Draftfcb New York has merged its media, digital and CRM practices into a single unit called the Real-Time Marketing division. The change, which is in response to the industry-wide focus on CRM and digital, impacted 100 company employees, who were relocated within the building to be in closer proximity and under the same operating budget.
Chief media officer Richard Gagnon, who leads the division, said there was logic to uniting digital specialists, who often handle the content creation, and media specialists, who are managing message context, under one department.
“Real-time marketing means that communication plans have to be adaptive to what’s happening in that moment with the customer wherever they are at and whatever information they may be asking for,” Gagnon explained.
Underpinning the move is the agency’s refined approach to CRM. “The promise of one-to-one marketing is here,” said Mike Brzozowski, executive director of CRM consulting, who will now report to Gagnon alongside Tim Queenan, executive director of digital convergence.
“It’s no longer about the campaign; there is no campaign. If you don’t get the proverbial right message to the customer at the right time you’ve lost that person.” Brzozowski noted. He said the company would help client’s write business rules that helped to determine how to communicate when based on consumer response.
Peter DeNunzio, president of Draftfcb New York, agreed, adding that by looking at customer communication as a series of interactions, marketers could understand the impact of messaging faster than calculating the more traditional customer life-time value.
He explained the restructuring was “born from the people who are now running the division” explaining that several client teams had already been using this approach.
DeNunzio maintained that the move was characteristic of Draftfcb’s “one agency” vision and built on pre-exisiting collaboration, he quipped: “We’ve all but banned the word integration from the office. Using that word wouldn’t set us apart from anyone.”
