| Mediaedge:cia: Bubbling Up |
| Media-Entertainment | |
| Written by Deborah Geering | |
| Monday, 01 October 2007 | |
 CEO Lee Doyle tells us how this communications planning and implementation agency helps its clients make a splash into today’s overcrowded media world. A bubblebaloo, actually. On May 24, the Atlanta band Cartel stepped into a fiberglass dome equipped with a 2,000-square-foot recording studio, modest living space, and 23 Web cams, pledging not to emerge until June 12. For those 20 days, the band recorded their second album, hung out, ate pizza—and garnered lots of public attention.  Lee Doyle, CEO The complex promotion was the culmination of a new direction for Mediaedge:cia (MEC), a global agency with nearly $19 billion in annual worldwide billing. From its roots in media purchasing, MEC, under the leadership of North America CEO Lee Doyle, is repositioning itself as the first global communications planning and implementation agency. “Basically, we’re in a world where the consumer is in control,” Doyle explained. “With technology like Tivo and DVR, consumers have more power than ever to avoid marketing messages. Rather than delivering a message, we’re trying to shift this organization toward thinking we have to find ways to invite participation from consumers, to actively engage consumers in our clients’ brands.” Brand evangelists Active engagement has been the MEC mantra for the past two years. “The notion is that while we have big mass-market brands, we need to build a growing base of brand evangelists,” Doyle said. That requires a new way of thinking, not to mention a lot of coordination. For the Band in a Bubble event, all sponsors first had to agree on the band, which had to be popular, telegenic, and relatively clean-cut. Then there were city licenses, building permits, record deals, and the little detail of staging a live televised concert at the end of the promotion. MEC Entertainment, a division of Mediaedge:cia, oversaw the entire project. “It was a year in development. It really showcased all the new capabilities we’ve developed over the last two or three years,” Doyle said. “The goal is to deliver something that is much more effective than an off-the-shelf idea from a media vendor. We’re developing ideas based on insights about the consumers we’re trying to reach and an understanding of what truly drives our client’s business.” Encouraging his staff to rethink how they reach consumers has been the primary objective for Doyle, who joined the company as account director in 2000. “It’s very easy to spend a lot of money and not have it all come together to a big effect. We need to ask, ‘How do I make all the pieces work together so that the whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts?’” he said. The key is collaboration. The media landscape has become too complicated for generalists to know the details about every communication medium. “Instead, all these individual experts need to be able to come to the table and create connection ideas that bring all the pieces together,” said Doyle. Naďve views Perhaps it’s no surprise that collaboration comes naturally for Doyle. He considers his team-oriented attitude one of his greatest strengths, along with his ability to persuade others to work in teams. Success, he said, is dependent on making sure all the right minds are at the table “and recognizing that no one person has all the answers—but together, we’re pretty smart.” Such a shift meant rearranging the company, right down to the office furniture. Instead of grouping together employees by their discipline, for the past 18 months, they’ve worked in teams organized around the clients. For example, digital teams sit side by side with the people who evaluate “traditional” media. “We’ve learned to work a lot more like a creative agency when we tackle a challenge,” Doyle explained. “Teams explore different ideas, expose them to a larger group, get feedback and then, based on that feedback, improve the idea. You need to have the right combination of people who know the client’s business intimately, along with people who are bringing in a completely fresh perspective. Sometimes a naďve point of view may be where a breakthrough idea comes from.” The new way of doing things has fostered some creative campaigns the world over. To emphasize the importance of Xerox’s color products, MEC developed partnerships with leading European newspapers to transform black and white business sections into color. To persuade Polish “traditionalists” that their kind of people shopped at Ikea, MEC placed life-sized cardboard cutouts of people in public places with the phrase “I am somewhere else” printed on their chests, followed by an Ikea Web site address. Xerox saw its sales in the color segment triple and its revenues increase 18%. Ikea recorded a 22% increase in visitor growth to stores. “Initially, there was a lot of fear and trepidation,” Doyle admitted. “People wondered, ‘What does this mean for my career path?’ But I’d say that by the end of last year, the majority of our organization recognized the importance of having a broad understanding of all the different channels of communication.” Organizational confidence has grown, due in large part to the success of the Band in a Bubble promotion. “If you asked us five years ago if we could pull that together on behalf of our client, I think we would have had our doubts,” Doyle said. “Now we can say, ‘Wow, we really can do this.’” Deborah Geering, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , is a freelance writer in Atlanta. |
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American Executive is a RedCoat Publishing publication.
American Executive is a RedCoat Publishing publication.
