• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, January 8, 2007

Just weeks after Chairman-CEO Michael Roth touted the promise of Interpublic's emerging media practice to a meeting of Wall Street analysts, the agency holding company is shutting down its Consumer Experience Practice and is parsing its responsibilities to its media brand shops Initiative and Universal McCann and to its Futures Marketing Group. The move, which comes less than three months after Interpublic announced the unraveling of its centralized Interpublic Media unit, is being attributed to similar economic reasons, but insiders say it also signals the growing influence of some rising stars within Interpublic's organization, especially Universal McCann President-CEO Nick Brien, and Bant Breen, Interpublic's senior vice president-director of strategic development and innovation.

Launched in May, the Consumer Experience Practice was the brainchild of long-time Interpublic media research diva Stacey Lynn Koerner, who left Initiative to assemble a team of elite thinkers with the goal of developing next generation research methods and tools that would help Interpublic's agencies and clients understand how technology is altering consumer use of media.

While the eight-person unit was beginning to generate genuine insights, it was also incurring significant costs without a clear revenue stream back to Interpublic, pitting it in a political quagmire with other operating units doing similar research tied directly to client business. Under Brien's helm, Universal McCann in particular has amassed an array of new research techniques and products that one insider termed "duplicative" with those of the Consumer Experience Practice. Universal also has been rebuilding a formidable communications practice and is getting close to announcing some of the fruits of those labors.

Interpublic's Breen, meanwhile, has been pulling strings behind the scenes and helping to develop a strategic plan for how Interpublic should leverage both media and technology, and whether it should be done at a corporate level or within existing operating units. Breen is said to have been working closely with Universal's Brien on the creation of new products and services related to digital media. Both executives come out of Publicis' Leo Burnett unit. Brien joined Universal in August 2005 after a long history at Burnett, most recently running Publicis' Arc operations. He was also a senior executive in Publicis' Starcom MediaVest Group. Breen joined Interpublic in January 2006 from his own consultancy, but had previously been a top manager at iLeo, the precursor to Arc.

Among other things, Interpublic has been evaluating a variety of new media investment opportunities and has been weighing whether it needs a futuristic venture capital function similar to Publicis' Denuo unit. In the past year, Interpublic has taken stakes in two high-profile digital media ventures - Facebook.com and Spot Runner - both of which have been making waves on Madison Avenue.

One thing Interpublic is not backing away from is its commitment to testing, research and development related to new media platforms. Interpublic's Emerging Media Lab, which grew out of Initiatives operations in Los Angeles, still has the support of the corporation, which plans to roll out similar labs in New York and London, and possibly other markets. As part of the restructuring, the lab will come under Interpublic's Futures Marketing Group, an amalgam of niche digital marketing assets, and below-the-line marketing services that are directly tied to revenue generation.

The Consumer Experience Practice will officially cease operations this Friday, but Interpublic has not yet decided what will happen with some of the consumer and technology gurus it has assembled, including Lydia Loizides, a highly regarded digital media analyst who is the author of MediaPost's Media Technology Futures.

It appears, however, that Koerner may be ending a nearly ten-year relationship with Interpublic. Koerner, who as a young media research analyst at Bozell and TN Media, and later within Initiative media, quickly rose to one of the most quoted Madison Avenue media experts. In recent years, she has focused on developing new tools for managing and understanding the extensive conversations consumers are having about brands directly on the Internet, via blogs, social networks and other emerging platforms. She was a direct architect of a TV analytics tool that has become a component of Nielsen BuzzMetrics.

Koerner declined to comment on the fate of the Consumer Experience Practice and referred calls to Interpublic's corporate communications staff, but she did tell MediaDailyNews that she hopes to continue developing some of the concepts she's been working on.

"There are some big trends coming. I just want to be part of that somehow," she said. Her next immediate project is a book entitled "Hyperlink Society," which will be published by Annenberg School of Communication.