"Blended" Media Offerings Enhance Reach and Accountability, Says MEC:Interaction's Schanzer

Schanzer sits atop a group handling digital and direct advertising in North America, and from his perch he spends a lot of time figuring out not only how to maximize the efficiency of his clients’ media buys but also how to help them be more strategic in the process. MEC: Interaction is a division of mediaedge:cia, which in turn is part of WPPs' GroupM.

Schanzer pointed out how new devices are already changing the media game. At the recent Consumer Electronics Show (JackMyers Media Business Report Jan. 11), Schanzer saw a wave of potentially marketplace-changing handheld devices he thinks will make major inroads this year. “The impact of having smart phones that have direct access to the Internet through fast WiFi connectivity instead of some WAP-enabled site is going to be pretty amazing,” he says. “Today, things you can do from a creative standpoint are pretty limited. Really only the iPhone has any real capability for easily and seamlessly allowing consumers to access the Internet on the go.” iPhone customers download twice the data they had before they had the device, more than half of them have watched a YouTube video and 34 percent have watched the news, Amy Friedlander-Hoffman, SVP, Programming for AT&T Operations said last week at the Future TV Show 2008.

Schanzer says it’s also important not to scoff at incremental improvements in technology. “Things being developed aren’t necessarily things you can’t do today. What happens is technology becomes more integrated and easier to use,” he says, pointing to cameras that enable GPS locating technology to pinpoint where a photo was taken and allow tagging and searches for images via geographic location. He notes that Nintendo’s Wii console has caused a sea change already. “Gaming has gone from an 18-34 year-old male to family-friendly, much more heavily skewing toward female and family usage because the Wii just makes gaming much more accessible to people. The gaming is simpler, the mastery of it is much more intuitive, and so what you find is the audience that uses it changes.”

Audiences, of course, are also changing online, using more personalized applications like social networking. “Marketers understand this is a place we need to be. It is a mass consumption area for lots of people. A lot of people spend lots of time in places like MySpace and Facebook,” Schanzer says. At the same time, marketers “have to be very careful, not just because of the types of content that might exist, but you’re really in a consumer’s personal space and that’s a different place to be.” While Schanzer’s team “doesn’t always know exactly how to leverage a social space,” they do have some rules: be transparent, be brave (while putting in as many filters as possible to monitor the content), “and, like everything else, we have to do a better job in 2008 of understanding what the impact of being in the social space is, how is it helping or not helping your brand.”

Everywhere in this increasingly digital and fragmented media environment, accountability is key, Schanzer says. “Clients are holding agencies more accountable for delivering the goods, so to speak. And we’re all, collectively, holding the media that we buy very accountable to understand what the contribution is to marketing goals.” Not that it’s easy in a multi-channel universe where someone might watch broadcast TV one moment, buy a show off iTunes or Amazon.com the next, then flip on the satellite radio. “The biggest problem now with measurement is measuring the net impact of being multiple places,” Schanzer says. “There's a real trick to reach and frequency. The real trick to reach is understanding duplication.” He sees the need for increased targeting, and notes that while some large media companies have done a good job of aggregating properties and audiences, they are now promising more calibrated access to those audiences for marketers. “Some major media properties are developing almost the next generation of back-end measurement so that they can offer more and more levels of targeting,” he says.

Perhaps the biggest trend is the continued “blending” of media, and that could accelerate if the writer’s strike continues, Schanzer says. “There are a lot more conversations happening about Webisodic type programming and that kind of stuff, because now there is a real need to have fresh content for the marketers to use for exposure, and there may not be as much of it as we want in the television space.” (JackMyers Media Business Report, Nov. 8) Wherever the content’s produced, it will be seen on multiple devices and held to ever new levels of measurability.

Alan Schanzer can be reached at alan.schanzer@mecglobal.com or by phone at 212-474-0244.

Dorian Benkoil is a regular contributor toJack Myers Media Business Report.