Keeping the Selling Focus on the Consumer

Jackie Kulesza, senior VP/broadcast activation director, Starcom

By Jon Lafayette -- Broadcasting & Cable, 6/25/2012 12:01:00 AM

Just as Jackie Kulesza is becoming one of the most influential players in television’s upfronts, her job keeps changing.

“Technology changes everything. It is the catalyst that is enabling the consumer to watch what they want when they want on what device they want,” says Kulesza, who is known for her work in broadcast and kids television for clients including Bank of America, Kellogg’s and Allstate. “It offers just a ton of opportunities for marketers to better engage with the consumer and be more relevant to the consumer than they’ve ever been before.”

Starcom is all about “human experiences,” and since those experiences are changing, the agency has been changing its approach to video, with Kulesza’s television and Starcom’s digital teams, led by Anne Enright, working more closely together.

“There’s a lot of things I’m involved in now that I was not involved in before, speci" cally a lot more involved with the science, and how digital planning and buying works,” Kulesza says.

One goal at the agency is to get away from planning based on who is selling what and to keep the focus on the consumer. From a buyer’s perspective, that means there are several points in the planning and buying cycle where money could shift from something like traditional television to online video, and vice-versa.

“We have some great tools that allow us to look at client needs in a number of different ways, so it might happen fairly upstream where they think about a video goal, and very quickly they get to what platform, and then the look at the content within each platform,” Kulesza says. Or it could happen further downstream, where a client identifies content it wants to be in and wants to buy the platforms where that content lives.

“A third way is where, when we’re in a marketplace doing buys for one platform or the other, we’re actually doing them together on vendors that have that capability. And we’re making decisions on the fly based on the marketplace conditions and based on the goals of the client,” Kulesza says.