• by May 25, 2005

Just try getting college girls not to drink. Such was the charge of Initiative Media's Bianca Espirito Santo. Fresh out of college in 1999, she began working for her sorority, traveling around the country to help struggling chapters right themselves. To win over wayward sisters, the sorority used empathy and legal warnings. The work left her well suited for a life in media; she now is a national broadcast supervisor for Initiative's largest domestic account - the $100 million plus Home Depot.

At 27, Espirito Santo handles brand integration initiatives for Home Depot, national broadcast buying, and works closely with the Initiative Atlanta planning and finance groups to help coordinate client needs.

Home Depot has right-of-first-refusal with reality show kingpin Mark Burnett, and Espirito Santo figures out which ideas are right for the marketer. So far, the retailer has been on two seasons of "Survivor" and "The Apprentice." She laid the groundwork for a challenge where Trump's winning team created a "how-to" clinic. The idea was to draw viewers' attention to Home Depot's workshops. Ten days after the show aired, 1,670 Home Depot stores featured "The Apprentice's" clinic on how to build a wooden storage box.

"Five years ago, media buyers were about negotiating that 30-second spot, and all of a sudden, we are figuring out how to leverage those dollars and to integrate them into shows in a way that doesn't insult the viewer," Espirito Santo remarks.

Home Depot sponsored and was featured on NBC's "Home Intervention" where Vern Yip, formerly of TLC's "Trading Spaces," rescues a homeowner whose renovation had gone south. Espirito Santo negotiated with NBC, Home Depot, and production companies to get the superstore the most bang for its buck - everything from the number of commercials to how much product it would supply.

"She spends our money as if it were her own," says Christi Korzekwa, director of media for Home Depot.

At Initiative since 2000, Espirito Santo started as an assistant national buyer on the Home Depot account and became a buyer for the retailer and sandwich marketer, The Quiznos Master, two years later. This March, she was named supervisor at Initiative about two years earlier than many Initiative contemporaries.

"If you want to succeed, you have to dedicate yourself. Just to know what's going on with advertising [isn't enough]. You have to know what's going on with the housing market. You need to know what's going on with lumber prices in Latin America. If I want to be the best at my job, I need to know what will impact their sales," says Espirito Santo.

A TiVo devotee, she understands the challenge and promise of digital video recorder technology "Pretty much every client is scrambling to make sure they are integrated on shows," she says. "But [the question is] at what point are consumers going to say 'I can't take it anymore. It's not organic?'"

Espirito Santo got into media when a friend of her older sister thought she would be a great fit in network sales especially with some buying experience. The friend - Claudine Lilien, now vice president of Eastern and Western sales at The WB - got Espirito Santo an interview with Tim Spengler, executive vice president and director of national broadcast at Initiative; she had a job within a week. Now she and Lilien sit across the table from one another.

"She conducts herself with the utmost integrity on behalf of her client," Lilien says. She won't let "me use my friendship with her and her sister if it doesn't make sense for her client."

Spengler, who oversees Initiative's 90-person network department, says Espirito Santo is an unusual mix. When the Los Angeles office lost its administrator, Espirito Santo - already an experienced buyer - stepped in to fill the void. Spengler says, "she is early in her career and doing incredibly well. Her potential is endless."

Down the road, Espirito Santo eventually sees herself as a media director for a marketer. "I like to be on the side that has the money," she wittily notes. Hillary Chura

Danielle DeCarlo
Grace Under Pressure

Danielle DeCarlo is a self-described organization freak. "I'm very much a planner," confesses the woman who has sticky notes for her sticky notes and lists for her lists. "And when I go on vacation, I'll have an itinerary." Overkill? Not in DeCarlo's line of work. She has to be hugely organized to manage six brands, their 20-some-odd partner agencies, nearly a dozen account supervisors, as well as numerous account executives and assistants.

DeCarlo, account director for Pfizer at Carat USA, commutes to New York from Staten Island where she was born and raised. She arrives at the office at 8:30 a.m. and spends about a third of her day in meetings - asking and fielding questions, developing, reviewing, and approving media plans and recommendations. In between, she catches up on industry news by reading Adweek and Ad Age online.

With so much on her plate, you can be sure this petite 30-year-old spitfire expects a lot from her team and from the media. "She has a stiff hand when need be," says DeCarlo's supervisor, Sean Smith, vice president and group account director. Lisa Rapp, the New York sales manager for u.s. News & World Report, who's been calling on DeCarlo for three years, calls her "demanding, but in a quiet type of way."

Smith is quick to note that DeCarlo never raises her voice or loses her cool; Rapp says DeCarlo is a good listener. Perhaps it's a result of her weekly yoga class. Or maybe it's just her personality. "She has a laid back calming effect," Smith says. "She doesn't seem to get rattled. She may be rattled from within, but she doesn't communicate that, or you don't feel that aura with her."

"Accounts that would drive other people crazy, Danielle could manage to pull together and get them running in a way that defeated many other people," recalls Susan Young, formerly senior partner and account director and DeCarlo's supervisor at Mediaedge:cia, DeCarlo's former employer. "She's worked with some extremely difficult clients and managed to keep her cool, including one who had asked that other people be moved off the business. But Danielle could handle him with aplomb."

Her skills haven't gone unnoticed at Carat. In 2003, she was awarded the agency's inter-company "Living Legend" award for outstanding performance, achievement, and job success. "I wish I had 10 of her," Smith says. "I'd take 10 Danielles over someone with 10 years' experience any day because of the approach she has and how hard she works. Her level of dedication is just outstanding. She's definitely a rising star."

Being impulsive? That's something DeCarlo is working on getting better at. "I would love to incorporate more spontaneity in my life," she says. We wonder whether she's written a sticky note about it. Lynn Russo

"Nice" is the operative word when it comes to 36-year-old media executive Coleen Kuehn. She's also smart, hard-working, and amazingly calm in the midst of chaos.

"There are very few compliments I can pay people higher than they're nice, smart, interested, and interesting," says Jerry Shereshewsky, Yahoo!'s liaison to Madison Avenue. "And Coleen meets all of them." Mike Donahue, head of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, agrees, calling Kuehn a "unique combination of intelligence, energy, and downright niceness."

But we all know "nice" doesn't get the job done, especially in the fast-paced and cut-throat agency world. Those who know her as "nice" are just as quick to say that Kuehn, executive vice president and chief catalyst strategist for mpg North America, has used brainpower and skills to climb the media industry ladder. "She thinks," says Fernando Rodés Vilà, executive vice president of Havas, mpg's parent company, and CEO of mpg worldwide. "And she thinks deeply. That is something that is getting more and more rare [today]."

As head strategist, Kuehn is responsible for keeping on top of trends in areas like consumer behavior and the latest media techniques and channels, and then providing feedback on how to infuse that knowledge into successful campaigns and programs.

For instance, "In a new-business meeting with a pizza company recently, I asked, 'What keeps you up at night?' and the person's response was, 'When I look at our demo and see that the 5- to 11-year-old age group is dropping by X percent over the next five years and that's my market.' That got me thinking, which categories will be impacted most by fewer children or an older marketplace? Then we went to all our clients in those categories and said, 'Have you been thinking about what's going to happen in 10 years?' Clients don't often expect that kind of proactive approach, but there will always be another agency that is going to send them a letter and offer something like that... and they might say, 'Why doesn't my agency do that?'"

Kuehn started her career at Coca-Cola fresh out of graduate school, but cut her teeth during a several-year stint at American Express, where she helped build the firm's first Web site and Web infrastructure, among other responsibilities. She learned valuable lessons from her mentor, Randy Christopherson, who was president of AmEx Relationship Services. "He set up a culture of innovating and being unafraid of failure."

Kuehn also led the Procter & Gamble online business while working at a division of Mediacom, growing the account from four brands to 40, then was elevated to president of Mediacom's interactive media unit. As president, she continued growing the agency's business. How'd she do it? By asking. "I just said, 'Give us a product and if it succeeds, give us another one.'" LR

Jeff Malmad
Plate Spinner

Trade jargon, high-flying ideas, and big talk about the future cling to the media industry like dryer-fresh socks. When it comes to the rubber meeting the road, though, look no farther than Jeff Malmad for both action and perspective.

As the director of futures for MediaCom, Malmad, 32, walks the talk every day, expending creative and intellectual calories in a thousand different directions trying to get a handle on emerging media. "I work to maximize the inclusion of all the new media technologies into our communications," Malmad says. "The media these days is totally exciting with its constant change and all the new digital touchpoints. The challenge is to keep up with everything."

At MediaCom, Malmad employs his knowledge of media to integrate all the tools available. The media mix can include everything from video-on-demand, digital video recorders, and video games, to wireless, online, and broadband. The changes in technology and consumer behavior make Malmad the ultimate circus performer spinning plates as fast as he can without breaking any.

"Jeff brings a true understanding of the media, always looking for the best opportunity with a unique flair for emerging media technologies," says Nick Pahade, managing director at Beyond Interactive, the division of MediaCom where he worked with Malmad previously. "He brings an element of creativity that's missing from many media professionals."

"We live in the world of 'I-control' media," Malmad says. "Consumers today subscribe to VOD, TiVo, Napster To Go, they have a Netflix account, they buy video games, they've got magazine subscriptions, and every flavor of HBO. The out-of-pocket for some people is $300 a month just to access media the way they want it. So how do you reach the consumer in this space?"

The answer is with creativity and a willingness to devise cross-platform strategies for clients. He cites a recent campaign for Remington, an example of an account that MediaCom deployed a variety of media tools on to create the Titanium Bowl.

"It was the first ad-supported video game tournament," Malmad says brimming with excitement. "We engaged the consumer through the whole process using everything from billboards, chat rooms, the Web, TV, and product placement."

The effort culminated in an event featuring nfl athletes and celebrities like Carmen Electra. For Malmad, it was a home run that he says fully integrated all the touch points - and all centered on a video game. "We're now working with clients to do something that's even bigger," he says. "But it's a real challenge because programs like these have a lot of moving parts, a lot of deadlines, and a lot of people involved." "The plan is always to make things more engaging to the consumer, more brand-centric," Malmad says. "So if someone says, 'Here's a great idea,' I might say, 'Why not extend it to the VOD platform to communicate X, Y, and Z?' It's all about educating people about how to better execute programs in the on-demand world we live in today."

"Jeff embraces and understands that today's market is all about the consumer," Pahade says. Alex Miller

Chris Price
Target Demo, Test Case

Peddling games and booze are all in a day's work for Chris Price. A media supervisor at Universal McCann, he runs the next generation of media for various Bacardi products after overseeing day-to-day planning operations for Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox video game console. Price joined Universal in 2000, just as the agency parted ways with $40 million worth of Unilever business because of Johnson & Johnson Co. conflicts. The team dwindled too, and Price and a group director handled the transition.

"I was thrown into the fire. I was doing things I wouldn't have had any opportunity to do. It was a big boost and propelled me more than I assume other people were at the same stage," he says.

Price, 28, has an unassuming way that makes even his elders sit up straight and take notice. He's one of a handful of people at Universal who has won an internal award signifying their potential.

He was named media supervisor in 2002, fewer than three years after joining Universal McCann, and has managed as many as eight people. When his planning team asked networks for ideas on the Xbox, it wasn't advisable to come up empty.

"If they didn't come back acting as a partner as opposed to a vendor, then we didn't place as much money there," he says.

The music network Fuse, for example, offered to establish an Xbox corner on one of its live shows and to showcase the latest games and celebrity endorsements. MTV developed a half-hour show on the making of "Halo 2." With Bacardi, the New England Sports Network set up a Bacardi Sports Desk with the Bacardi name and bat logo visible. Spike TV has a Bacardi Casino Cinema with gambling pointers during commercials. "People have to find ways to create demand," Price says. "Things are always changing, and you have to open your eyes. You can't plan based on what was available yesterday. You plan on what is available today and available tomorrow."

Eric Poritzky, Price's boss and an assistant media director at Universal McCann, says Price is a tough negotiator.

"You can't be willing to walk away from something unless you know what the next guy has, and Chris has a good handle on both," Poritzky says. "He definitely puts his clients' money where his mouth is."

Price customizes media ideas for each brand, capitalizing on target analysis. It helps that he is the target audience of Bacardi and Xbox. "I'm a guy, and guys play video games," he says. "Xbox and Bacardi hit close to home."

On Bacardi Superior, the world's top-selling spirit, Price manages eight executives. Poritzky says Price instills confidence, which is important for a client that spends nearly $90 million through Universal. "Our Bacardi client is kind of a demanding client, and I've spent the last four or five years garnering their respect," Price says. HC

Jamie Rubin
Contextually Speaking

Whenever time and weather permits, Jamie Rubin hops on his bike and pedals to work. As he zips through Manhattan en route to Deutsch's Midtown-West headquarters, he finds himself in the shadows of Sean John billboards, perched alongside phone kiosks touting the city's Olympic bid, and momentarily blocked by buses bearing 20-foot-wide ads for HBO's "Deadwood." It's during these rides, Rubin says, that he does some of his best and most concentrated thinking.

"We're in a very smart world," he observes. "A big part of my job is being out on the streets and finding new touchpoints with consumers."

It's a responsibility that Rubin, 29, takes quite seriously. As a media supervisor who's worked on the Mitchum deodorant and Starwood Hotels and Resorts business (Deutsch no longer handles the former), Rubin distinguishes himself by melding non-traditional and out-of-home media with the creative use of traditional media. Such a mindset, he believes, is crucial in an era marked by increasing aversion to advertising in all its iterations.

"I'm not as convinced as everybody that TiVo will be the end of advertising as we know it," he says. "What it's doing is making us all work more smartly."

Rubin confesses that his mind rarely turns away from the task at hand, whether inside the office or out. A few minutes prior to being interviewed, he was paging through a copy of the now-on-hiatus Tracks magazine, which chronicles the non-teenybopper popular music scene. His radar immediately started blipping when, a few pages in, he spotted an ad for online shoe seller Zappos.com.

"I thought it was a horrible placement," he says, getting slightly riled as he recounts the experience. "A Taylor guitar appeared before it... that makes sense. A beer ad was there too. Appropriate. But Zappos? I don't think [the magazine's] demographic is buying shoes online or cares to."

This constant focus on media, according to those who know him well, elevates him above many of his peers. "If he hits a wall, he'll keep going right at it until he gets a resolution," says Kiki Rees, Revlon's vice president of media, who worked with Rubin on the Mitchum account and other Revlon business when the account was at Deutsch. "He has a maturity that you don't see in people at that level."

Indeed, Rubin remains a relative newbie to the world of media. He worked at Salomon Smith Barney after college producing collateral materials for brokers to use in sales. The lack of creativity frustrated him, as well as having to wear suits.

During his five-year tenure at Deutsch, Rubin has worked on a range of big brand accounts. His welcome-to-the-business moment came at the outset of his year and a half on the firm's Snapple account, when he learned his team would be expected to compete with the Cokes of the world, despite a vast disparity in budget. "Hundreds of millions per year versus $10 or $15 million per year - no problem," he quips.

Rubin considers his work on Mitchum account among his proudest achievements. Revlon, which hadn't advertised in 15 years, tapped Deutsch to revitalize the brand among younger consumers. The treatment - 25-second TV spots, print ads, and different copy for every out-of-home execution. The latter included ads on matchbooks in bars and restaurants, with copy reading, "If you've ever had to burn incriminating photos, you're a Mitchum man."

"We didn't just want to be the wallpaper that so much advertising has become," Rubin says. "Consumers have so much control over what they see. We wanted to be where maybe they wouldn't expect us."

Which, of course, brings him back to his bike. "I was riding at 6 a.m. today. There were these wild postings around the [Brooklyn] bridge that got me thinking how it's all out there on the streets. The opportunities are right in front of us - it's just a matter of putting yourself in the right place to see them," Rubin says. Larry Dobrow

Andrea Slodowicz
Living La Vida Futura

You fly with Andrea Slodowicz, and you're flying with her family. When this 28-year-old associate media director at Starcom's Tapestry deplanes, you have to wait for the ritual call from mom in Buenos Aires, who tracks flight times on the Web and checks to make sure that her daughter didn't fall from the sky. "It's a whole Latin and Jewish thing together," Slodowicz explains.

Actually, it's a very 21st century American thing. Slodowicz is an object lesson in our demographic future, where multiple ethnicities and national identities inform a consumer's identity. Lección número uno about Hispanic consumers: "They are doing everything as a family unit. They go to McDonalds together. They go grocery shopping together," she says. It's like flying with Slodowicz: When you talk to one Hispanic consumer, you are talking to a family.

These are the insights that only come from living and breathing the emerging market that media planner Slodowicz pitches to brand managers at Kraft and Coke. A Polish Jew who was born and raised in Argentina ("I am a minority wherever I go"), she seems genetically engineered for this. At Tapestry, Slodowicz invents tools to analyze Hispanic media and consumption habits and map how old mass-market brands can target specific sub-groups.

Lección número dos: Get your butt out of your chair and your nose out of mri reports and hit the streets. "The numbers don't tell you much. You need to get out there," Slodowicz argues. So she created the consumer insight tool "Happenings." Video cams and questionnaires in hand, she and colleagues canvas Chicago and New York neighborhoods to observe how Hispanics interact with media. At a Chicago lunch wagon, she discovered that Mexican soccer is obsessive, full-time water cooler talk for construction workers. This insight led to Coke's milestone sponsorship of Mexican National Team soccer broadcasts on Telemundo. By visiting mom and pop grocery stores, she found small sections devoted to foods with specific national origins. Now, Andrea is helping Kraft divisions understand how even a certain Jello flavor combination might remind Columbians or Mexicans of home.

"I call her an evangelizer," says Slodowicz's manager, Danielle Gonzales, Tapestry's vice president and media director. Andrea preaches her gospel "to teams that haven't even thought about Hispanics, like Jell-O or Planters," Gonzales says. Andrea shows old line brands how moving a small percentage of their spend to Hispanic media penetrates hidden markets and delivers disproportionate return on investment.

Slodowicz co-authors the annual "Insiders Guide to Hispanic Television," which charts how networks like Telemundo are serving Columbians and Ecuadorians, as well as the dominant Mexican Hispanic population. Which leads to lección número tres: melting pot-media is the future. If you're not flying with Slodowicz, then have breakfast with her as she tunes the radio to ultra-hip Reggaeton (a fusion of Spanish/English dance and hip-hop). "In popular and demographic trends, growth will be fueled by u.s.-born Hispanics living in two worlds, picking up trends from outside of the house," she says. While colleagues know her as a hyper-connected, high-tech guru, Slodowicz admits she doesn't actually pay much attention to the news. After all, her family is her filter.

"If something major happens, my mom will call." Steve Smith

Scott Witt
Renaissance Man Adds More Than Fizz

Asked to describe his first 14 months leading MediaVest USA's digital group, Scott Witt serves up a precise and appropriate metaphor: "I think we've refined the shock-absorption system on the digital SUV," he says. "It hasn't been the smoothest of rides, but every bump we've encountered we've learned something." Witt, 29, is clearly comfortable behind the wheel. Eight years into his career, he finds himself heading digital media initiatives for Coca-Cola's entire brand portfolio. In that role, he helped launch Coca-Cola C2 with a new media blitz, extended Sprite's brand in cyberspace, and worked with Lance Armstrong and what he describes as "humanlike talking marsupials," for Coke's Dasani water brand.

Witt was hired with the specific task of elevating the brands to new digital prominence. "They told me to keep pushing until they yelled 'stop!'," he recalls. "That's an amazing and frightening edict."

To hear his colleagues tell it, Witt handles the pressure with aplomb. "He marries the creativity of a great creative director with the analytics and knowledge of a great media director," says Cameron Death, senior business development manager of Microsoft's branded entertainment and experiences team.

Starting his career with copywriting ambitions, Witt entered a WPP Group/ OgilvyOne fellowship program that exposed him to various aspects of the marketing and media businesses. He quickly became attracted to new media, taking a post at Organic, an Omnicom Group-owned online marketing shop. The experience at Organic afforded him the chance to work on brands like Lego and Compaq.

While he has fond memories of the Internet boom period, "there were parties for 2,000 people where they'd serve nothing but candy cigarettes and Smarties," he found himself looking for new hills to climb when the bottom fell out. After a brief stint with a beauty/fashion creative boutique, he made his way to MediaVest. Witt concedes that he's still growing into the operational, management, and financial aspects of his job. "I was always the 'idea person' behind a brand. Having to balance the right- and left-brain parts of what I do, that's been a challenge."

"You have to learn to tailor pitches to get them to fall in love with something the way you're in love with it," he explains. "When you work 70 hours straight to create something that gets dismissed in 60 seconds by somebody who got his or her MBA three months ago, that's rough. Sometimes the people in a position to make decisions about your product may not be the best equipped to do so."

Witt counterbalances the pressures of his gig by writing and performing his own music, taking classes at the School of Visual Arts, and by doing what he calls a "kind of 'Fight Club' thing," attending trade shows in industries other than his own. LD