• by Joe Mandese , May 9, 2007

Signaling a broad shift in the strategic direction of the kind of media services it provides its clients, Initiative North America Tuesday said it promoted entertainment and media marketing guru Alan Cohen head of its West Coast operations and would begin integrating his approach to all its businesses nationwide. In a related move, Initiative plans to open a New York office for Cohen's successful Innovations and Entertainment unit, which as been applying a marketing-oriented approach to traditional and new media platforms that has won the division major entertainment and media accounts such as CBS, Showtime and Lionsgate, as well as MEDIA magazine's "Media Boutique of the Year" honor for 2006.

The move is part of broader repositioning of Initiative North America under CEO Richard Beaven who has been restructuring the agency's operations and altering the mix and nature of services it provides clients.

The move represents a rapid ascent for Cohen, who joined Initiative little more than two years ago with a staff of three people to pitch new, entertainment oriented business for Initiative. When the fledgling team won CBS' coveted media account from long-time incumbent Carat, as well as Showtime and Lionsgate, the team quickly grew to 60 dedicated planners, buyers and new media specialists who operate more like marketers and account planners than traditional media services executives.

With his promotion to executive vice president-managing director of Initiative West, Cohen now oversees a team of more than 400, operating in offices in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco, and will also expand is dominion to New York vis a vis the new Innovations and Entertainment office there. But the shift appears more of a cultural one, than a territorial one, as Cohen looks to expand his approach to other offices, as well as types of clients not normally associated with entertainment marketing.

"I feel like we're reinventing what media means to these companies," says Cohen, a long-time entertainment marketing executive at NBC, ABC and most recently at Twentieth Century Fox, before joining Initiative. During his seminal days at NBC, Cohen was regarded as a marketing innovator forging joint promotions with some of the biggest consumer goods marketers, and exploiting what then were considered the most advanced media platforms of the time, including massive, pre-Internet uses of interactive media.

Initiative's Innovations and Entertainment unit was founded on similar principles, but in many ways as more options and sophisticated tools at hand. It also comes as both entertainment and conventional marketers face greater challenges than ever before in getting their messages heard, especially the combined effect of increasing media clutter and consumer control. Cohen's solution is three-fold:

"We redefine TV as video. We define the consumers as marketing. And we define advertising ad content," he explains, adding, "When you look at it that way, all of a sudden media looks like marketing."

The most literal example of that, he says, is when marketers utilize branded content. "The consumer is digesting it as content, but it's really a 60-minute ad," he notes.

As head of West Coast operations, Cohen will remain closely involved with Innovations and Entertainment's core accounts, which represent some of Initiative West's biggest clients. But he'll also look to expand the offering to others.

The unit already has begun working with non-entertainment clients such as Victoria Secret and AOL, and was a big factor in Initiative's defense of the AOL account last year.

His team already is developing plans for seemingly non-entertainment brands as Carl's Jr. and Las Vegas tourism, and even sees some innovative approaches for consumer packaged goods and pharmaceutical brands, suggesting that it may simply require looking at the essence of a brand from a new perspective.

For Bayer's Alka Seltzer brand, for example, he suggests, "It could be repositioned. It's not just for stomach distress, but for people who partied too much on the weekend."

The key, he says, is to infuse Innovation and Entertainment's ideas-oriented approach into the planning and buying process.

Organizationally, Cohen will be one of two coastal chiefs reporting directly to Beaven, and will split the nation with Rob FitzGerald, executive vice president-managing director of Initiative East.