• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, December 13, 2006

Lisa Seward, the chief media officer of one of the nation's most creative ad agencies and a champion of the integration between media and creative on Madison Avenue, is leaving Minneapolis-based Fallon after a ten-year run as its media director. Seward, who presided over one of the most highly regarded media departments and spearheaded award-winning media campaigns known for their creativity, will launch her own, as-yet-unnamed Minneapolis-based media services business early next year to help advertisers and agencies "future-proof" their media plans. Seward will stay on through the end of the year to help Fallon search for her successor.

"I want to focus on that wonderful, warm and fuzzy area between media and creative," Seward tells MediaDailyNews, which announced her departure inside the Publicis unit late last week.

"It's a really rich area. The big question on everyone's mind is how do they prepare and organize for the changes that are taking place. And while I don't claim to have all the answers, I have a lot of experience, and I've done all I can do at Fallon."

The move isn't just a loss for Fallon, but for Madison Avenue--where Seward has been one of the strongest and most articulate voices for the traditional full-service agency media department, and the integration between media and creative. Seward has championed some of those views as a regular columnist for MEDIA magazine. In this month's column, entitled "Embrace Fuzziness," Seward writes of a recent epiphany she experienced and why it is imperative for media planners and buyers to challenge the rules of convention.

"Suddenly I got it. I felt simultaneously terrified and thrilled at the prospect of there being no set conventions in these times of cataclysmic change. Here we had been putting our energy into clarifying new media rules, when in fact, the very definition of next-generation media might be its inherent 'rulelessness.'"

Seward cites recent work she has done for Fallon clients such as Citi and NBC Universal that was premised on building new processes for generating "fast creativity" in both media and advertising messages. "It's absolutely amazing, when you get the formula right, how fast you can get the right answers. I think there are ways to orchestrate that through process, structure, leadership and ideation, and I want to begin working with other clients and agencies to do that."

Seward's departure comes as the advertising industry is questioning the impact of unbundling media services, and as many marketers are rethinking the strategy and trying to find new ways of integrating media and creative. Some big agency holding companies are doing the same. Interpublic Group, after trying to centralize its media offerings under Interpublic Media Group, has chosen to realign media shops Initiative and Universal McCann with strong creative brand agencies--Draft FCB and McCann-Erickson, respectively. Strong, integrated full-service agency media departments like Fallon's; Crispin, Porter + Bogusky's; RPA's; Martin's and Mullen's, meanwhile, are dominating industry awards and buzz for their creative media thinking.

Seward, who prior to Fallon was a rising star within Publicis' Leo Burnett media department, says she doesn't have a plan for her new enterprise, a name, a list of prospective clients, or executives she'd like to collaborate with yet, but she says she is eager to get started.

"We've been at this inflection point between media and creative for a while now, and I'm beginning to see that we're not going to be in it forever," she says. "Now is as good a time as any to give this a try."