(from March's RBR/TVBR Solutions Magazine)

Appointed to the position in 2005, Jack Klues sits atop two of the most powerful media services networks in the world - - Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG) and ZenithOptimedia - - spending some 23 billion dollars globally each year. Big-name clients include Proctor & Gamble, General Motors, Sara Lee, Disney, Sprint, Bristol Myers-Squibb, Avon and Coca Cola.

Jack helped found SMG in 2000 and quickly led the network to a market leading position as its CEO. He invested early in a broad spectrum of niche services at SMG including Relay Sponsorship and Events Marketing, Tapestry (multicultural), Halogen Direct Marketing, SMG Entertainment, SMG IP (Internet) and SMG Directory Marketing.

As technology continued to advance, Jack extended SMG's roster of specialized services to include Play (gaming), Digits (wireless comm.), Reverb (viral marketing) and TV 2.0 (revolutionary television platforms).

Klues drove the formation of an entirely new media function called "Consumer Context Planning", which uses consumer insights to better understand how best to interact with a brand's target audience. Pioneered inside SMG's own GM Planworks - - the dedicated planning unit of General Motors - - Consumer Context Planners have been integrated into media planning teams throughout the SMG network.

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Publicis Media is one of the largest in the world. How do you translate that power into negotiations?

If I'm correct, you're leading as a question of being able to do global deal-making. The funny thing is I think that we'll be in a place to properly entertain, guide and negotiate global media deals if and when those opportunities truly present themselves on a more common occurrence. But to be honest, most media today, and I perceive in the immediate future, is still going to be local/more country-specific.

However, This is also a question about clout. I do believe it's a global thing, not just a US thing. It's not that hard to drive price down - - I learned it pretty early in my career, but I think clout in this day and age is about access. Media owners - - big ones and small ones - - follow money. As media owners come up with new

and ever-changing ways to capture audiences, those new and different ways are first going to come to the bigger buyers anywhere in the world, in my opinion. It's going to be the bigger buyers that will have the wherewithal and resource on how to not only evaluate those ideas, but maybe actually reframe or reinvent them to where they will make more specific benefit and sense to our clients.

So, one, I'd say it's about access. The other one is about a big agency's multiple clients in all your major offices. That cross-client opportunity is an opportunity where we can act as a connector and a bit of a bridge between non-competitive clients for the sake of mutual benefit. So our ability possibly to connect a Sprint to a P&G or to a Coca Cola, or a Disney, you get the picture. I'm not saying that we're the only ones that can do it but think we're one of the few agencies that would talk to you about size from a different dimension.

So you present these opportunities as they come to clients?

Right and maybe it's also to a media owner. [Starcom USA CEO] John Muszynski uses a term called "diversified scale." Yes, there is an ability to marry clients to each other for their mutual benefit but there's also a benefit on the price side. Whereas when you're big and diverse you now have a lot more weaponry, a lot more tools in your negotiating box, if you will, to a media owner. Because at the end of the day it's all about how can you satisfy some of their needs and get to where we need to be on behalf of our clients. Now UPN and WB are together.

These conglomerates have lots of different needs themselves. Your ability to see those, marry those and utilize them to the benefits of our clients is just another different dimensionalizing of scale and clout.

I think another thing about being big is big also should - - if you're managing yourself properly - - attract the best talent as it relates to buyers as well as planners. Having scale also gives you the financial resource to continually reinvest in your product. In part, what you want to be able to do, as another negotiating tool, is have some knowledge that the seller doesn't have. And getting that knowledge in this highly fragmented, consumer-controlled world is a complicated, complex and not inexpensive proposition.

Any concerns you are hearing from clients?

Some are fearful, some are excited. All have questions on the ever-changing, emerging and new media opportunities available to them. When they see things like Google buying dMarc they go, "Whoa, what does that mean?" UPN/WB, what's that mean? This continually steady state of change - - I think clients who don't welcome or get excited about change or might be waiting for some time for it to settle down, that isn't a world we live in. I think that makes some clients and advertisers a bit nervous.

And the more you are able to digest change quickly, the more confidence they have.

Right. They would want us to do what I think is becoming increasingly difficult - - get in front of everything. It's a great challenge but a tough one. The other thing is I think clients totally understand that we're moving beyond - - and we encourage them to move beyond - - raw exposure and intrusive models of impure reach, frequency and head counts, to something richer. It's on their minds. They understand the consumer is in control and why. And when the consumer is in control I need to know much more about their media behaviors.

Because if I understand those media behaviors I'm going to improve my odds of "Am I allowing my message to be a part of their lives?" And that gets us into "experience the brand" and engage in the advertising message.

Part of the ROI equation is media consumption behavior. What about reactive purchase behavior?

You hit my third point. It's all about results, whereas even our ZenithOptimedia guys' position is an ROI agency. And it's a good, strong, solid positioning. It's aspirational as all good positioning should be. Clients are not only demanding results (case movement and share strengthening and the like) but they want us to look for a return on more marketing communication objectives as much as investment - - which should be more down the paths of can you prove to me that

I've improved brand preference? Did I strengthen loyalty? Did I get trial? I think there are other measurements they are prepared for us to be accountable for but we, right now as an industry, are often lacking in how to get our arms around those measurements. What they really hunger for is being able to have predictive results rather than results tracked after the fact. And I think your ability to predict performance, which I don't see a lot of us in the industry doing at this moment, would be another area that I think clients would be hungering for.

Product integration deals - - what makes them work?

The best ones I've ever seen seem to be based off an idea vs. trying to fit an off-the-shelf media entertainment product with client need. They seem to be much more organic and start from an idea of what the client is trying to accomplish, and then find a way with those media suppliers that can be delivered but still give a positive payoff to a viewer or a reader. That's why media agencies have branded entertainment operations - - because you really need those people sitting close to your planners and investment buying groups. They are the ones that are going to really bring those ideas to life, and ultimately in many cases start to decide what the price or the efficiency of the deal is to the client. It moves from cost per thousand on a demographic to something far more complete, if you will.

Do you think clutter problems are solvable if networks would reduce self-promotional tune-in spots?

As an agency guy my plea to the marketplace at large would be I may stand down a bit on clutter if you media owners and sellers just sell me the audience on the commercial minute, not the program average.

Then I'll give a little less gear because then at least my clients are only buying the audience, which I know saw the commercial. You guys decide, do you want to run your rating down and run 20 minutes of commercials? Go ahead, but my desire is less about "oh keep the clutter down," I'm embarrassed as a global media guy for some number of years now that the US is one of the few markets where we still buy on program averages and not the exact commercial minute that the stuff runs in.

And we have the technology to do it.

We buy it! And that's what even aggravates me more - - I pay Nielsen more money to buy their minute-by-minute ratings. I know they've got them and I've got them, but that's not the currency. The coin of the realm is still program averages and I find that for me to be a greater frustration than whether you add another minute and a half in the episode of "Lost" next week.

Do you have a research wish list?

There are variables that can be measured these days and we need to be a mature industry and stand up and find ways to, in fact, measure those and be accountable for them. I have a pretty good idea with some work we've done in the print space about relevance of environment for print advertising. I would love to have a more predictive, reliable way of understanding relevance in the TV space. Running commercials for Allstate in a Law & Order episode or a drama may make perfectly intuitive sense but I don't know of the real quantitative magnitude of that connectivity and maybe it's not even true.

Do you think the Apollo Project might help you in that respect if that gets off the ground?

I think so but to me Apollo isn't really getting at the question of why do people watch. It's still measuring how many and it's cross-tabbing how many with product consumption. So I don't dismiss it, I support it 100%, but I think if I had to tell you my wish list without labeling - - here's the next six projects in research - - I think they would all be geared to a better understanding of why people consume the media they do than how much.

And then you could cross-tab from their other predictive personality quirks what these particular people will have in common about media consumption.

You're absolutely right and I will make it kind of a closing comment on this part of our conversation, Carl, because it isn't mine. There is this smart guy who works for me named Rishad Tobaccowala [he's now in charge of their Denuo division]. I think he is brilliant in his perceptions of the future media behaviors and the like. He said to me years ago, and we've been often toying with how to get at this project, but it's like "MRI reverse engineering."

MRI is about people reporting their product consumption and then they also have some media habits. But you kind of use MRI to determine some of your targeting and your media selection based upon reporting of your heavy user, light user, etc. What if you could start better defining people, where the targeting was lead by their media behavior versus their product consumption?

So as media options become more abundant to you and me as consumers, therefore you should be able to better understand and distinguish Carl from Jack. I think it's possible and what I've always been impressed with is that it wasn't me thinking that three or four years ago, it was one of my guys.