Starcom Consolidates Addressable Advertising under SMGX

Filed Under Advertising, Digital Signage, digital ooh

I had heard about this a while ago but wasn’t expecting SMG to pull the trigger on this for a little while. I stand corrected.

Starcom has reorganized their buying/planning organizations once again and opened a new unit called Starcom Media Group Exchange (SMGX), according to Mediapost. In what is a bit of a surprise to me (although not a bad thing at all!), John Muszynski will become the Chief Investment Officer of the new group. I had originally heard that another person would be filling some shoes to head up the group, although that may still be announed in the future.

The new group will be taking on all of those pesky “addressable advertising” initiatives. You know – those hyper-targeted mediums like Digital Out-of-Home that don’t fit that well into the commoditized practices of buying and planning that TV, Print, Radio and traditional outdoor do. The ones that require new “digital” integration and planning across new media platforms to truly be successful long-term.

It is KEY to note that SMGX is starting with Digital OOH:

Muszynksi said the approach would be rolled out in phases. The first will begin with digital out-of-home media, local TV, sports and children’s television. The second would focus on online and national TV.

It is ALSO key to note that SMG is looking at this beyond the typical aggregation of dollars. i.e. many organizations were set up to get the cheapest prices for their customers given commoditized media. New mediums are not yet commoditized to those levels and need a bit of a different approach in the early days. There is a very large strategic impetus to this move which is kinda cool to see.

a big part of what we’re trying to do in terms of redefining that, is moving beyond the aggregation of dollars, and really locking in on some of the opportunities that the marketplace has or will have – most notably when we talk about addressability and measurement.

The pairing of measurement inside this will be quite interesting. Folks like OVAB have been trying to get holistic equivalents on research through some of their projects, which is great, but you really need a holding company like Publicis/Starcom to weigh in to do it across many industries to get a real knowledge of each industry. We’ll see how it comes together in the next little while but it should be interesting to watch this one evolve!