Davie Brown Gets Ready for Its Close-up

LOS ANGELES Davie Brown Entertainment president Tom Meyer has a guest seat in the Omnicom Group boardroom with access to decision makers including holding company president and CEO John Wren -- but not at sibling agencies' pitch tables.Meyer said he's thrilled about the former situation and working to improve the latter, with a firm belief that the growth potential of digital platforms in entertainment marketing should help.Despite many complementary and shared connections -- such as long-standing relationships with Pepsi and Frito-Lay, brands that work with Omnicom creative shops BBDO and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, respectively -- so far Davie Brown has not been part of a united front pursuing new business.A stronger connection to sister shops "would be nice," said Meyer, whose 60-person agency serves clients such as Hewlett-Packard, AT&T, Cisco, FedEx and State Farm. "But it doesn't always work that way." During a typical pitch, Meyer said, "It's not about entertainment marketing -- only a piece of what they would produce for the client. But we've certainly been part of the discussion" and hope to be more involved in the future.Meyer joined the Santa Monica, Calif.-based agency from Paramount Pictures in 1999, two years before Omnicom acquired the specialized marketing firm."We had a mom-and-pop mentality" nearly 10 years ago, said Meyer. "We were entrepreneurial, but not as sophisticated as we could be in our realm. We were surrounded by competition at the simple tie-in or product-placement level, but that's not what we're about. We had to up our game substantially and get more into an advertising and marketing model."Today, Davie Brown operates as part of Omnicom's Diversified Agency Services group.The current setup allows for more creative freedom and "scope" than the studio world he left, where the task was "building brands on speed, with three months to generate huge awareness and creative impact." Meyer remembers that even as Paramount's director of theatrical marketing, his smallest decisions would sometimes require the approval of then-CEO Sherry Lansing.At Omnicom, however, Meyer and Davie Brown maintain a fair measure of autonomy. The holding company respects the agency's independence and identity, Meyer said: "They want to make sure you are making money and taking a strategic approach to getting better. And they know it's important for us to be [ourselves]."But just as the shop has availed itself of Omnicom insights and analytics that it couldn't afford while independent, it contributes to the larger fold with its "DBI" (the Davie Brown Index), an econometrics model for measuring the impact of celebrities on brands. DBI goes beyond typical attributes such as awareness and popularity to gauge whether consumers would trust recommendations from specific stars. Meyer notes that it can even compare a real person like Oprah to a fictitious character such as Mario of video game fame.The agency pointedly represents brands, not celebrities, but deploys tools such as DBI when constructing campaigns.Davie Brown recently arranged for Hyundai Motor America's first luxury vehicle, Genesis, to appear on Fox's 24. And just last week, it signed up RealNetworks, seeking constructing a bridge between film, television and mobile for the client's Ringback Tone service and a first-look deal with NBC's Digital Studio. That deal "gives us a closer connection to the content creator and the ability to have a brand more deeply integrated with content and use that to advance a brand's interests," said Meyer."I'm incredibly bullish on the world of digital," he said. "It has a lower cost of entry, it's more measurable than anything else in the entertainment space and can use our access to talent. Everyone recognizes they need to be playing there and that this is the time to break the mold and try something new."

Brand Marketing

Davie Brown Gets Ready for Its Close-up

Gregory Solman

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Gregory Solman