• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, October 2, 2007

Five years ago, in the months following the September 11th terrorist attacks, and with great uncertainty facing the world at large, New York City in general, and Madison Avenue in particular, two big agency media vets--Steve Farella and Audrey Siegel--did the improbable. They struck out on their own. In retrospect, Farella says their decision to launch TargetCast tcm in the spring of 2002 meant they were either "geniuses or idiots." Five years later, they're looking more like the former than the latter.

Bucking the industry's trend toward the consolidation of media services--and in some ways capitalizing on it--Farella, Siegel, and a team of scores of big agency media renegades have managed to create the first independent media services agency of any size in more than a decade. It's an organization that now bills more than $450 million from a roster of smaller, more entrepreneurial blue-chip clients, has a staff of more than 50 people including eight of its original 10 employees, and was recently named to Inc. magazine's "500" list of the fastest-growing, privately held companies in America ( see video interview here).

"Our thought was that there was a fantastic marketplace out there that wasn't being served by the big media agencies," Farella says in hindsight. "What we found is that there is a ripe market here and that it is still growing."

That market, he says, is being fueled by the dissatisfaction some clients are experiencing with the big agency approaches that are structured around the biggest media accounts.

"That works for the top 10 or 20 guys in the world. Other clients have different needs that don't require all that overhead," Farella says, pointing to TargetCast's growing roster of relatively smaller--and more entrepreneurial-oriented--clients such as TIAA-CREF, Wyeth, Ruby Tuesdays Restaurants, 1-800-Flowers.com, and Dominican Republic Tourism.

"They just want the answers to their business problems," says Siegel, adding that they've been attracted by TargetCast's ability to organize, structure and service based on the needs of new clients. "Our independence really gives us the ability to make the right choices for our clients," she boasts. "Everything we do is about ensuring that we have the right data, the right tools and the right staffing to service their business."

In some ways, TargetCast is a throwback to the early independent media buying services that blossomed in the 60s and 70s as an alternative to the traditional Madison Avenue media department approach. The success of such independents ironically led the big agency holding companies to unbundle their own media departments into free-standing media agencies, and to acquire many of the biggest of the independents.

Farella claims TargetCast is the first independent of its kind to launch in about 15 years, when an earlier crop of media shops like DeWitt Media (acquired by Publicis Groupe), Media First International (acquired by Interpublic), and Creative Media Inc. (acquired by Omnicom) were acquired by big agency holding companies, joining earlier pioneers like Western International Media, SFM Media Corp., and Botway Associates, which have all subsequently been merged into bigger Madison Avenue shops.

Among the last big generation of media buying services, only a fiercely independent Horizon Media Inc., and KSL Media--which bought itself back after being acquired by Interpublic--remain.

When they launched TargetCast five years ago, Farella and Siegel say they were heartened by the fact that no mid-size independent ever went out of business, although many have been acquired.

The reality is that there is plenty of business to go around. Aside from disenfranchised clients of big Madison Avenue media shops, there is the ample new business to be had outside the big agency holding companies, whose clients account for less than half of total media spending. In reality, the advertising business is a "long tail" marketplace made up of small and medium-size clients that never even plant a foot on Madison Avenue.

New business prospects aside, Farella and Siegel believe independents like TargetCast have another key advantage over the big boys: Their ability to recruit and retain talent.

"All of the agencies in our business are very good at what they do," Farella acknowledges, adding, "but a lot of them are not taking care of their biggest asset: their own people."

Another advantage, says Siegel, is that TargetCast doesn't need to keep reinventing the wheel as it grows its organization. Instead of creating departmentalized structures that many big agencies are now trying to move away from, Siegel notes that TargetCast's offering is completely integrated. The agency doesn't have separate traditional and digital media groups, but approaches everything from the kind of holistic communications orientation that its surname would suggest. TCM stands for total communications media.

"It all starts from an integrated, strategic platform," she says, noting that the flexibility allows TargetCast to organize itself around its clients' needs, and not the other way around.