MSN Courts Creativity From Offline World

As Eric Hadley perused the work at the Cannes International Ad Festival last year, he was impressed. Still, one thought kept nagging him. "I thought, 'Wow, the TV stuff is good. The print's good. But nothing has changed in the way these things are produced and developed in so long,' " said Hadley, director of marketing at MSN, the Microsoft-owned property in Redmond, Wash. He concluded that "within five years, the cyber awards are going to be the biggest thing." MSN is looking to expedite that by issuing a "friendly challenge" to four traditional creatives—Deutsch ecd Kathy Delaney, Wieden + Kennedy cds Ty Montague and Todd Waterbury and Crispin Porter + Bogusky ecd Alex Bogusky—to develop ground-breaking online campaigns for their clients. In return, MSN will donate space to run the work. The clients are still being determined, but the creatives will essentially have free rein. "We're going to give them a blank slate ... and say, 'If you could do anything, what would you do?' " said Hadley, adding that MSN's technology gurus will help make the visions a reality. The four creatives all happily signed on. "I hope what it does is encourage other traditional agency creatives to rethink the Internet. A lot of them until now have rejected it or treated it as second best," said Montague, who works on Nike and ESPN, among other clients, at Wieden in New York. "We want to make it a part of the everyday lives of the traditional creative department." "It allows us to delve into a medium that we love and really, really stretch the boundaries and not have any handcuffs on us," said Delaney, who oversees creative for clients such as Tylenol and Monster at Interpublic Group's Deutsch in New York. As Internet advertising nears its decade mark, media properties such as MSN and Yahoo! continue to push agencies and advertisers to create water-cooler-worthy Web work. "They are looking at it from a financial standpoint, obviously, and trying to siphon share from other media, but their underlying premise is a good one, in that we need to push very hard to open up the possibilities," said Matt Freeman, worldwide CEO of Omnicom Group's Tribal DDB. Yahoo!, for instance, recently wrapped up its seventh Creative Summit Series—a roving conference that began in October 2002 to evangelize online creativity. This year, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based portal has been awarding the Yahoo! Big Idea Chair for innovation to agencies such as Wieden, which created the multifaceted "Beta-7" campaign for Sega's ESPN NFL Football videogame. "We have to have a medium in which great advertising is welcomed, and we have to help educate the people who make great advertising on how to do it here," said Jerry Shereshewsky, who holds the title of ambassador plenipotentiary to Madison Avenue at Yahoo!Inviting traditional creative directors into the mix is healthy, "but it's not necessarily a panacea for the state of online creativity," said Freeman, predicting that the next big idea may not germinate from an expected place. "Revolutions always come from unexpected corners."

Brand Marketing

MSN Courts Creativity From Offline World

Ann M. Mack

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Ann M. Mack