• by Frank Saxe , November 20, 2002

Cross-platform advertising opportunities continue to get large amounts of attention, as they did at Tuesday’s International Radio & Television Society Foundation in New York Tuesday. There may be some debate as to whether they are more buzz than business, but it appears these mind-boggling deals are here to stay.

“At Viacom, it’s now not a matter of if cross-platform, it’s a question of when,” said Lisa McCarthy, senior VP of Viacom Plus. Perhaps one of the best examples, Viacom spent billions of dollars in the past five years amassing a multi-media giant, capped by its June 2000 purchase of CBS, Inc. Today, it bills roughly $1 billion in cross-media sales, stretching from its TV and cable assets, to outdoor and radio, plus its Blockbuster Video stores. The result is that Viacom is taking a bigger share of the advertising marketplace. “We’re getting more money. In every single deal we have gotten more volume.”

When Viacom Plus broke ground in May 2001 with its first of its kind $300 million cross-platform deal with Procter & Gamble, it was the sole player in the multimedia game. Today, ABC/Disney, AOL Time Warner, Clear Channel, and others have formed organizations charged with selling advertisers a spectrum of media. The result, said Mediacom EVP/director of national and local broadcast Donna Speciale, is a better bottom line for buyers. “These were not formed to be cheaper. When Viacom Plus was formed that was not the reason Mel Karmazin put all his assets together. It has become all about that though, because now there is more competition.”

That is critical, said Zenith Media EVP, director of local media Bonita LeFlore, because clients are more bottom line focused than ever. “If a proposal doesn’t have a return on investment on it, we can’t even look at it.”

While Time, Inc. and America Online have been exploring cross-platform ad deals under the AOL Time Warner umbrella, its Global Marketing Solutions unit was formed especially to push deals on a larger scale – including with media outside AOLTW. “This is a market in transformation. As you look around the media landscape, ratings, readers and users are harder than ever to get to,” observed GMS president Michael Kelly. “The slam dunk media deals are no longer available and advertisers are looking at new ideas.” Among the upsides, said Kelly, is that advertisers are moving money that was once in the marketing budget to advertising.

With that shift, however, comes more work for agencies that are designed for a more traditional model of planning and buying. All that added work is less about choice, and more about necessity, said Clear Channel Advantage senior VP Lori Wellinghoff, who said advertiser’s mission of connecting with consumers has become more complicated. “I think cross-platform is making it easier. When you have a consumer that is active, distracted, jaded, diverse, you can’t just buy a national television spot and have that be as effective. It may be cost-effective, but it’s just not that simple any more.” Clear Channel Advantage, with a large stable of radio and outdoor assets among others, aims to push itself as the outside the home cross-platform shop. So much so, it’s trademarked the phrase, “gone from home.”

One big issue that still needs sorting out is how cross-platform ad deals will be measured. “We are buying the media anyway, so we can evaluate the media based on its merits and its value,” said Initiative Media EVP, director, national broadcast Tim Spengler. Citing one cross-platform buy his agency did for Home Depot, Spengler said they went into it simply feeling confident in the campaign that was created, and accepted there is no “scientific way” to measure success. “The sum of the parts was much greater than the whole from the extra exposure we got,” said Spengler.

Yet for all of its rave accolades, there are still those who believe cross-platform is just the optimizer of the new millennium. “The buzz is a little more than what’s happening,” said Speciale. While saying that she is a firm “believer” in its potential, Speciale said many of the most-hyped cross-platform deals have been nothing more than “volume deals” aggregating a greater amount of media spending across one company’s assets.

“This new buzz is very interesting because we’ve all been doing this for sometime,” said LeFlore. Yet she and most others believe advertisers will help turn the buzz into business once they have more insight into why cross-media can work.

AOL Time Warner’s Mike Kelly agreed. “These are so difficult to do that one of the reasons we haven’t seen more of these deals is that we haven’t done a good enough job convincing clients that there’s something clearly an advantage of having gone down this road.”

“We haven’t done enough convincing of clients that there’s value to do this,” continued Spengler. The way he sees it, the main selling point is how that will impact the agency’s relationship. “It allows us to get closer to our clients and get involved with them earlier in the process.” As more advertisers put their marketing burden on their media buyers, he said that would become an increasingly convincing argument.