• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, March 8, 2004

For some media shops, the future of media is still in the, well, future. For others, the future is now. That seems to be the mixed sentiment with which Madison Avenue is embracing the role of so-called "media futures" operations, units or individuals who are supposed to be charged with monitoring, testing and even deploying new media opportunities - especially interactive TV - on behalf of their clients.

But if the recent past is any prologue than some major shops seem a reticent to support the function, which many consider to be more an R&D luxury than a source of media service revenues. As a result, there has a rampant game of musical chairs and restructurings of futures operations at several major agencies.

Universal McCann, which has a deep-rooted role in the field - the agency was the first on Madison Avenue to join MIT's fabled Media Lab and was an early tester of interactive TV projects - has had four executives responsible for the function in the past year: Mitch Oscar, who left the agency about a year ago; followed by Jon Swallen, who recently joined TNS Media Intelligence/CMR; Alan Schulman who left to start his own new media agency; and finally David Cohen, senior vice president-interactive media director at UM.

Other media agencies seem to be following that suit, folding the media futures role into their interactive media units in an effort to tie them to some current, real-world media buys and to make them less theoretical.

"The future is now," explains, Jon Mandel, co-CEO and chief global buying officer of MediaCom, which recently consolidated the role under Jeffrey Malmad, who has been given the title director of media futures, a role that had been handled by Russell Booth, who has left MediaCom to become chairman of Insight Partners, a new sibling econometric modeling unit of parent Grey Global.

Mandel says Booth will continue to play a role in MediaCom's media futures efforts, overseeing Malmad on certain efforts, especially projects involving TiVo and other interactive TV initiatives.

Mandel says Grey's interactive unit, Beyond Interactive, has also been integrated into the media futures role. "It's soft of in different places right now, because it cuts across different media, interactive TV, online videogames."

Tying the operations to Beyond gives the practice a connection to an existing media marketplace, says Mandel, noting, "In a certain sense, it's like we're saying the future is here already."

To a certain extent, that's a similar approach being undertaken by Carat, which has quietly hired former Universal McCann media futurist Mitch Oscar and named him a executive vice president at Carat Digital.

I don't think there is one reason why so many changes have been made or why some shops are bringing in the function and others aren't," says Kurt O'Hare, president of O'Hare Associates, an executive recruiter specializing in agency media services. "I would think that in this age of perceived parity amongst the media agencies this media visionary could be a critical point of differentiation between shops."

If anything, O'Hare predicts such executives will become more in demand, not less.

"Some agencies are looking to do this econometrically and others qualitatively - but finding the ideal mix of the two seems to be more difficult than it may sound," says O'Hare, adding, "Several shops have moved people in and out of these roles and others have restructured their teams - which is to be expected."