• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, July 9, 2017

You probably heard the news last week that Publicis Media is putting the Mediavest brand on ice.

Out with the old and in with the new, as they say. One thing agencies love to talk about is the rapid pace of change in their sector and for good reason—that pace seems to be getting more rapid every day.

And, of course, to show they’re keeping pace, agencies are constantly tweaking their offerings and their branding. At one point, the “v” in Mediavest was uppercase. Then it was lowercase. Now that’s progress!

But seriously, the retirement of the Mediavest brand is a milestone.

It was one of the big holding company agencies that helped usher in the unbundling era in the '90s, when marketers began questioning the blanket 15% commission rate — and agencies responded by presenting them with an “unbundled” ala carte menu of services.

Part of that new menu included separate media agency services. Mediavest was in the vanguard.

It was established in 1993 or 1999, depending on your point of view. DMB&B established a separate broadcast operation called TeleVest in 1993 that was created and run by Irwin Gotlieb, now chairman of GroupM. TeleVest was then merged with the agency’s planning department in 1999 to form MediaVest, one of the first unbundled, full-service media agencies in the U.S. Gotlieb was the founding CEO.

Shortly thereafter, Gotlieb moved to WPP, where he founded Mindshare in the U.S., another early manifestation of the unbundling trend that combined the media operations of Ogilvy and JWT.

Around the same time that DMB&B was creating its ala carte menu, sibling creative agency Leo Burnett spun off Starcom to create a separate media offering. Holding company BCom3 joined MediaVest with Starcom to create Starcom MediaVest Group and put Jack Klues in charge. Publicis Groupe acquired the company that owned SMG in 2002.

SMG had a long and successful run. The agencies in the group ran some of the biggest media accounts in Adland, including General Motors, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and Kraft Heinz, for nearly 20 years.

A lot of that business has since moved to other shops, which probably explains the rebranding, at least in part. Everybody wants to move on and get in on the next new thing.

Not that it’s going away (although it's certainly evolving), but one thing unbundling didn’t do was foster collaboration. As they battle for attention and turf, the backbiting among separated creative and media siblings has always been fierce.

Marketers are sick of the politics and have let their agencies’ bosses know it. That’s why WPP chief Martin Sorrell is so big on “horizontality,” and why Publicis concocted its “Power Of One” reorganization. Other holding companies have their own iterations.

Yeah, collaboration. It’s easier said than done. In a system that fosters competition, everybody wants as big a piece of the pie as they can latch onto.

But if Sorrell and his peers have anything to say about it, collaboration is going to happen. Or at least improve.