of the Absolut buy, as the spot will appear on a roster of targeted nets, including FX (Damages, Nip/Tuck), E! (The Soup) and Comedy Central. (Since 2001, when a recession forced nets to seek out alternative sponsorship dollars, cable has been awash in booze.)

With local advertising in free-fall, broadcasters may no longer have the stomach to turn away liquor patronage. “The world has changed since 2001. People are more accepting of spirits advertising,” said Arthur Shapiro, alcohol industry consultant, AM Shapiro and Associates.
“The industry draws the distinction between network, cable or spot. The consumer doesn’t care.”

Should the Sons of Temperance take issue with the Absolut spot, the creative will find its way to YouTube. On Feb. 9, Absolut will engineer a 24-hour homepage takeover of the site, said Clare Kanter, Absolut senior brand manager. “We didn’t really have the funding to do a national buy, so we’re making the ad available to our key target, adults 21-29,” Kanter said. “It would be a mistake not to be there.”

If all goes according to plan, Absolut will piece together a second TV buy in the latter half of the year.

AOL's Platform-A Back to Square One?

11:24:15 PM

Mediaweek

AOL's Platform-A Back to Square One?

Buyers split on which direction Platform-A should head

(UM's David Cohen quoted)

Feb 8, 2009

-By Mike Shields

Digital media buyers are weary of the constant executive and strategic shifts at AOL. But many are surprisingly optimistic that the long-adrift Web portal may finally be taking the proper steps to right itself.

Last week, AOL ousted Platform-A president Lynda Clarizio after just 11 months on the job (which was only six months longer than her predecessor). She was replaced by Yahoo vet Greg Coleman, whose heritage is in traditional brand selling. Then the company revealed a severe revenue decline during parent company Time Warner’s earnings call, causing outrage among some analysts. Pali Research analyst Richard Greenfield issued a missive in which he called for chairman and CEO Randy Falco’ and president/COO Ron Grant’s jobs.

Unfortunately for AOL, the leadership changes and bad news were all too familiar to some buyers. “It feels a little bit like Groundhog Day,” said Amanda Richman, senior vp, director of digital services at MediaVest. Or maybe Back to The Future. “This seems to signal a shift from technology&hellipback to a focus on content and experiences.” Richman is referring to Platform-A’s formation back in 2007. While just a few years ago AOL was touting itself as the home of original entertainment like the Mark Burnett series Gold Rush, Platform-A was delivering a firm statement to the market that AOL would focus on the ad network, performance-based side of the business.

It’s a move the company never should have made, argued David Cohen, executive vp, U.S. director of digital communications at Universal McCann, since that segment was already saturated with imitators all chasing the same direct-response dollars. “The real growth in this industry is in brand marketing. You can’t have your entire sell [be] around spots and dots,” said Cohen.

AOL officials explained that Clarizio had succeeded at integrating the company’s ad network-related acquisitions (Tacoda, Third Screen Media, etc.) and that it’s now time to focus on sales efforts. At least one digital exec buys that argument. “For AOL, 2008 was a year of focusing on their technology to make sure they delivered,” said Carrie Frolich, managing director, digital media MEC Interaction. “They did a great job. It feels like AOL is being proactive with this move, and this is not a backed-in-a-corner move.”

However, Dave Martin, vp, digital media at Ignited, warned that ’09 might be a dangerous year to move far away from D-R in favor of brand dollars. “You have to talk about both, especially in this economy,” he said. “Targeting, network buys—these things are critical. Platform-A needs to be locked and ready.”

Coleman is expected to focus his efforts on landing top brand advertisers, given the recent formation of AOL’s programming-centric group MediaGlow, which has quietly launched 70 new niche sites. According to AOL, MediaGlow sites saw page views soar from 48 billion to 71 billion last year. That would be great news—except it more glaringly highlights AOL’s display-ad declines.

Imran Khan, managing director, J.P. Morgan, cautioned that selling niche content might be tricky in a rough economic climate that favors performance-based campaigns. “Content is a good strategy for AOL,” he said. “But pricing is down, and you have to be very careful with all these content investments. It will be hard to get a return in this environment.”

Still, buyers are willing to be patient—with MediaGlow and AOL. Universal McCann’s Cohen said that MediaGlow properties like WalletPop.com and Asylum.com are “all nascent brands. It’s a little unfair to judge them yet.”

MediaVest’s Richman emphasized that it will be crucial for these sites to deliver more than just extra page views. “They’ve created a lot of mini-brands,” she said. “The jury is still out on how they apply that. Do they allow us to get more depth and experience?”

For his part, Adam Shlachter, digital practice lead at MEC Interaction, said that after attend a recent AOL “road show” sales event, he came away impressed with the company’s renewed commitment to content. “They are launching some properties and not even thinking about ad support [to start]. They’re building loyal audiences and they’re not slowing down.”

Mind Over Matter

11:24:15 PM

Media Magazine

February 2009

Proof [IN]SIGHT: Mind Over Matter

By Graeme Hutton

Click Here to Download a Scan of the Article

UM's Global Brand Keys on Curiosity

11:24:15 PM

Adweek

Jan 12, 2009

-By Steve McClellan

NEW YORK In his first five months on the job, Universal McCann worldwide CEO Matt Seiler has quickly put his stamp on the Interpublic media shop, restructuring the U.S. operation, solidifying his senior global management team and instituting a new global brand position.

Mary Gerzema, president of UM's U.S. operation, left the shop at year's end and the position has been eliminated. Seiler said he considered Gerzema a "real asset" during her tenure at the agency, but "we just didn't end up having a role that made sense for her and us," given the new structure of the North American operation, where the leaders of the global Microsoft, Sony and Johnson & Johnson accounts, based in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, report to him.

Instead of a U.S. president, Seiler is hiring an executive to head the New York office, who will have oversight of a number of key U.S. accounts and capabilities including the national broadcast and print buying operations and business development.

With the new structure, "North America looks like a mini world with Canada, New York, L.A., San Francisco and J3 (the stand-alone J&J operation within UM) as sort of full service entities reporting into global with the other geographical regions," Seiler said.

UM currently has an estimated $15 billion in annual billings worldwide. Seiler describes 2008 as a year that turned out well due to "terrific organic growth" from existing clients. He declined to be more specific,but sources said it was between 15 and 20 percent. Going forward, said Seiler, new business development, lacking in '08, will be a top priority.

Meanwhile, Seiler's global management team, including three new positions, is in place. Veteran agency and search consultant Jan Boyle has joined the shop in the new role of global managing partners lead. Boyle will work with the agency's account heads (although they will report to Seiler) on major global and multiregional clients to insure they have the tools and resources to fully serve those clients and to maximize opportunities for organic growth with those accounts. Boyle will also serve as chief liaison with the McCann World Group, which houses sister creative and diversified service agencies such as McCann Erickson, in order to, as Seiler puts it, "insure we're getting the most out of each other in critical markets around the world."

Seiler and Boyle have known each other since the late 1980s, when Boyle, who ran the BMW assignment at Ammirati & Puris, hired Seiler to work on the car account. In 2000, Boyle co-founded the search consultancy MatchWorks. With her return to the agency world, Boyle has closed the consultancy.

Boyle said she was happy running MatchWorks with no thought to rejoining an ad shop. But after a chance encounter with Seiler at an Ammirati reunion dinner in October, Seiler said of Boyle, "You're exactly what I want," for one of the new global roles. After further meetings to discuss the position, Boyle said, "It was just something I couldn't refuse."

Seiler has also created a worldwide chief marketing officer position and appointed Scott Tegethoff to fill it. Tegethoff will continue to oversee the shop's global Coca-Cola account across 49 markets.

Huw Griffiths has been promoted to global director of research, a new post. Daryl Lee, president of global strategy, and Quentin George, president of digital and new media, retain their roles while joining the global management team.

UM has also launched its new brand position, with the tagline, "Curious minds for surprising results," which replaces, "The next thing now."

One of the problems with the latter slogan, said Seiler, was "what that actually redounded to for clients. If you're just bringing them new stuff all the time, so what? Particularly in an economy such as this where clients are saying 'I'm not sure. I just want to be aware of all the cool things I might do one day. I'd really much rather know what you're going to do for me today and how that is going to beat my expectations for what success looks like.'"

UM clients agree. Jack Kennard, svp, global director of marketing services for wine and spirits marketer Brown-Forman, describes the new positioning as a "welcome rebalancing of the role of art and science in media planning and buying." The old slogan was good for its time, said Kennard, when marketers were initially learning about new digital platforms, but it "focused rather exclusively on science, technology, the new and the novel. The new positioning reinforces the importance of human nature and the creative power of curiosity." He added, "My idea of great reach and frequency are emotional bonds sustained over time," which is what media shops help create between their clients and consumers.

The curiosity theme has been a key component of the UM communications planning offering, whose development has been overseen by Lee since he joined the agency as lead strategist two years ago. At UM, Lee said, the communications planning offering is "specifically about insights and the source of all insights is curiosity," he said.

But Seiler has taken the theme and made it the core tenet of the agency, going so far as to develop a "curiosity quotient," to assess new hires. Even the company Intranet is now curiosity themed, with a question of the day that is answered the following day. Compensation to some extent will now be linked to curiosity, said Seiler.

"We're fundamentally overhauling the training to insure that new people coming in have a certain level of curiosity and that the people that are here are kept fresh on what being curious is," Seiler said. "We define it as open-mindedness that leads to unexpected or surprising results."

The Curious Story of Universal McCann

11:24:15 PM

Mediaweek

The Curious Story of Universal McCann

CEO Seiler ties global positioning to inquisitive energy

Jan 11, 2009

-By Steve McClellan

In his first five months on the job, Universal McCann Worldwide CEO Matt Seiler has put his stamp on the Interpublic media shop, restructuring the U.S. operation, solidifying his senior global management team and instituting a new global brand position.

Mary Gerzema, president of UM’s U.S. operation, left the shop at year’s end and the position has been eliminated. Instead of a U.S. president, Seiler is hiring an executive to head the New York office, who will have oversight of a number of key U.S. accounts and capabilities including the national broadcast and print buying operations, business development, among others.

In the new structure, “North America looks like a mini world with Canada, New York, L.A., San Francisco and J3 [the stand-alone J&J operation within UM] as sort of full-service entities reporting into global with the other geographical regions,” Seiler explained.

Meanwhile Seiler’s global management team, including three new positions, is in place.
Veteran agency and search consultant Jan Boyle has joined the shop in the new role of global managing partners lead. Boyle will work with the agency’s account heads (although they will report to Seiler) on major global and multiregional clients. Boyle will also serve as chief liaison with the McCann World Group, which houses sister creative and diversified service agencies such as McCann Erickson, in order to, as Seiler puts it, “insure we’re getting the most out of each other in critical markets around the world.”

Seiler has also created a worldwide chief marketing officer position, appointing Scott Tegethoff to fill it. Tegethoff will continue to oversee the shop’s global Coca-Cola account across 49 markets. Huw Griffiths has been promoted to global director of research, a new position. Daryl Lee, president of global strategy and Quentin George, president of digital and new media, retain their roles while joining the global management team.

UM has also just launched its new brand position, with the tagline, “curious minds for surprising results,” which replaces, “the next thing now.”

One of the problems with the latter slogan, said Seiler, was that, “If you’re just bringing them new stuff all the time, so what? In an economy such as this, clients are saying, ‘I’m not sure I just want to be aware of all the cool things I might do one day. I’d really much rather know what you’re going to do for me today and how that is going to beat my expectations for what success looks like.’”

UM clients agree. Jack Kennard, senior vp, global director of marketing services for wine and spirits marketer Brown-Forman, described the new positioning as a “welcome rebalancing of the role of art and science in media planning and buying.” The old slogan was good for its time, said Kennard, when markers were initially learning about new digital platforms, but it “focused rather exclusively on science, technology, the new and the novel. The new positioning reinforces the importance of human nature and the creative power of curiosity.”

The curiosity theme has been a key part of the UM communications planning offering, whose development has been overseen by Lee since he joined the agency two years ago. At UM, Lee said, communications planning is “specifically about insights and the source of all insights is curiosity.”

But Seiler has taken the theme and made it the core tenet of the agency, going so far as to develop a “curiosity quotient,” to assess new hires. Even the company Intranet is now curiosity themed, with a question of the day that is answered the following day.
Compensation, to some extent, now will be linked to curiosity, said Seiler.

“We’re fundamentally overhauling the training to insure that new people coming in have a certain level of curiosity and that the people that are here are kept fresh on what being curious is,” Seiler said. “We define it as open-mindedness that leads to unexpected or surprising results.”

Ad Shops Eye Web Space

11:24:15 PM

The Wall Street Journal

Ad Shops Eye Web Space

JANUARY 5, 2009, 11:27 P.M. ET

By EMILY STEEL

Madison Avenue took a back seat as technology companies created the tools to buy advertising space online. Now, major ad holding companies are developing their own systems.

The latest tool, from Interpublic Group's media-buying unit, Mediabrands, creates custom digital ad marketplaces for clients, which include Johnson & Johnson, Hyundai Motor America and Microsoft. It groups the ad space across thousands of Web sites from ad networks and ad exchanges and then adds a layer of data ranging from the sites a consumer has visited to information in the marketer's own customer database. Marketers can then place ads that appear only to the consumers they are trying to reach.

For instance, a tech marketer could choose to show ads only to consumers who have already downloaded a white paper from its Web site and visited a competitor's site, says Quentin George, the newly appointed chief digital officer at Mediabrands.

Mediabrands has deployed the system to buy ads for one of its clients and plans to soon roll it out to others. Other big holding companies, like Publicis Groupe, WPP and Havas, are developing similar tools.

While creative star power, catchy jingles and attention-grabbing TV commercials have long been the ad industry's bread and butter, many shops are now eager to harness -- and own -- consumer data to build deeper and more lucrative relationships with marketers. The development is part of a broader industry push to create technologies to streamline the placement of ads and to keep up with Internet companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL.

Major marketers, for their part, have long relied on ad agencies to buy space in newspapers and on television and radio, a business model the Internet is challenging. Since the Internet offers an unlimited supply of ad inventory and the ability to buy ads according to individual users, it wasn't feasible to buy ads from millions of individual Web sites until an array of smaller tech companies -- many of them since evolved into or bought up by the Internet giants -- had created systems to aggregate online ad space and target ads.

Google changed the rules by linking ads to Internet searches, in many cases eliminating the intermediary role of the agencies. Today, hundreds of thousands of advertisers buy online ads directly from the Web sites of Google and its competitors, though most of these advertisers are still small businesses.

"The ad-network business, we almost shouldn't have allowed it to exist," says Rob Norman, chief executive of WPP's digital-media unit, Group M Interaction Worldwide. WPP acquired the online-ad firm 24/7 Real Media in 2007 and is now using its technologies to build its own online ad-buying system and data warehouse. Tech firms "got there first and dealt with the science before we did," he says.

The ad holding companies have struck a flurry of individual partnerships with the Internet companies, but they have come to realize that they need to create their own systems to remain a relevant partner to marketers.

"If technology is going to automate the rest of media, then agencies will be cut out unless they control platforms as well," says Dave Morgan, founder of the behavioral targeting ad network Tacoda, now owned by AOL, and Real Media, one of the first online ad networks, which later merged with 24/7.

Each time an online ad broker delivers an ad, the broker captures information about individual browsers as well as which type of ads and Web sites are the most effective. Because ad agencies sit on the buy side, they can tap into data from multiple Internet companies and can link those data with the advertisers' own information. This creates a smarter approach to buying online ads, says Curt Hecht, president of the Vivaki Nerve Center, Publicis Groupe's digital-ad initiative.

But industry executives say it's going to be a long haul, as building such technologies places holding companies outside their core competencies. Ad agencies have traditionally been in the service business, not the software development business, and often lack the technology skills to compete with the experts. Digital-advertising executives say aggregating data for the sake of owning them is worthless, and that companies have to be smart about understanding and analyzing the information so that they can put it to use.

One advantage the ad holding companies might have is their strong relationships with major media companies. As they become more reliant on digital ad dollars, media companies like ESPN and Martha Stewart have grown increasingly leery of ceding their ad space to Internet ad brokers, believing that can erode the value of ad space on their sites. But marketers still want to buy ad space on these sites, because the content is safe and predictable and leads to a good brand association so some ad holding companies have persuaded media companies to include their ad inventory in their digital ad systems. CBS is going to include ad inventory on its sites in Publicis Groupe's system, which also links ad space sold by Web giants Google, AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo.