360⁰ MEDIA GUIDE

THE NEW PUSH TO INTEGRATION By Kathy Haley Thus, when Wachovia Securities wanted to boost business in Sarasota, Fla., it launched “What’s Your Number?” a campaign that used print, direct mail, online, cable TV, local events, merchandising displays and employee training to take the fear and denial out of retirement planning. The campaign kicked off with a seminar featuring author Lee Eisenberg and other financial gurus, and netted local bank branches a long list of appointments with interested prospects. It even attracted a story in The Wall Street Journal.

“The keyword for us is integration,” says Jim Garrity, Wachovia’s chief marketing officer. “Our marketing wheel of integration looks at every possible contact point.”

Although it began as a media planning tool, 360 has since expanded to embrace the entire process of communicating with customers and prospects. Here again, the old ways have been abandoned, as multitasking, media-meshing consumers have forced marketers to rethink the very ways in which they communicate with customers and prospects.

“If you are talking about reaching the consumer, you are missing the point,” says Wenda Harris Millard, chief sales officer at Yahoo! Inc. “You can reach anybody. The challenge now, because of multitasking, is connecting with consumers.”

To do this, marketers must understand their potential customers better, including how they tend to use media. This need more than anything else is enlarging the role that media companies—from giants such as Disney ABC Unlimited to specialists like Alloy Media+Marketing—play in helping marketers make

Wachovia Securities used a 360° marketing approach to reach people interested in retirement planning in Sarasota, Fla. _{those connections with consumers.}

My Space, Google, You Tube. Video-on-demand, online gaming, viral marketing. Place-based advertising, addressable advertising, word-of-mouth. Media choices are proliferating at an astonishing rate, leaving marketers and their agencies racing to keep up with the most effective ways to reach out to potential customers in a fragmented, shifting media world.

The answer for a growing number of marketers is to take a 360° approach, zeroing in on a target group of consumers most likely to be receptive to a certain message and surrounding them with it, using a variety of media to touch them at different points along the deci-sion-to-buy process.

FOCUS ON THE CONSUMER

Conglomerates such as Time Warner, Viacom and Sony Corp. have used the integration mantra for years to promote their ability to reach out to consumers through a variety of branded touch points. What’s changed, particularly in the last year or so, is the emphasis companies like these are putting on the consumer.

At Meredith Corp., for example, a new marketing solutions unit launched in July specializes in connecting marketers with the 70 million women the company reaches each month through magazines, TV stations, Web sites and local events. The work doesn’t end with simply plotting out an all-embracing media plan. The company also creates materials, including DVDs, on-demand shows, magazine inserts and TV spots.

“We do creative services, customer relations marketing work and advertising, be it for print or broadcast,” says Nancy Weber, chief marketing officer. “We can even create a line of books for you.”

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Agencies React to 360° Media World By Wayne Karrfalt and Kathy Haley

Silo. It’s become a four-letter word in the world of advertising, where marketers, media companies and big agencies are working feverishly to break down the organizational structures that hold them back in a 360° media environment

In taking a sledgehammer to their silos, media buying companies in particular are vying for a greater role in the process of developing communications for marketers.

Among agency executives exploring this new media world are (from left) Mary Gerzema, North American president of Universal McCann; Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO of Denuo; and Peter Gardiner, chief media officer of Deutsch Inc.

“There’s a bit of a free-for-all in the 360° media world right now,” says Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO of Denuo, an agency specializing in helping marketers make the most of emerging advertising venues.

Media-buying companies are taking a variety of approaches to adapt to the realities of a 360° media environment.

Initiative North America created a new executive role—

chief activation officer—and named its former director of national broadcasting, Tim Spengler, to carry it out. Mr. Spengler, who oversees buying on all media platforms, is now the agency’s point person for clients; he also heads a newly formed Implementation Council that will meet regularly to help integrate operations.

Chicago-based Starcom aligned its media business into two disciplines: activation and captivation, and put three new divisional presidents in charge: President-Chief Consumer Officer Steve Feuling oversees consumer context planning; Chris Boothe heads up all buying units as president-chief activation officer; and Andrew Swinand is president-chief client officer, in charge of accountability and what Starcom calls “ROO,” or return on objectives. (A fourth president, Kathy Ring, was appointed CEO of Starcom’s L.A. operations, serving Walt Disney Co.’s needs.)

Interpublic Group’s Universal McCann collapsed its online and emerging media operations into a single unit. Mary Gerzema became the agency’s first North American president and named David Cohen, former senior VP of UM Interactive in

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NOVEMBER 6, 2006