• by Joe Mandese , January 8, 2004

Amid an array of announcements this week about a "brave new world" of digital consumer media developments, one of Madison Avenue's highest profile new media executives is unveiling plans for a new type of interactive ad agency dedicated exclusively to exploiting such technologies for marketers. The new shop, aptly named Brand New World, in fact will rely on a fair measure of bravery from marketers, traditional agencies and media platform developers, many of who have been loath to exploit next generation interactive media technologies until they are proven and have reached a critical mass of consumer penetration. The agency, which will be unveiled today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, is being headed by Alan Schulman, who just resigned as creative director of Universal McCann (MediaDailyNews Jan. 7) and Alan Feldenkris, former head of interactive marketing at America Online.

Initially, the shop plans to work primarily with innovative digital media platform developers themselves, the kind that have innovative new interactive media applications but who don't necessarily now how to approach Madison Avenue to develop them. In fact, Brand New World's first client is Visible World, an interactive TV advertising producer and distributor that has figured out how to produce high quality, on-the-fly and relatively inexpensive versions of traditional TV ad campaigns for addressable cable TV systems.

As such, Brand New World plans to compete with the major full-service interactive agencies, which also are seeking to exploit next generation interactive media, but whose primary work is with common interactive media applications - mainly the standard Internet advertising units such as banners, buttons and pop-ups, as well as email marketing.

Brand New World, by contrast, will work almost exclusively on emerging platforms that stretch the "sight, sound and motion" of digital media in a way that competes directly with traditional TV advertising, but which also offers interactive branding, affinity and electronic retailing capabilities.

The agency, for example, has extensive plans for new broadband Internet applications, as well as interactive TV (ITV) and wireless, mobile media technologies.

"We believe that with the advent of broader bandwidth advertisers have the ability to blow past those formats. We're talking about doing things well beyond rich media and the Flash, Eyeblaster and Unicast type of things. We're talking about custom type services like video mixers and music mixers that are virally relevant to consumers. The kind of things that they will want to pass on to their friend through email and to a wireless device," Schulman told MediaDailyNews on the eve of today's announcement.

While that might sound like a new threat to traditional media agencies, Schulman says Brand New World's goal is to work mainly through traditional media shops to execute the concepts and strategies it develops with technology companies and marketers.

Schulman, who recently resigned as executive vice president-creative director of Universal McCann said he would continue working as a non-exclusive consultant to that agency for a few months to "transition" some of the high-profile interactive media projects he had been working on to other Universal executives, mainly Interactive Media Director David Cohen, who has assumed control of most of Universal's interactive and so-called "media futures" operations as part of an extensive restructuring of that agency (MediaDailyNews Jan. 7).

Schulman says Brand New World doesn't necessarily want to reinvent the advertising wheel, but will be focused on ways of extending existing advertising campaigns - primarily television ads - into new media platforms that expand their reach, provide more interactivity and, in many cases, also create a transactional component.

"We call them transactional flashpoints," says Schulman, noting that is where Feldenkris' expertise will come in. Whereas Schulman plans to work primarily with brand-oriented marketers, Feldenkris will work with retailers looking to expand their interactive media reach. The two will overlap on integrated campaigns and strategies.

Schulman says the timing is ideal for Brand New World, because interactive ad spending is finally back on the upswing and because marketers are more willing - indeed needful - of making such R&D investments again. More significantly, he says the media marketplace has also reached an inflection point relative to some new media platforms, particularly broadband, which is in about 23 million U.S. households and is growing rapidly. As evidenced by announcements being made at CES this week, a vast new generation of interactive media technologies is coming right behind it.