• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, April 19, 2023

In the ad biz, successful ideas have many authors. Bad ones, not so much. But according to former Digitas chief Colin Kinsella there were probably two agency visionaries who gave birth to the newfronts: former Digitas Worldwide Chief Creative Officer Mark Beeching and former social content lead John McCarus.

“Beeching was literally the creative force behind it,” Kinsella recalls, adding that the process began with some internal agency brainstorming sessions about what was going to be the next big creative breakthrough in ad-supported media.

“We were still trying to figure out what does ‘digital’ even mean, and how do you do ‘digital brands’,” he recalls, adding, “And clients were stepping all over themselves, as were agencies.”

Kinsella says it wasn’t a singular lightbulb moment that gave birth to the idea behind the newfronts, but a series of meetings.

“We kept coming up with these ‘Let’s get a conference going, let’s get together and starting building something out sessions,” says noting that they eventually led to the concept of a showcase for important new digital content players come together and discuss what they were developing.

While Digitas was successful right out of the box with the concept in its first few years, Kinsella said the agency quickly realized it has a media neutrality problem: that other agencies wouldn’t want to participate in something recognized as being the intellectual property of one of their revivals, so after a few years the management team realized that in order for the newfronts to grow, Digitas would have to spin it off.

But to whom?

“It wasn’t our business model, so we tried to figure out what to do with this entity and there were people like [MediaLink’s Michael] Kassan who wanted a part of it. A lot of people wanted a part of it, but we felt like we needed to give it to the industry and that no one agency or entity should own it. The whole industry deserved it.”

That’s when Digitas decided to give it to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), and then IAB President Randall Rothenberg ran with it, he says, adding, “We gave it to them because we felt like they didn’t have a dog in the fight, and the events would be better off with the IAB running it.”

In retrospect, Kinsella said “it’s crazy” how big the newfronts have grown, even to the point of supplanting the long established TV upfronts, “if not in terms of actual dollars yet, at least in terms of what people are talking about.

“The upfronts never seemed to move the needle on progressiveness, or newness, the way the newfronts have. And that’s what the digital kids were all about.”