The Media Planners
By Jon Lafayette -- Broadcasting & Cable, 7/30/2012 12:01:00 AM
RELATED: Media Planners Open Their Playbooks|
Gary Barsky |
Aimee Garriga |
Kristina Lutz |
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Melissa Coffas |
Kevin Howard |
Jennifer Nyhan |
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David Fasola |
Rob Jayson |
Steve Piluso |
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Mason Franklin |
Coleen Kuehn |
Jan Weinstein |
Gary Barsky
Title: Senior VP, managing partner,
Universal McCannCollege: SUNY at Oswego
First media job: Media assistant at NW Ayer in the planning group on the U.S. Army account.
Key client: U.S. Army
Buyer jealousy: "No-I started out as a floater and I moved around into different departments. That gave me a good sense of what seemed to be interesting to me. I thought planning was the good way to go, and it worked out fairly well."
Favorite TV show: Modern Family
Cool way to use TV: Barsky last winter got involved with Dish Network's interactive TV platform, which allows viewers to choose from a gallery of creative. "We were able to measure the effectiveness in terms of how much time people were spending on it, how many people did we actually drive online to engage with the creative, the length of time that was spent watching the creative," he says. "We were able to get some really good metrics that you typically don't get beyond reach, frequency, rating points. We got a very high level of engagement with the commercials, and a lot of people actually requesting more information."
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Melissa Coffas
Title: Managing partner, group account director, MindshareCollege: Hofstra University
First media job: Universal McCann, as assistant media planner on Lowe's Home Improvement
Key client: Unilever (food brands)
Buyer jealousy: "I've always really loved the strategic planning side, so no, I've never thought about moving over."
Favorite TV show: Mad Men (guilty pleasure: Real Housewives)
Cool way to use TV: Lipton Tea had a partnership with the band Lady Antebellum that included TV spots, custom content and public relations. Lady Antebellum was scheduled to perform on the CMT Awards, which already had an official beverage sponsor, but Mindshare was able to buy commercials on the broadcast. It complemented those spots with a partnership with social TV reward site Viggle to create a campaign to capture consumers as they were watching the awards. The agency strategically surrounded the band with spots that aired after it performed and before its award category nominations were announced. Viggle asked viewers questions about the show and the brand, and answers were rewarded with custom Lady Antebellum content. "We saw heavy levels of engagement," Coffas says.
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David Fasola
Title: Managing partner, group account director, MediaComCollege: SUNY at New Paltz
First media job: Assistant planner at SFM Media on the American Isuzu Motors account
Key client: Volkswagen
Buyer jealousy: Not at all. "One of the things that SFM gave me, because it was a small shop, was an opportunity to work closely with buyers and closely with clients," he says.
Favorite TV show: Shark Tank. Also "bad reality shows" he watches with his wife.
Cool way to use TV: Best example was a program VW did with ABC's The Middle in which the agency's content team worked with the show's writers to make the next door neighbors' Passat a key piece of the episode, creating an aspiration for the brand's affordable German engineering positioning. The episode aired just before VW's ads during the Super Bowl, so it kicked off a campaign previewing the brand's barking Star Wars spot. "It was really genuine and it got sticky, and allowed us to draft off that not only in media, but in content," Fasola says. "It really checked all the boxes."
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Mason Franklin
Title: Managing director, MECCollege: University of Michigan
First media job: Starcom Detroit, working on the General Motors business
Buyer jealousy: "I get jealous of them a little bit in that the buyers are really important in helping to bring some of these ideas we come up with to life with the different partners. In my opinion, the better buyers involve me in that as they work with the partners."
Favorite TV show: Flipping Out With Jeff Lewis
Cool way to use TV: Putting AT&T together with American Idol to encourage people to use mobile phones to text. Now everybody texts like it's second nature, Franklin says. But back in the day, there was a task to be done in getting people to understand texting and getting them to get into that habit. "At the time, it was a very innovative use of TV to get people to do what was strategically important to AT&T in terms of getting that new habit engrained and doing that while letting them enjoy the experience of Idol," he says.
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Aimee Garriga
Title: Group planning director, MaxusCollege: Lafayette College
First media job: Assistant media planner at McCann-Erickson in Houston, sending out insertion orders, reconciling discrepancies, doing flow charts.
Key client: Church & Dwight
Buyer jealousy: "No. I've always known that I wanted to keep on the planning side of it. My background is in psychology, and I like focusing on the consumer and what their media habits are and how you can develop a media idea or strategy that will more closely resonate with them."
Favorite TV show: Mad Men
Cool way to use TV: To build a more emotional connection to consumers for Arm & Hammer's cat litter, the agency partnered with Animal Planet to create a philanthropic campaign urging pet owners to tag their cats to keep them safe, because few lost cats are returned. The campaign paired content created by the network with brand commercials that aired on TV and appeared on both the Animal Planet and Arm & Hammer websites. The clients also make donations to pet shelters. The successful campaign has been running since 2010.
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Kevin Howard
Title: Group account director, OMD NYCollege: Gettysburg College
First media job: Assistant media planner, the Lord Group. Before that, he sold T-shirts by the famed Cyclone roller coaster. "I learned to negotiate by negotiating prices on the streets of Coney Island," he says.
Key client: GE
Buyer jealousy: "Not so much. The business is evolving and so are buyers. I love strategy. I love planning. So it's a match made in heaven."
Favorite TV show: Modern Family
Cool way to use TV: Used Super Bowl ad to drive viewers to an online sweepstakes for GE's appliance business via Shazam. "That made it digital just by virtue of watching the spot," Howard says. The results were amazing: Café line sales grew 60%, almost 900,000 consumers participated and 14% of those downloaded a rebate certificate. The campaign generated engagement; the brand's Facebook community grew by 50%. "That pays dividends in the future for us," he says. "We wouldn't have gotten a life like that without the TV component."
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Rob Jayson
Title: Chief data officer, ZenithOptimedia WorldwideCollege: London School of Economics
First media job: Assistant TV salesperson at Grenada TV in the U.K., keeping schedules on paper and checking ratings in the book.
Buyer jealousy: "No, I love what I do. If you have a strong negotiation mind, buying is fantastic. If you're more inquisitive about people and consumers, then planning is the right area for you."
Favorite TV show: Dr. Who, his favorite since he was 7 years old
Key clients: Nestlé, Chase and Reckitt
Cool way to use TV: Zenith created a custom platform for Chase's Sapphire credit card with Bravo's new show Around the World in 80 Plates. Zenith was involved from the series conception. Plates stars appear for Chase in vignettes and online. It is not only great in-program integration, but it stretches across the brand and across to digital to real customer-user experiences. Cardholders can recreate experiences from the show, Jayson says. "It's about trying to grow what the consumer gets out of it, not just the video asset," he says.
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Coleen Kuehn
Title: President of strategy and planning, MediaVestCollege: Tulane University
First media job: An intern at Intel in Santa Clara, Calif., doing demand forecasting. Grew up on the client side with Coca-Cola and American Express.
Buyer jealousy: "At MediaCom's digital agency, the planning and buying were integrated. I really do miss the interaction with the media owners. With so much reality on TV, you have opportunities to do interesting things. And our buyers get a seat at the table, which is exciting."
Favorite TV show: Revenge
Cool way to use TV: For Coke during the Super Bowl, MediaVest streamed second-screen content featuring the brand's polar bear mascots reacting to the game. They rooted for different teams, based on who was winning. When a Pepsi ad appeared, they fell asleep. "Basically it was a multiplier for the 30-second spots we had purchased in the game," Kuehn says. "Something like that, that brings the different screens together rather than simply replicating spots and distributing them on different platforms, I think shows a lot more creativity."
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Kristina Lutz
Title: Senior VP/activation director, StarcomCollege: University of Iowa
First media job: Marketing assistant at Boelter Environmental Consulting, then Leo Burnett.
Key client: Bank of America
Buyer jealousy: "The way we're structured now, I have the best of both worlds."
Favorite TV show: Survivor
Cool way to use TV: Worked with the History Channel to rebuild Bank of America's reputation after the financial crisis; effort was tied to the miniseries The Story of Us. "We delivered bite-sized, immersive stories featuring the bank as an unsung hero that fueled American progress at key points in our history, and we aligned it perfectly to the editorial content of the miniseries," Lutz says. The segments appeared on the air, online, on DVDs and on demand, providing emotional impact. BofA didn't even buy any commercials. "It was a very non-traditional approach...it was really successful and it moved all the brand metrics and surpassed the goals that we set," Lutz says.
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Jennifer Nyhan
Title: Senior VP, group business director, InitiativeCollege: UCLA
First media job: Intern at InteRep Radio, working on the Fox Broadcasting account. Later moved to Fox and ABC, planning and scheduling promos.
Key client: Dr Pepper Snapple Group
Buyer jealousy: No. "My role is to bring all the different disciplines together. I'm working across digital, across TV, across print. I feel like I get a full picture, which I enjoy," Nyhan says.
Favorite TV show: Real Housewives of New York. "People know me as the Bravo enthusiast. I watch a lot of guilty pleasure, decompress sort of television."
Cool way to use TV: Went beyond 15- and 30-second spots by integrating Snapple into The Amazing Race, which are both "the best stuff on earth," she says. Contestants on the show went to China and India and helped launch Snapple's new Papaya Mango Tea flavor. "It's hard to do an integration that's completely seamless and feels like it's a great fit, and we felt really successful with that one," she says.
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Steve Piluso
Title: Chief strategy officer, PHDCollege: Boston College
First media job: Young & Rubicam in the spot buying department; Piluso asked to join the media planning training course.
Key client: Google
Buyer jealousy: "In my first year I slummed around with a lot of buyers," Piluso says. "They became a lot of my friends in the business and I understood what they did. They're a little more willing to get away from the usual way they do things when they trust you and know that what you're doing is the right thing to do."
Favorite TV show: Mad Men
Cool way to use TV: The agency is looking at ways to create loyalty programs for entertainment clients HBO and Discovery Communications using social TV platforms such as GetGlue and Viggle. It's also looking at ways to get other clients' products involved as incentives for viewing. For example, viewers of TLC's What Not to Wear could get a discount at Old Navy. "Leveraging this idea of people checking in could create a mutual benefit for both of them," Piluso says.
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Jan Weinstein
Title: Senior VP and group director, CaratCollege: Syracuse University
First media job: Assistant planner at Wells Rich Greene doing analysis on the Procter & Gamble account.
Key clients: Pfizer, Beiersdorf
Buyer jealousy: Only around upfront time, although now she's able to get herself invited to the events she wants to attend.
Favorite TV show: Breaking Bad
Cool way to use TV: Formed a partnership with CBS to create Web show 60 Minutes Overtime, in which the newsmag extends a lifestyle or human interest profile story online, where it is sponsored exclusively by Pfizer. "It's almost a fourth segment," Weinstein says. The extra segments are promoted during the show and have been driving substantial traffic. They have also given Pfizer content to share in order to get more connected with consumers on social media platforms. "It has been a very successful partnership," she says.
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