• by April 16, 2007

Aiming to offer a complete suite of services, interactive shop R/GA said it added a media buying function and hired Joy Lin, formerly of Agency.com, to the newly created role of media director. The Interpublic Group agency's buying presence will complement strategic and media planning functions the shop launched in 2004. Lin will report to Ken O'Donnell, group media director and head of the media buying team.

The move by R/GA, which is best-known for building sophisticated and award-winning video and Flash-packed Web sites for clients like Nike, Verizon, L'Oreal Paris and Purina PetCare, underscores how digital shops are increasingly unwilling to cede functions and business to traditional media shops. And it also shows how they're angling to become full-service players, offering a host of different services across all media, strategic and creative functions.

R/GA expects to grow its media team, now just four people, over time. The team supports the agency's Universal Planning model, which is designed to unite all planning disciplines in one organization.

The goal, according to Anne Benvenuto, executive vice president of strategic services, is to deliver integrated creative media plans that incorporate paid media such as online advertising and search, and non-paid media like word-of-mouth, viral and relationship marketing.

Benvenuto, who is responsible for overseeing the agency's insights, planning, data intelligence and media functions, said R/GA's model is designed to ensure that strategic and media planners inspire and actively contribute to the creative process.

Benvenuto took pains to correct the perception that R/GA is merely a digital shop: "It's not actually an interactive agency, it's an agency that has a core competency in interactive and digital. The vision was to have a universal planning model so that all the planning disciplines are united in one organization."

At R/GA, Benvenuto said, media planning sits in the same organization as account planning, direct and CRM [customer relationship management] planning.

"It's significant because it allows the media group to consider the whole engagement path from awareness and acquisition, to relationship and retention marketing," she said.

Adding the media buying function, O'Donnell said, is really just "a natural extension that organically our clients have been asking for. They've been asking for integrated plans." R/GA had been outsourcing media buying to IPG sibling shops like Universal McCann.

"We want to provide all our clients with media planners and media buying across all of our accounts. We feel that within this universal planning model that the end results of these programs are more tightly integrated across the board," O'Donnell said--adding that R/GA plans to take into account non-digital media within its planning process and currently works with outdoor digital, mobile, e-mail, CRM, direct mail and video kiosks, among other emerging platforms.

Lin, one of OMMA magazine's 2006 Rising Stars, will manage R/GA's day-to-day online media planning and buying practice and develop content partnership programs with online publishers that include rich media display advertising, search marketing and mobile advertising.

R/GA is agency of record for Nike's U.S. digital business, and counts Verizon Communications and Verizon Wireless, Nokia Multimedia, L'Oreal Paris, Avaya, Subaru, and Sunglass Hut among its clients.