• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, April 9, 2004

Three months after launching as a new kind of digital marketing agency, Brand New World has lined up three clients that are all key players in emerging new digital media technologies, and is poised to change the way marketers and agencies target advertising, especially on television. The firm, which was created by former Universal McCann creative director Alan Schulman and former AOL interactive marketing chief Alan Feldenkris, has developed a new approach for adapting advertising on addressable cable TV systems that is capable of pinpointing messages with a new kind of precision.

The approach, which is based on a proprietary creative brief developed by Brand New World, utilizes a "scenario-based creative" that can be executed through new digital production versioning systems. Not coincidentally, one of Brand New World's clients, Visible World, is a chief enabler of that approach. Visible World, which has received backing from top agencies and from a major cable TV operator, Comcast, is just now deploying the technology into Comcast systems capable of serving addressable ads to 20 million cable households.

"We're never going to be J. Walter Thompson, but we are in a position to do addressable advertising that works right now," said Schulman. While he declined to spell out proprietary elements of the approach, he said it depends on a new orientation toward producing creative that is counter-intuitive to the major ad shops.

"It requires a little attitude adjustment. It means producing a broader array of shots that allow you to create versions of the ad for different audiences," he said, implying that it is more of an inductive approach that accumulates content for potential ad messages that is different from the kind of deductive approach used to produce a typical TV commercial, in which footage is edited down into a 30-second spot.

Importantly, Schulman said the approach considers an array of potential ad messages upfront, including ones that are aimed at the interests of specific targets, as well as targeted at specific geographies and dayparts.

"This is not as simple as changing tag copy and changing versioning from a classic retailing standpoint. It actually gets into dynamic versioning," said Schulman, adding that those versions can sometimes come from existing creative, but more often than not require additional "shoots" to make them relevant to addressable audiences.

Schulman said the approach is imperative to the development of an addressable advertising marketplace, because without the relevant ads, even the best addressable technology will make little difference.

"The creative piece seems to be a missing component, not the technology," he asserted.

Currently, Brand New World is focused on addressable TV advertising, but Schulman said the company is also exploring new broadband advertising applications, including one developed by Avant Interactive that enables users to seamlessly integrate commerce into video ads. "You click on something and it will automatically pull in a page from the client's commerce site," he said. "We've shown it to the major publishers and they really love it."

Schulman said Brand New World intentionally is working mainly with new media technology companies at this stage, because it wants to immerse itself in the latest capabilities before taking them to brand marketers. He said the company plans to announce several brand marketing clients within months.

The agency's other new technology clients include TruePosition, a division of Liberty Media that is developing new consumer products based on global positioning satellite technology; and PTI Media Networks, a company that is rolling out a place-based media network comprised of digital video advertising systems in gas stations and other locations.