• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, December 14, 2007

At a time when some of Madison Avenue's big, full-service agencies are considering how and whether to "re-integrate" media with creative, the biggest independent pure-play media shop unaffiliated with a major agency holding company has created a new post to mine the creativity of media. Horizon Media Inc. Thursday formally announced the creation of a new post, director of creative media solutions, and tapped Marc Strijdveen, the managing director of its Eurizon Amsterdam unit, to oversee it.

Strijdveen, who previously had creative agency experience at BBDO Amsterdam, where he was managing director of the media department, as well as the agency's "media concepts" director, will work with the agency's consumer insights and communications channel planning teams to apply them. He will report to Oliver Maletz, senior vice president, managing director of Horizon's insights group.

Although the role seems somewhat abstract, a Horizon insider said Strijdveen will effectively serve as Horizon's in-house expert on creativity, and will catalog "the masses of literature regarding creative media use and develop best practices internally and externally." He will also serve as the agency's de facto spokesman on media creativity, speaking at industry conferences and trade shows and to the trade press.

While media arguably has always been a part of the creative process, the concept of media creativity has built momentum over the past few years, especially with the creation of a series of industry awards shows recognizing the art and craft. Four years ago, MediaPost, the publisher of MediaDailyNews created the Creative Media Awards in recognition of the creative use of media across a variety of platforms and executions. The role of media creativity, meanwhile, has grown at big industry events, like the Cannes Advertising Festival, where media has taken center stage via the Media Lions awards. And new conferences have begun to emerge such as the Venice Festival to further discuss and recognize the role of media creativity.

Ad industry creative awards compiler The Gunn Report introduced a "Gunn Report For Media" two years ago, and in July MediaPost began publishing Media Creativity," a new publication edited by Out To Launch Editor Amy Corr focusing on the subject.

The new Horizon post also comes as big "full-service" agencies are trying to figure out where media creativity begins and traditional advertising creative leaves off. Publicis recently restructured legendary creative shop Leo Burnett to work under an "open architecture" structure in concert with media agency Starcom MediaVest Group and interactive agency Digitas via a new umbrella concept dubbed the Insight Factory. The new structure reports up to a committee chaired by former Leo Burnett Media Director Jack Klues, who is now chairman of Publicis Groupe Media.

Media agencies also have taken stabs at introducing whole creative functions within their organizations. For a short while, Universal McCann had an actual creative - Alan Schulman, now executive creative director at IMC2, and a regular contributor to MediaPost's Video Insider - but phased that position out. Havas' Euro unit, meanwhile, went in the opposite direction, creating a "director of creative media" role held by former OMD exec Richard Notarianni.

The line between media creativity and traditional advertising creativity has been further blurred by the emergence of new media where advertising content and conduit may be one and the same. This is clearly evident among interactive agencies, which specialize in both, and in a host of new "communications planning" shops like Naked New York, winner of Media magazine's 2007 "Media Boutique of the Year" award, which sometimes acts more like a creative shop than a communications shop, and which, founder and CEO Paul Woolmington says, "defies a label."