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.
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