MediaVest and Starcom
Double Standard
Starcom USA CEO John Muszynski isn't satisfied with winning media
magazine's agency of the year award four times in a row. "I want 10," he says. He's halfway there, but this year, his agency will have to share the stage with a familiar name - sibling shop MediaVest.
The Starcom MediaVest Group sisters tie for this year's honor for the same reasons - they are thought leaders for their industry and benchmarks for their competitors.
But in what has become arguably the most highly functional corporate family in the media agency business, they took distinctly different paths to the top.
Starcom, of
course, has built its brand on smarts and, in recent years, has become an innovation perpetual motion machine. But in 2007, Starcom outdid even itself, activating a deal with TNS to use Charter
digital cable system set-top boxes in Los Angeles to deliver second-by-second data and becoming the first - and still the only - buyer in decades to negotiate national TV deals with something other
than Nielsen ratings.
In New York, meanwhile, MediaVest was evolving from a classic buying shop to a digitally-focused player while simultaneously kicking the living
daylights out of all comers in high-stakes, blue-chip pitches - something it's done with regularity in recent years. And it displayed SMG's verve for smooth succession when, in the midst of digesting
more than $1 billion in new business from Wal-Mart, Wendy's, Abbott Pharmaceutical and Capital One, MediaVest CEO Laura Desmond ascended to CEO of SMG USA and handed the reins of the agency to Bill
Tucker, president of client service and agency operations.
"You can work off a common set of values, but people will drive it to their own standards of excellence,"
says Renetta McCann, SMG worldwide CEO, of her two stars. "They have different clients, their leadership has different personalities, but they each took what they did well and raised it to another
level."
The two agencies' shared DNA is at the root of their superiority, despite how differently it may manifest, agrees Desmond. "We want them to be united under the
SMG umbrella but to go to market the best way they see fit," she says. "This year is an excellent example of that. They did very different things but they still led to performance and results.
MediaVest had a spectacular year - very few companies could pitch and win Wal-Mart within 27 days, as the agency did, and then follow up with the Wendy's victory. Starcom signed some industry firsts
this year and had a real breakthrough on second-by-second ratings and research - a completely different path to performance and results than MediaVest but they both win the finish line every time."
Starcom sprinkled its 2007 Agency of the Year submission with its usual, strangely engaging mix of Midwestern modesty and confident braggadocio, all focused on how
innovative the shop is, especially when it comes to new metrics and accountability. The Chicago-based operation took note of its "massive efforts" to stay ahead of the game in negotiation strategy and
tactics, how it went "to greater lengths than any other agency to understand TV and video viewing behaviors" and, naturally, that it was very busy "making the smartest deals."
Also, as usual, Starcom backed it all up.
In 2009, all television will have to be transmitted digitally, and when the rest of the media agency
world gets there, they'll find Starcom - and its clients. The agency signed an agreement with TNS Media Research (best known in the u.s. for its ad spend data but also a provider of audience
measurement in other markets) to track anonymous set-top box data from the Charter Communications digital cable system in Los Angeles.
The system covers 300,000
households (compared to Nielsen's 12,000) and Starcom receives reports on nearly 400 TV networks with average-second program and commercial ratings. The TNS relationship allows the agency to look at
actual second-by-second commercial ratings and commercial versus program performance, as well as program duplication, audience flow, average seconds viewed and viewing behavior. Last year, Discovery
Networks and NBC jumped on board, validating the concept, says Chris Boothe, Starcom president and chief activation officer.
"For the longest time, all the industry
ever did was bitch and moan about Nielsen," Muszynski explains. "Complained about using the average of a program to determine the audience of that program. So Nielsen provides data that gives us
better precision, and the industry decides to go to average commercial ratings. From average program to average commercial ratings? We don't look at that as a big improvement."
The TNS deal, he says, was the biggest step Starcom took in 2007, and it was a blockbuster, effectively giving the shop and its advertisers an 18-month head start on the
marketplace. But it was just business as usual for Starcom which, not surprisingly, now coordinates the activities of all of the agencies of several of their clients. Even the sellers look to Starcom.
"We were a couple years ahead of everyone in terms of measurement currency and accountability," adds Boothe, and "every major head of network research came to us for
guidance and counsel pre-upfront."
That's thought leadership in action. But the agency is still far from satisfied. "I want our clients and the agencies that work with
us to see us as the idea incubators," concludes Muszynski. "That we know the future is completely unknown but we are willing to go down whatever road it takes to get to the right spot. Always moving
forward and leaping ahead to get to that unknown point, even if we have to create it."
Whereas Starcom's AOY submission was light on details and heavy on prose about
its strategic leadership, MediaVest sent the sizzle, complete with a chronological chart of accomplishments in 2007 and a comparison of its planning prowess to jazz ("we improvise based on insights"),
alongside a photo of Willie Nelson jamming with jazz musicians.
Not your typical Agency of the Year approach. But MediaVest makes a habit of defying convention. That's
why big clients flock to its roster. In fact, when Tucker took over the agency in the summer, the new CEO's first challenge was to manage the absorption of all that new business. "We had to ramp up
very fast," he notes dryly.
The shop still found time for forays into media's brave new world as it continued to transform itself from a classic buying operation to
what Tucker calls a commitment "to digital being at the core of our agency. Every single digital assignment is fully integrated and two-thirds of our clients use us for digital."
Indeed, MediaVest was all over the Internet and emerging media last year, conducting mobile tests for Procter & Gamble, putting the Crest "Smile State" on Facebook and Herbal
Essences Dump Cupid content on MySpace-the seventh most linked video of all time.
The shop also moved the needle in traditional media, demanding magazine
accountability with issue-by-issue guarantees (vs. the historic six- to 12-month averages). All major publishers either complied fully or altered their policies as a result. And in the spring of 2007,
MediaVest launched a multicultural unit, MV42, which is now the second largest multicultural media agency in the U.S. And it won a Mosaic award for its Coca-Cola "Timeline" campaign for Black History
Month, the first agency to win for a media effort.
All of that was accomplished with a new leader and 10 figures worth of new business to integrate. But that's the way
it is in the House that Desmond Built: Think smart, move fast and win, baby.
"When you move into the CEO job, you have to hit the ground running," says Tucker. "Laura
told me that once you're in it, you're in it and you don't always know what the day is going to look like. You build in that 20 percent of each day; you won't know what's going to happen."
Two agencies, two different paths: But one powerful corporate culture and the same standard of success - a gold standard.
"The hardest thing to do
is to get a successful company to go on a steady diet of change," concludes McCann. "That's what we at SMG and the leadership of our major brands do. What's next? What's the focus? How do we
continually add value? It's in the water for us."