• by December 10, 2003

THOUGHT EQUITY - OR IS IT A CREATIVE COMMODITY? -- The Riff agrees with Carat chief David Verklin. It's not media that's being unbundled. It's creative. And just to prove it, the Riff has just received a pitch from a new outfit called Thought Equity that's making a business out of -- get this -- reselling the "unused creative" of ad agencies. Now on first blush, this might seem like a very practical idea. Agencies frequently have a lot of untapped creative overhead -- copywriters, art directors and creative directors -- who occasionally sit idle waiting for the next campaign, account win or new business pitch. So wouldn't it make sense to resell some of those services to non-agency clients and pick up some extra income? Not if you're a major agency looking to avoid being perceived as a commodity. After all, isn't it the unique branding propositions that agencies dole out for their clients that, in the end, are what contribute so mightily to an agency's own brand equity? But the truly ingenious or devious part of Thought Equity's model is that it goes beyond simply utilizing creative department down time. It actually recycles unused creative that was developed as part of advertising pitches, but which were never run as advertising.

"All agencies develop concepts to pitch to clients and prospects," Thought Equity spokesperson Lauri Harrison tells the Riff. "Not all of those concepts are chose and seen publicly. Thought Equity takes the high-quality, unused concepts, strips out the branded material and tags it in the searchable database for small, local and regional business to use. When an ad is purchased out of the database, the creative agency gets a hefty check in the mail." In other words, Thought Equity is franchising unused agency creative. If this seems like a bad idea, the reseller claims to already have more than 350 agencies "sharing their unused content," including a few top ones. "Sawyer, Riley, Compton, a top agency in Atlanta, is one," says Harrison, citing an ad the agency created for the Atlanta Ballet as an example. The ad, which featured two college-aged kids "kung fu fighting" in slow motion in a living room carried the super "Too much time on your hands? Go to the Ballet." The ad proved to be too "racy" for the ballet's marketing team, so Thought Equity resold it to, of all places, a Wyoming-based technical trade school. But instead of enticing viewers to go to the ballet, the pitch was switched to: "Everyone has skills. Some earn money. Enroll at WyoTech." Harrison acknowledges that Thought Equity's business model "could be considered controversial" but adds that "the value to creative firms who have stacks of unused creative in their files is powerful." Even as the Riff can hear the sounds of Messrs. Bernbach and Ogilvy rolling over, we can't help wonder if there isn't some genuine brilliance here and how it might ultimately catch on and reshape the advertising business in bigger and far more unintended ways.

WHAT DO YOU GET FOR THAT REACH? - When the Journal Register Co. made its presentation to Tuesday's session at the Credit Suisse First Boston MediaWeek conference, they brought along today's edition of three of its papers, including the flagship New Haven (Conn.) Register. And they brought the whole thing, even the preprints. The preprints included circulars for Sears, Kohl's, J.C. Penney's and Filene's, a flier for The Floor Store at National Wholesale Liquidators, a sheet for the Physique Plus health center in Cheshire and a menu for a Chinese restaurant on the Boston Post Road in Guilford. That last one might not be useful to the New York City resident - we've got plenty of great Chinese restaurants around here.

SILLIEST ACRONYMN HEARD AT TUESDAY'S CONFERENCE - Riff's not the only one thinking that there might be a few too many acronyms in the media business. Overheard were several investors and analysts - Wall Street types - who said they wished that the media industry didn't have so many abbreviations and acronyms. Riff's favorite: ARPU. No, it's not the quickie mart proprietary of "Simpsons" lore. It stands for: average revenue per subscriber, the MSO's way of counting how much they charge us for all the services they provide.

A BUZZWORD BY ANY OTHER NAME - You can't sit in a room of newspaper executives, even ones that wouldn't know a newsroom if it fell on them, without hearing a lot of buzzwords about quality editorial products that connect with readers. Riff's not going to give those buzzwords any due by repeating any of them, but Riff is glad that a favorite of the 1980s and early 1990s, reader friendly, got retired from use.

YOU SAY TOMATO - Even in the media industry, the same term can generate fireworks or yawns. Take "cluster." On Monday, Clear Channel brass had to defend their type of management amid charges that clustering - shorthand for clumping assets together in the same or nearby media markets - killed local radio. But newspaper executives use the word to describe the gathering of assets within a large market or region, and no one thinks badly of them.

LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION - Kudos to Belo, the Dallas-based multimedia company, which showed an eight-minute video, "A Day in the Life of Belo," during the CSFB conference. Belo's got an interesting story to tell, how its TV, cable, newspaper and Internet properties work in connection with each other in places like Dallas and the Pacific Northwest. The video was pretty powerful, even if it would make newspaper traditionalists go into shock. The overnight news-gathering functions in Dallas, for instance, are handled by one central desk serving the newspaper, TV station, Internet and cable news channel. Say what you will, but it's a smart way of using resources in a - how shall we say it - truly media agnostic way.