Mediabrands Making Magic, Reorganizes To Market It

Mediabrands Ventures, the expansionary division within Interpublic's Mediabrands division, has slightly reorganized its management team reporting to CEO Matt Freeman, naming Tom Lightoller worldwide director of corporate development, and Joe Benarroch CMO, in addition to his ongoing role as global corporate affairs chief for Mediabrands overall. The creation of the CMO post is especially telling, because Mediabrands Ventures is aggressively incubating businesses, services and even tangible products -- both internally and via its burgeoning network of relationships with vendors, venture capitalists and startups -- that will need to be marketers with same acumen and discipline that Interpublic's agencies provide to the consumer marketing companies that are their clients.

And while most of the initial focus will be on developing marketing plans and communications strategies to position Mediabrands' expanding portfolio of marketing services organizations -- from traditional media agencies such as Initiative and Universal McCann to newer specialty units like Ansible, Cadreon, Geomentum, Orion Trading, Reprise, and Shopper Sciences -- some of them may materialize as tangible products marketed to businesses and consumers alike.

In one likely example, Mediabrands has quietly incubated what could be a breakthrough technology for the digital out-of-home media marketplace, The technology, which is code-named "EML Magic Window," is an inexpensive, flexible film that can be applied to any glass surface, turning it into a touch-sensitive, full-motion video screen.

The technology, which was incubated in Mediabrands' Emerging Media Lab in partnership with Screen Solutions Inc., BenQ and United Future, is a relatively simple, and inexpensive means of turning any glass surface -- say, the window of a retail store -- into a digital, interactive media experience.

Mediabrands' initial plans are to deploy the technology into retail environments, but the application of "in-glass creative" that can allow consumers to interact by simply touching or even gesturing at the surface could have implications for a wide variety of brands, products and even media content producers and distributors.

"To support the creative, Interpublic is developing a business rules and analytics engine designed specifically for the glass," reads an internal description of the technology developed by the lab. "It is intended to increase the value of the investment by dynamically driving personalized, hyper-targeted media, interactive experiences, and product offers into the glass, as well as capturing rich consumer engagement data."

Among some obvious applications, the description noted, would be installing the Magic Mirror on dressing room mirrors to create "an in-mirror, touch-based dressing room solution."

Benarroch says Interpublic currently has 10 similar lab-created products in its "pipeline," many of which could be brought to market soon. That, combined with the new products and services that will be incubated within Mediabrands Ventures, and especially its Velociter start-up unit, means Benarroch's position may be like no other marketing post ever created inside an agency holding company structure.

Benarroch, who has some consumer marketing background, says he will be recruiting a marketing team, and that some of the products and services launched through Mediabrands Ventures could have sizeable advertising budgets of their own, making the division one of the first big advertising organizations to become a significant advertiser itself.

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