Gathered for a panel on contextual media and advertising at the McGraw-Hill Media Summit in New York, the ad and brand executives discussed the challenges of reaching audiences atomized across a variety of digital platforms and programming niches.

One key to adapting to the shifting media terrain is to update Madison Avenue's traditional ways of doing business built around the 30-second spot. Instead, lines between agency departments should be increasingly fluid to promote innovation and better reflect growing media fungibility.

"If we don't learn to more aggressively cross-train ourselves, you could argue the agency structure is not going to be relevant to marketers' needs," said Tim Hanlon, executive vice president, ventures, at Denuo, the futures practice of Publicis Groupe.

Getting more directly involved in creating original content is one of the ways agencies may increasingly pursue that goal. Peter Gardiner, a partner and chief media officer at Deutsch Inc., said the agency will soon announce a new in-house content studio as a way to bridge media planning and creative execution.

Gardiner didn't provide further details on the Deutsch studio, but the idea is for it to serve as a media lab of sorts, developing material independent of any specific campaign. That creative material could then potentially be applied to a future brand marketing effort.

"I think one of the biggest changes about to come is taking money from the media side and putting it into the content creation side," said Christoph Stadeler, CEO, MRM Worldwide Germany.

Providing the client perspective, Frank Cooper, vice president of marketing at Pepsi-Cola North America, said there wasn't a fundamental shift yet in how the beverage giant interacts with its agencies. But he noted that the fragmentation of media has thrust brand managers within companies into increasingly prominent roles.

"Where we've been successful is where a brand manager has taken a leading role and set up a system" for overseeing all aspects of a campaign," Cooper said. "The brand manager has to sit in the middle as sort of a general contractor and conduct business."

Cooper even pointed to a branded entertainment campaign Pepsi launched last November, in which the actor Forest Whitaker was brought in to help conceive and design a Web-based fantasy game "Dewmocracy," that let consumers create a flavor of Mountain Dew. "He developed that whole experience and brought agencies to the table," Cooper said.

In relation to such branded content efforts, however, the Pepsi executive and other panelists expressed the usual frustration with the lack of a standard measurement for user engagement. "How do you measure an experience?" asked Cooper. "It's not a GRP (gross rating point), I know that for sure."

Neither is it impressions. He added that one of the company's online campaigns drew 3 billion impressions "and there was no impact."

Federico Grosso, senior vice president for business development at video search engine blinkx, said the problem was magnified by the phenomenon of media "double-dippers"--people checking their e-mail or browsing the Web while watching TV.

Deutsch's Gardiner, meanwhile, discussed efforts to develop a "video ratings point" as a digital era equivalent to TV's GRP to track video audiences across different media platforms.

But there was agreement that no one can afford to wait for new standard metrics to emerge. Maintaining relevance requires distributing media and messages in any format consumers want it. "Media brands are loosening now, and that allows an unlimited amount of opportunities," Hanlon said. He pointed out that CBS this year for the first time is making all NCAA basketball playoff games available on-demand online without any blackouts. "That may be the only way for some people to see the games," he said.

But how do you reach consumers everywhere without cluttering up the media landscape to the point of annoyance? Cooper explained that Pepsi has conceived the term "cultural spheres" to guide how it reaches consumers receptive to its brand. For a large marketer like Pepsi, that requires a difficult transition to bottom-up rather than top-down thinking.

"A brand marketer's tendency is always to start big," he said. "We resisted that temptation, and now we're starting at the grassroots level." That can mean tapping into blogs or other online communities to help generate user-generated content around Pepsi brands.

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