• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, October 12, 2010

Two months after recruiting former Publicis ventures chief Tim Hanlon, Interpublic has named him managing director and CEO of Velociter, a new unit within its Mediabrands division focused on accelerating innovative media and marketing services via strategic relationships -- and in most, but not necessarily all of them, equity stakes in promising media technology start-ups.

Velociter builds on and replaces Greenhaus, the in-house unit Mediabrands formed over the past couple of years to incubate and nurture entrepreneurism within its organization, but takes it several steps further, making it the central clearinghouse for the financial, intellectual and emotional capital Interpublic has to invest in innovative media options both inside and outside its organization.

"We're basically rebooting Greenhaus," Hanlon said, adding that the name change was made for several reasons, including the fact that a competing agency in San Diego already owned the Web domain name for greenhaus.com, and the notion that Velociter had a broader connotation for the direction Interpublic wants to take its venture development activity. The name Velociter, Hanlon said, means "faster, moving quickly, hastening," which is what Interpublic's media agencies need to do to stay ahead of a rapidly changing media marketplace where innovation is constant, as is disintermediation for those who don't keep pace with it.

"The cycles of business success have become incredibly compressed, and we need to be in different parts of the supply chain if we are going to stay ahead of that," Hanlon explained, adding that Velociter will have one foot planted internally to help incubate entrepreneurial ideas inside Mediabrands agencies and talent pool, and one planted outside the organization -- mainly in the venture capital community, but also via a variety of strategic relationships with so-called "incubator communities."

Hanlon already has struck a strategic relationship with San Francisco-based incubator Kicklabs, and recently announced a partnership with the Paley Center for Media in New York to present "The Next Big Thing," a collaboration that will showcase business start-ups in media, entertainment, and technology.

Hanlon said Velociter is already in conversations with more than a dozen start-ups about equity stakes, but declined to name specific ones other than Spongecell, a startup that has developed technology capable of "pushing" ads onto calendars, social profiles, mobile devices, home pages and other digital places, without disrupting a user's browsing experience.

He said the goal ultimately would be to be as -- or more -- aggressive than he was at Publicis' Denuo unit, where he said he helped develop more than 40 equity stakes in promising digital media start-ups, more than half a dozen of which "exited," or liquidated for some financial return, including Sling Media, Rapt and Navic.

But Hanlon -- who continues to report to Mediabrands Ventures' CEO Matt Freeman, himself rumored to be in line for a bigger role, possibly CEO of Mediabrands -- said the goal isn't primarily a financial return, but to gain a strategic leg up on the rest of the marketplace in promising new ventures that could alter the way agencies and clients communicate and promote their brands to consumers. The main focus, he said, would be figuring out ways of aligning those venture activities with the strategic goals of Mediabrands operating units, including Initiative, Universal McCann, Cadreon, Reprise, Geomentum and Ansible.

To accelerate those relationships, Hanlon said Interpublic will utilize a combination of financial investments and strategic counseling, the latter of which he said might be even more important to start-ups in dire need of understanding, and perhaps more importantly, marketing their business models.

"The cost of producing things keeps coming down," Hanlon noted, "and many of these companies don't need cash as much as they need advertising, media and marketing."

On the cash side of the equation, Hanlon said Interpublic is also "rebooting" the Internal Innovation Fund, which was originally created to provide "seed" capital to fund business ventures conceived by Interpublic employees, but he declined to elaborate on the sources, scope or application of that capital. He did note, however, that a significant part of his new role would be to stay close to "professional money people," including VCs, banks and private equity firms that might help with raise capital necessary to develop some especially promising ideas, but also to simply understand what they are investing in.

"We want to have the right relationships with the right partners," Hanlon said.