NEW YORK When companies such as Sprint and Unilever address marketing questions like how to price a new product or figure out the best retail distribution strategy for a brand or assess the likely impact a package design will have on consumers, they have not traditionally sought advice from their media agency.

MindShare, the media agency for both brands, aims to change this. The WPP-owned shop is two months into a major overhaul of its North American operation. The plan is to encourage clients to seek MindShare's advice on nitty-gritty, marketing-focused issues.

"Clients are seeking partners who can look across all of those marketing levers," said Tim Elton, director of communication planning at MindShare North America. "That's what's behind our reorganization -- fundamentally taking our planning product and moving it upstream to make it more of a business planning function."

The reorganization eliminated the shop's digital operation, MindShare Interaction, as a separate unit and dispersed its staff throughout the agency as a whole. It also established four key areas of service: client leadership; business planning; "invention," including branded content and other creative disciplines; and "the exchange," including buying and activation.

MindShare is one of several big media shops in the past 18 months to reorganize or reposition its service as one designed to offer broader marketing solutions, moving away from narrowly defined media planning and buying. In 2007, Aegis Group's Carat and Publicis Groupe's Zenith Media both implemented major restructurings. Zenith refocused around client teams while Carat, like MindShare, merged its digital operation with its main agency.

Other shops are expanding their marketing expertise, through new hires and additional resources, without undertaking major reorganizations.

Earlier this year, Interpublic's Initiative began referring to itself as a "media, marketing and digital company," said Richard Beaven, the agency's worldwide CEO. The repositioning followed months of retooling and enhancing its consumer insights and channel-planning acumen.

"The notion there is that really none of our clients ever come to us specifically with a media problem," said Beaven. "They express their needs in a marketing or business context. So what's critical is that we understand that context and that we answer it with the strategic breadth that it demands, and not just automatically look to a pure [paid] media solution as we might have done five years ago."

MindShare's efforts aside, not every client is going to seek product pricing and packaging advice from its media shops, said Garry Graham, chief marketing officer, Burlington Coat Factory, which earlier this year retained Initiative as its media shop after a review.



That said, Graham indicated that Initiative was retained because it put forth a number of marketing ideas that would, with success, achieve numerous objectives, including a substantial increase in company-wide store traffic, a key priority for the retailer. "In a changing economy, we're looking at an opportunity to talk to consumers that haven't considered us before," said Graham. "If we succeed and service them right, we hope to retain their loyalty."

Graham wouldn't disclose specific ideas presented by the agency, but he did offer that media shops face new challenges: "It's all about making the cash register ring and at the same time supporting your brand and positioning it properly."

Although ad placement is still a core competency for media shops, understanding consumers and what motivates them has become just as important a capability in recent years, said Martin Cass, director of communications planning at Aegis Group's Carat. With so many new channels for consumers to immerse themselves in, and with client dollars chasing those new channels as a result, "you better darn well understand when people are receptive to messaging and when you can make them receptive. From that perspective, it's about creating time rather than buying time," he said.

And that, he said, is a marketing mission, not a media solution. The challenge for brands, and their agencies, Cass said, is to "have a story to tell that will want to make the consumer spend time with you because it is so easy to turn you [and your brand message] off now."

Cass cites a recent campaign Carat did for client Reebok. Called "Run Easy," it enabled runners to share their favorite jogging routes via a Web site called goruneasy.com. Thousands of runners did so, and are still doing so, even though no advertising is currently in place to drive consumers to the site. Contributors can put together jogging routes utilizing Google Maps and add pictures via Flickr and even upload their favorite songs from iTunes to listen to while running.

"It all came together to create an environment that runners want to use," Cass said. Adding value is the key, he said, because "consumers are pretty wised up when it comes to being sold to." And that's the double-edged sword of the Internet, he said: "You're always one step away from oblivion."

Increasingly, said Beaven, media agencies use data to understand behavior and emotional triggers to help fulfill client marketing objectives. The endgame, he says, is to "create high-value exchanges between people and brands" -- exchanges that get people to respond in some way. The challenge for agencies is to have tools in place to capture and analyze all the data that's related to those exchanges.

At MPG, North American CEO Charlie Rutman said that as clients hold media shops more accountable for results now compared to just a few year back, "we're trying to position ourselves not so much as a media partner but as a business partner. I'm not as interested in reach and frequency as I am in getting a loyal customer to go to the store one more time a month. I'm not sure how you can do your job in today's world without offering that."



At IPG's Universal McCann, Mary Gerzema, president of the U.S. operation, said that clients increasingly seek the shop's input on broader marketing issues. And it has happened as the number of consumer channels has grown dramatically in the past five years, she said. "A channel is any place a consumer can interact with a brand," Gerzema said.

That includes the array of digital and traditional media channels. But it also includes in-store marketing, events or public relations.

"The crux of it is new media," Gerzema said. "Digital has changed the landscape in a way that has given consumers tremendous influence in marketing decisions. So now it's about harnessing that power and understanding those influencers."

The increased consumer power in the digital space raises marketing issues that clients turn to their media shops for advice on, said Gerzema. "They want to know how their e-commerce strategy should align with their ad and marketing strategies or they'll want a point of view on a segmentation they have and how to activate across all channels," she said.

And there's the ROI piece, Gerzema added: "helping clients determine how to measure the efficacy of the total marketing effort; what's important to measure and how to measure it."