• by Joe Mandese , March 22, 2006

Nearly seven years ago, one of Madison Avenue's biggest buyers of television time changed its name from TeleVest to MediaVest. Now, in a move equally as symbolic, the agency has rebranded and restructured its powerful TV buying operations to reflect an even bigger shift away from traditional television. MediaVest, which buys time for some of the medium's biggest advertisers - companies such as Coca-Cola Co., Kraft, Masterfoods and Procter & Gamble - has scrapped the word television altogether and has reorganized its buying groups into what it calls Video Investment and Activation or "VIA" units.

The reorganization, the most dramatic move yet by a major TV shop, comes as the world's biggest advertisers meet in New York today for the Association of National Advertisers annual Television Advertising Forum, where they will be discussing a similar shift in thinking away from conventional television advertising and toward a new, broader vision of a video advertising marketplace.

But the MediaVest move is more than just symbolic. It reflects real changes in the way the agency plans to approach the new video marketplace, and especially how it works with media companies to reengineer the medium to make TV advertising more effective. It's also an aggressive move to reposition the agency and differentiate it from a crowded, and some might say an indistinguishable field of other big TV buying agencies, including sister shop Starcom.

"I think it differentiates us from all of our competitors," boasts Donna Speciale, president of U.S. Broadcast at MediaVest, whose title also represents something of an anachronism today. "It's about all the organizations we compete with, and I guess you can say Starcom is one of them."

The move is the most demonstrable shift yet to position MediaVest distinctly from Starcom, since the two were joined at the hip following parent Publicis Groupe's acquisition of the two media networks, and the creation of Starcom MediaVest Group. While the two agencies will continue to work seamlessly in servicing accounts the jointly work on, they are expected to become increasingly independent as Publicis seeks to create unique identities for all of its media shops including MediaVest, Starcom, GM Planworks, Starlink, Denuo, Zenith and Optimedia.

MediaVest's new VIA teams also represent a progression that began with Starcom MediaVest Group's creation of a Video Investment Group, or VIG, two years ago, that was the first of its kind on Madison Avenue, a cross-discipline unit that combined the TV, online, planning and research operations into a centralized team that sought to help develop a marketplace for new video advertising platforms by creating real advertising budgets to support them.

While VIG has been successful to date, MediaVest's Speciale says VIA has been formed to push the agency's directors - and rank and file buyers - even more aggressively away from conventional thinking about TV, and more toward a "neutral" video marketplace.

"Basically, we are now focused on video-neutral platforms. What we are not doing now is not just focusing on national broadcast," says Speciale. "That's what national buying used to be. Wherever content is being shown, we are looking at all those platforms."

While conventional national and local broadcast TV will continue to be a dominant part of the mix, Speciale says the group will push deeper into new video platforms - everything from broadband video to iPods, and whatever comes next.

Structurally, MediaVest will have seven VIA units headed by senior vice presidents. Each of the units will be cross-discipline, and will have digital media specialists "embedded" within them.

The VIA units will work with MediaVest's planning and strategy units to develop new ideas, but Speciale says "the word activation is key" to the new VIA structure. Because the VIA teams control actual advertising budgets, they can take new video advertising ideas beyond the concept phase and make them actual buys. Depending on the nature of the deal, the VIA teams may turn the execution over to digital specialist teams.

VIA also has two specialist teams within it, the so-called "Connective Tissue" unit headed by banded entertainment guru Brian Terkelsen, and a new unit headed by Pam Zucker, the long-time head of Procter & Gamble's buying account, who will be focused exclusively on working with video advertising outlets to create new ideas and standards for advertising. "It's a new role," says Speciale of Zucker, whose title will be senior vice president-marketplace ignition.

While Zucker will focus on the creation of new video advertising formats, all of the VIA groups are charged with rethinking the medium and leveraging their relationships with vendors to develop new, more effective ways of advertising on video. Speciale would not elaborate on specific efforts for proprietary reasons, but she says they might include new commercial formats, and new ways of scheduling commercial "pods."

Speciale says these efforts are critical to the future of the medium, because changes in business practices - especially fragmentation, clutter and over-commercialization - coupled with new media technologies, have changed consumer behavior, making viewers more apt to avoid traditional TV advertising formats.

"We're talking about how we can try to test new models in changing the consumer expectation. Commercialization is just one of them," alludes Speciale, who is nonetheless quick to point out that these efforts do not spell the demise of traditional TV advertising.

"This is not about broadcast being dead. Broadcast is fine. We have to find new ways of working within broadcast. Perhaps a little bit smarter," she says.

In fact, MediaVest had already begun to do that even prior to the launch of VIA. Speciale points to the work Terkelsen's connective tissue unit has been developing with major content companies, as well as some of the corporate-level media deals MediaVest has struck with big media companies like Viacom for Kraft and Procter & Gamble, which go well beyond conventional TV programming and advertising.

"The dialogue is very different now from where we started. Way back when, we started with the budgets at the corporate level. Now we are completely brand-focused, and consumer-focused. It tends to be much more idea and creative driven," she explains. "The costs and the CPMs come, I wouldn't say last, but they are not the first part of the conversation."