• by April 18, 2011

Longtime UM digital maven David Cohen has been upped to global digital officer at the Interpublic media agency. He replaces Heidi Browning, who left the position three months ago to join Pandora as senior vice president of sales and planning. Cohen will report directly to Jacki Kelley, UM's global CEO since January. Cohen, who has been in the Internet advertising field since 1996, joined what was then Universal McCann exactly 10 years ago to start its digital media group. He has served as UM's U.S. director of digital communications for the past five years. Both internal and external candidates are being considered to fill his previous position, Cohen said.

Cohen's ascension comes a few weeks after Interpublic's Mediabrands unit, which consists of UM and Initiative, moved both agencies' global operations from a traditional structure of five major geographic regions to "clusters": North America, G14 and world markets. G14 consists of clients' "priority markets," like the U.K., China and India, while World Markets includes countries like Greece and South Korea, plus the entire Mideast.

His goal is to "have best-in-class digital capabilities on the ground in all of our markets." His mantra: "become much more performance-metric focused."

"We are awash in a sea of information and data," he says, "so UM needs to "inject all that info and draw insights" -- something he said agencies did not do in the past.

Indeed, UM as a whole is moving toward a data ecosystem with a performance metric and analytics focus; Cohen's digital team will play a leading role. To reach that goal, UM is looking to partner content providers and technology players, as well as research companies (like Nielsen).

As for specific digital areas, while UM's global digital team will continue to focus on planning and buying, search, mobile and social, Cohen said he also foresees "explosive growth" in a new area: "technology in the living room." That is, addressable television technologies providing the "ability to interact with programming" and to add interactive advertising messages and social media layers.

It means "working very closely with our traditional media counterparts," he says. Cohen termed the erosion of lines between traditional and digital an "organizational challenge," saying "there is no sacred ground. We're all kind of learning together. The key to success is collaboration."