Media Online All Stars Announced
- by September 16, 2005
Earlier this week, we presented Online All Stars in the creative and marketing spaces.
All of our Online All Stars will be honored at a reception in New York on Sept. 28, the second day of our OMMA EAST Conference.
'Anti-Marketing' Strategy
Speaking another language is mighty impressive, but creating one is an entirely different feat. Add that to the résumé of Kate Everett-Thorp, who is unequivocally regarded as an online pioneer.
Last year, Everett-Thorp shepherded Microsoft's online marketing for the highly anticipated debut of its "Halo 2" video game for the Xbox console. The online marketing needed to be precise, meaningful, and completely different than anything ever seen. This was not a time for banner ads.
So AKQA devised a simple and discrete strategy: It buried Web pages with information on the game within the Microsoft Web site. The lexicon used was a new, artificially concocted language of symbols called "the covenant," devised by the ad's creators.
"We just let [gamers] find it. It was as anti-marketing as you could get," Everett-Thorp recalls. But the strategy worked. Within 48 hours, the pages had attracted 150,000 visitors and a decoder had been published to translate the Web site. "[Gamers] felt like we knew them and we had created an environment they could participate in," she adds.
It's initiatives like this that illustrate Everett-Thorp's talent and flair for the interactive medium. She's already developing the second generation of Internet advertising, pushing new models for digital marketing in innovative ways, says Wenda Harris Millard, chief sales officer at Yahoo!, who has worked with Everett-Thorp for several years. "She is a very interesting combination of strategist and innovator. She is a disciplined thinker, but doesn't allow that to interfere with her creativity," observes Harris Millard.
Everett-Thorp cut her teeth on online media and marketing. She arrived at CNET.com in 1993 as one of its first 30 employees. Her title--the crusader--said it all: She was charged with evangelizing the online world. Indeed, she carried that mission with her all the way to the cofounding of interactive agency Lot21 with Eric Wheeler, Andrew O'Dell, Sasha Pave, and Louise Peter in 1998. Everett-Thorp also spearheaded the founding of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the industry's trade association, in 1995.
In the late '90s, Lot21 was "pound for pound the best interactive agency," recalls Dave Morgan, CEO of Tacoda Systems, who worked with Everett-Thorp in various capacities over the years. While at Lot21, she experienced the dot-com downturn but survived it because the agency's founders wisely made a commitment not to allow revenues from fledgling companies, such as Pets.com and Webvan.com, to exceed 40 percent. The strategy helped the company weather the storm as other dot-coms went belly up, Everett-Thorp says. She served as president and CEO of Lot21 before it was sold in 2001 to Carat Interactive (now called Carat Fusion), where she became chairwoman and chief marketing officer.
She stayed with Carat until her twin sons were born in early 2003, and then took time off to be with them. In early 2004, she was snapped up quickly by AKQA, where she is making her mark working closely with clients, earning the shop numerous accolades in industry publications, stepping up hiring, and opening a New York office.
Tacoda's Morgan says that with Everett-Thorp at the helm, AKQA is poised to break out and take its place among the top online shops with the largest budgets, like Universal McCann Interactive, OMD, and Avenue A. "It's clear given their track record that they are going to be a powerful interactive agency," he says. "They are one of the leaders."
Earlier this year, AKQA devised a campaign for Palm that allowed users to interact with a Treo phone via an interactive tour. That was followed in April by a marketing program in which Palm gave away a Treo every five minutes on Yahoo! for 12 hours. More than 2 million people entered for a chance to win a free phone, giving Treo a different base of people to market to, Everett-Thorp says.
It's the sort of program she embraces. "[I like] creating something that no one has solidified yet," she says. "We are beginning to learn the special effects of communications and how they've changed, and how we can do a better job. These examples are better than just shouting, 'Free shipping.'"
This month the agency plans to enter the search engine marketing business through a partnership with Performics, the search engine marketing division of DoubleClick. AQKA will deploy the service for large campaigns. Meanwhile, Everett-Thorp continues to look for ways to make clients like ESPN, Nike, and Visa stand out.
Five DVRs, Six Computers
Rishad Tobaccowala isn't a nine-to-fiver. As president of SMG Next, an idea incubator within Starcom MediaVest Group, and chief innovation officer of Publicis Groupe Media, Tobaccowala lives and breathes work every minute of the day, no matter where he is, whom he's with, or what he's doing.
His job? Tobaccowala predicts the future, or at least attempts to, and people depend on his visionary and analytical abilities. He doesn't pick lotto numbers or determine who's going to win a football game. But he is the go-to guy at SMG and throughout Publicis Groupe when clients and agency people want to know how people are going to use and interact with digital media in the future.
"I'm really the challenge-the-status-quo guy," Tobaccowala says. "I ask, 'How do we improve, break, and create new models?' My job brings in the outside perspective--the disgruntled perspective."
Jack Klues, CEO of Starcom MediaVest Group, handpicked Tobaccowala seven years ago to start a digital division (Starcom IP). "Rishad is provocative. He challenges us and our clients daily. He never lets us get comfortable, and therefore reminds us that we live in an industry where change is not only expected but constant," he says. Two years ago, Klues turned to Tobaccowala again when he saw the need for an idea incubator and futurist group.
"If you ask marketers, agency folks, and media buyers who they feel sees the media future with as much clarity as is available, it all points to Rishad," says Bill Gossman, CEO of Revenue Science, on whose board Tobaccowala sits. "He is brilliant, eloquent, and incredibly funny. When you meet and start working with him, you understand why he is as successful as he is. He makes stuff happen when other people quite often can't."
To stay on top of trends, Tobaccowala reads four daily newspapers, a dozen magazines, and several RSS feeds customized just for him.
"He is curious. He lives in a world that doesn't stand still. Nothing is ever new for long. He looks at everything, but he has a rare talent for sorting what is a fleeting fad versus what is potentially a critical game-changer," Klues says.
Tobaccowala also passionately observes clients, partners, staffers, and even his wife and two daughters. "I'm surrounded by a lot of talented people, and they constantly tell me what I should be thinking about," he explains. For instance, "I'm all thumbs on gaming, so once every six or eight weeks, I sit and have dinner with our games specialists and watch them play."
He experiments with new technologies to understand how they affect consumer behavior. "Any time I see a new technology, I try to buy it and use it myself. I'm on my fifth iPod, and I have five digital video recorders and six computers."
"He is always looking out onto the horizon to see how Starcom can participate in the changing market," says Joanne Bradford, chief media revenue officer for Microsoft's MSN.
Tobaccowala's ability to turn vision into reality has resulted in the launch of several successful practices within SMG, including Play, set up to understand gaming; Digits, a wireless marketing practice; and Reverb, which focuses on word-of-mouth marketing. SMG's TV 2.0 initiative focuses on how consumers will engage with myriad forms of digital video and the next generation of television.
SMG Next is a cross-company unit. "Where it makes sense, we find people who are change agents. We have clusters of people working on those areas while doing their normal job," he notes. Like Tobaccowala's chief-innovation-officer role, Next cuts a wide swath across the company. "It makes certain enterprise-wide decisions based on where the future is going," he explains.
"People here know me. If I come up with a harebrained scheme, I'm an insider and I have a track record." Tobaccowala's been with SMG, formerly a part of Leo Burnett Media, for 25 years. But, he notes, "I've had more career changes than anybody. I spend 150 days traveling all over the world, so I think it's a combination of roots and wings. You have to have really good roots if you want really strong wings."
"When I first met him, I thought, 'If anyone can change the world, he can,'" says Wenda Harris Millard, chief sales officer at Yahoo!. "One of his best qualities is his genuine belief that digital marketing can solve marketers' problems in an effective way."
Killer App Playlist
When last we checked, Scott Witt was still adjusting to the rigors of his leadership post in MediaVest's digital group. As the point man for Coca-Cola's digital-media initiatives, he was thrilled by the opportunity but somewhat frustrated by the brand's initial hesitation to invest significantly in the online space. He was 29, and he wasn't sleeping a whole lot. "It was both humbling and scary," says Witt of his first full year on the job.
Several months later, the Coca-Cola/MediaVest pairing has proven fruitful, with a trifecta of programs garnering both popular and critical kudos.
"Scott's just like his brand: He's very authentic," says Joseph Jaffe, president of jaffe LLC and author of "Life After the 30-Second Spot." "While the rest of the world is figuring out how to build the bridge between media and creative, Scott is becoming that bridge."
One widely lauded program run by Witt was a collaboration between Coke's Sprite brand and MSN, dubbed "The Scenario." The program attempted to connect with hip-hop fans by doing something other than merely doling out free music downloads. MediaVest proposed tracking down well-known DJs and asking them to compile their personal playlists, which would then be aired via a customized application on "The Scenario" Web site.
"The Scenario" included a custom instant-messaging application, which will soon be expanded to incorporate what Witt calls "a very robust, Flash interactive graffiti wall, kind of a 3d-modeled cityscape."
"There's so much music on the Web--with a single keystroke, you have unfettered egalitarian access to every piece of music produced," Witt says. "Because of this, there's a need for curation. The playlist becomes the killer application, and that's what we offered."
MediaVest also paired the Coca-Cola Classic brand with the Mavericks Surf Contest. Witt and his team essentially served as the site's creative directors. "It was the kind of opportunity you salivate over--the chance to sit down with a blank piece of paper," he says. The tie-in to Mavericks' Web site likely did more to underscore the newly tweaked positioning of Coca-Cola Classic than a multimillion-dollar network ad buy would have.
MediaVest's crowning achievement in the digital space over the last year, however, may be its pairing of Diet Coke with Reuters. The agency put forward an ambitious program for a customized newswire. It meant creating an algorithm of sorts to retrieve and display lighter Reuters fare that aligned with the Diet Coke brand. MediaVest coordinated delivery of the Reuters content via an RSS feed, a mobile application, and a ticker-like device for online ads.
Witt is the first to admit that the campaign wasn't an easy sell. "Reuters isn't the type of partner you'd think would deliver a Diet Coke-like experience," he says. "But they have 40,000 reporters around the world. They produce thousands of pieces of content every day. Not all of them are about bombs in Iraq."
Larry Dobrow, Lynn Russo, and Daisy Whitney contributed to this report.
