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The Integration Initiative: Special Ops Media Gives Entertainment Marketing a Full-Service Facelift

Written on
December 20th 2006
Author
by Kiran Aditham  |
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So, give me some chronology and the operational breakdown of Special Ops if you would.

C: We really built this other company together. It was part of a broader holding company, but Jason and I got to a point where we felt we could better service our clients and take advantage of opportunities in the marketplace on our own. So we started Special Ops September of 2002. We are 4-years old now. The company now is over 70 people. We are just opening an LA office right before the end of the year. We’ve got headquarters here on Park Avenue and another office out in DUMBO where our creative shop is.

We’re a full-service interactive agency. We have three primary business units. The first is interactive marketing & strategy. This group does strategic consulting, branding, press and publicity, corporate communications, viral and grassroots marketing, blog marketing, and social network servicing. We group all those under the auspices of that group. That was really where we started the business. For a variety of reasons, it was really rare.

At that point, companies weren’t really structured to deal with interactive. The interactive budgets in a lot of cases were the first to get cut and priorities changed. We tell the old war stories, but often times it was clients saying ‘ok, we’ve got $10,000 left over to do the Internet, so tell us what to do.’ That might include building a website, buying media, and press & publicity. Something that was fundamental—and still is—to how we grew the business was being opportunistic and really putting client service and innovation first. We used having a seat at the table to educate clients and help lead the growth in the industry and also grow along with the industry.

So, about 1½ years after we started, we formed a media strategies group that does media buying and planning, research, sponsorships and search engine marketing. Then, about a year after that, we formalized the creative services group. So, we have the three pillars of creative, media strategy, and branding. Those were all consistent with our approach to the marketplace, which was to focus on interactive and continue to bring into the company the leading people in the space. We were the first agency to bring an entertainment client to MySpace and Friendster. We were YouTube’s, I think, second meeting in New York. There’s a rich history here of identifying what’s next. That continues, and I think what’s so exciting is this space is so dynamic.

I think, frankly, we’re still at the tip of the iceberg in terms of what you’re going to be able to do online. Inevitably, there will be ebbs and flows in terms of challenges, proof of ROI and budget allocation. But I think for the most part that nobody’s going to argue with you that this space is exploding. The focus continues to increase from senior executives on a coherent, integrated interactive strategy and we’ve been focusing on this in many ways since the beginning—the 90s, the dotcom boom, through the corrections in 2001 and 2002.

The entertainment focus of your agency appeals to me, being a self-admitted music and film geek. But you’re expanding into pharmaceuticals and other verticals. While in entertainment, it’s protocol to stay on the cutting-edge, do you find other verticals are taking their time to warm up to your strategy or are they totally into it?

Jason: I think, in theory, yes. Everyone in general is excited about the space and excited to be a first mover in some new opportunity, a new technology, a new publisher, whatever it is. It’s very fortunate that we happened to start with entertainment, literally cold-calling studios, record labels and videogame publishers. The reason why we started the way we did with entertainment was at the time, it was right after everything fell apart with the first boom. Every budget was retracted for interactive, and there were scraps of money.

But entertainment clients had something which other companies didn’t have. They had really compelling content that had a value. So when we talked to a studio, it was “ok, we’ll give you some money for your time.” Then, they retained us, and we said we’re going to take your trailer, which was already done, we’ll take clips from the movie, we’re going to call up and email all these different websites where we think the target audience is, and we’re going to get them to feature. That’s how it started.

So it was repurposed content for the most part?

J: We called it content syndication. What it has really evolved into now is full-fledged online publicity, where we’re doing specific pitches based on certain angles. Talent is finally interested in doing stuff, whereas they couldn’t care less than four years ago. You couldn’t get a second of their time to do anything with these sites. So we were able to cultivate these entertainment relationships that then grew to buying media and doing interesting creative executions. I think entertainment has always been the first to be doing a lot of this stuff, and certainly relative to other industries, it’s much more risk-tolerant. This has been really fortunate for us because we’ve really gotten to do a lot of things, whereas I think if we started with consumer product companies, it would have been much more of a conservative approach. I think we would’ve learned a lot less about the space.



(a screen shot of Special Ops’ Valentine’s e-card to promote the DVD release of Lions Gate’s SAW II)

A lot of what we do to some degree, and we’re not afraid to admit, is trial & error. When you’re an agency that’s doing stuff that’s never been done before, who knows what’s going to happen. Everyday, we had more information to minimize the risk. But the body of information that we have is just so rich that we’ve been able to do all these campaigns. Fast-forward to today. Everybody knows they need an interactive strategy. Some consumer product companies have them, and they’re good. Some of them haven’t done anything online. A couple of years ago, it was should we spend money online or not.
Is this an online product? Is this an online movie? Is this where my audience is? Are we going after the kids who use the Internet? So it was binary budget or no budget. Now, it’s not a question of budget. The budget is there, so it’s like, what do I do with this budget?

We get these kinds of questions, and it’s very exciting for us. We purposefully made ourselves a full-service agency because we don’t think just being a media buying shop is an interactive strategy. Nor is just having a creative shop, nor is it just having a strategy or publicity shop.



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