Goodby, Silverstein & Partners
They've Got It Together
Like a handful of other media savvy brand agencies, the
team at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners are usually on Media's short list for selection as Media Department of the Year. We picked them for 2007, in large part, because they abolished their
media department during the past year. Well, they didn't actually get rid of it. They merged it with their account planning group to create a seamless "strategy department" that could well be the new
model for the media department of the future.
At a time when many voices in the industry are calling for greater integration between media, creative and brand science,
or even the "re-integration" of media and brand agencies, GS&P took the debate to the next logical step, blowing up the old models altogether, and creating something new, a strategic organization that
looks seamlessly across how people think and behave towards brands and how they relate to the media that delivers brand messages.
The change took place last summer,
when GS&P merged its media department with its account planning team, creating a fully integrated strategy department co-headed by former media director Joshua Spanier and account planning chief John
Thorpe, who serve as director of communication strategy and director of brand strategy, respectively. The reason they won isn't because they dumped media, but because they recognized it was evolving
to a new level of strategic integration that required a new kind of organizational structure.
Surely, it wasn't the first time a major agency integrated its media
department with the other full-service aspects of the rest of the shop. That, in essence, is the way any good agency should be structured. But this one took it in a new direction by saying media is a
strategic function that shouldn't simply be aligned with the other facets of brand strategy, but is part and parcel with it.
GS&P also managed to take on this
transformation at a time when many agencies would be too distracted servicing business and hiring new people to think about radical new organizational structures. During 2007, GS&P picked up more than
$2 billion in billings from new clients including Sprint, Hyundai, Cheetos, the NBA and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, and hired more than 210 employees just to service the business.
GS&P got the best kind of praise possible in 2007, racking up more than $2 billion in net new billings gains, expanding and re-envisioning its media function in the process. The
growth came from results, including some award-winning media campaigns like Anheuser-Busch's "Beer Ape" campaign for Rolling Rock (winner of Media's Creative Media Award for media planning in
2007). The shifts also resulted in some pretty radical new media directions for a full-service brand agency whose media billings ended the year 52 percent in traditional media and 48 percent in
nontraditional media.