• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, December 17, 2008

Michaelides & Bednash

History repeating

For an industry whose fundamentals are based on the perpetual notion of "new and improved," it makes sense that Madison Avenue is constantly reinventing the way it sells its services. Occasionally, it even reinvents the services it provides.

That was the case during the 1950s when a new, dynamic medium - television - began transforming the way advertisers communicated with consumers. But it wasn't until a new visionary - Doyle Dane Bernbach founder Bill Bernbach - modified the way agency creative departments are organized that Madison Avenue really grasped the potential of the medium. Bernbach's epiphany was to couple Madison Avenue's wordsmiths with a new generation of visual smiths, creating the copywriter/art director team that has been Madison Avenue's stock-in-trade for the half-century leading up to its next media paradigm shift: the explosion of digital media and alternative communications platforms. Bernbach was long dead by then, but a couple of British renegades from some traditional creative shops were possessed by his spirit, and in 1996 created what has become known as the communications planning agency, and in the process, revolutionized the way advertisers and agencies use media. The breakthrough from George Michaelides and Graham Bednash was, in fact, inspired by Bill Bernbach. But instead of pairing copywriters and art directors to form a "creative team," they paired media planners with creative directors to form a "communications strategy" team. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Twelve years later, Michaelides & Bednash's model has been copied by much of the industry. It has spawned an array of stand-alone communications strategy shops - the most notable of which is likely Naked Communications (which actually launched several years after M&B) - and got the biggest media shops on Madison Avenue to restructure their media planning organizations into communications planning teams. It got giant marketers like Procter & Gamble to scrap old-school planning approaches too. And in 2008, it got the world's biggest buyer of media - WPP Group's GroupM - to buy into it, in the most literal of ways. In October, GroupM acquired M&B and merged it into Mindshare's new Invention creative group, putting Michaelides and Bednash in charge of the effort of reinventing Mindshare's media creativity.

So in a way, it's a bit ironic for Media to be recognizing Michaelides & Bednash as its Media Boutique of the Year for 2008, because that was the year that M&B - the organization that gave rise to the modern-day media boutique - ceased to exist. It ceased to exist in large part because it had accomplished all it could achieve as a stand-alone boutique, and it needed the kind of global scale and resources that GroupM had to offer to truly realize its vision of fusing media and creativity for the start of the new millennium - the way Bill Bernbach fused art and copy in the final century of the last one.