• by June 24, 2004

CONSTRUCTION PAGE FIRST, BETTER RESULTS LATER - It's been a while since we've had a reason to land on the MediaCom website, so we were surprised by the snappy, syncopated music and hip moving graphics when we stumbled on the page this week. Gone was the old, static MediaCom page that was more evocative of its parent Grey's namesake than the kind of cutting edge media brand recently installed chief marketing officer Jim Porcarelli says he wants to create. To be sure, the new page is merely an "under construction" placeholder for Web visitors, but at least it gets your attention and hints at something bigger yet to come. It also appears to tip a bit of MediaCom's new branding hand.

The page opens with a new MediaCom logo, the letter D of which sports overlapping silhouetted faces. The page jumps around and dissolves into what appears to be the media shop's new positioning statement: "People First. Better Results."

That statement dissolves into an image of corporately-attired young execs, hands raised in unison toward a sunny sky, and the kicker: "MediaCom puts people - your consumer and our own talents - at the front of everything it does."

A final frame thanks visitors and invites them to come back soon to "see new content, a new look and much more."

We'll be checking back shortly.

CAN YOU HEAR THEM NOW? - One of the most vexing and growing issues confronting media researchers these days is how to get quality samples for telephone-based research. The reason: A significant percentage of the population has cell phone-only service and are not accessible through conventional land-line phones that are the basis of telephone surveys. "It's about 3 percent to 4 percent of the U.S.," says Carat Insights' Director of Media Research Rob Frydlewicz, "but it may be as high as 10 percent of 15 percent among young adult demos."

It's a paradox, says Frydlewicz, noting that young adults are precisely the dynamic slice of the media marketplace Madison Avenue most wants to know about, and yet may have the most difficult time researching via traditional phone methods.

"The French are working on a solution," says Frydlewicz, fresh back from the ESOMAR conference in Geneva, Switzerland. "They have an approach that only goes after people whose only phones are cell phones. It's a small base, but it skews toward young people." Alas, he says the breakthrough may have no immediate application in the States, where U.S. privacy laws would make it difficult, if not impossible, to identify people to participate in such research.