In her Breakthrough keynote, R/GA's Anne Benvenuto said planners today need a 360-degree view and a broadly integrated and inspired workforce.

Presenting the final creative keynote presentation for Breakthrough iMedia Summit 2007, Anne Benvenuto, EVP of strategic services for R/GA, used the mythological archetype Hydra -- a serpent figure with many heads -- to explain how agencies need to change their internal processes to successfully adapt to the demands of the new media market.

In a talk titled "Inspiring the Creative Hydra," Benvenuto offered up advice for what planners need to do in today's marketing and advertising environments to inspire their own "Hydra" energy in media teams.

"The Hydra has new needs," Benvenuto said, using the metaphor to infer that today's media leaders need to inspire their teams to new heights to get the best outcome from emerging platforms and consumer-relevant content.

In the past, traditional creative teams consisted of an art director and writers, a mere shadow of what it takes today to launch a successful online media campaign.

"Traditional media teams are not used to working with interactivity or with the people who bring those ideas to the table," Benvenuto said, attributing this divide to the fact that old media is rooted in a linear narrative, the basic concept behind TV. But it takes innovation and inspiration to stretch media concepts far enough to meet the behavioral and experiential demands of today's consumer.

Faced with consumers who are avidly co-creating and expecting high levels of creative outreach to win their loyalty -- or interest -- what are marketers doing to capture the online audience?

"One-way communication doesn't work anymore," Benvenuto said. "We need to leverage interaction between brand and consumer."

Right now, planners are transitioning from where to how their message lives in new media. An industry that was once format-centric is now distribution driven and interactive professionals must think in terms of the interactive experience. Old paradigms are no longer working and the boundaries have shifted. Only agencies that are prepared to embrace the many elements required to reach the online consumer can succeed.

"Strategic planners are frustrated," Benvenuto said. "It's difficult to inspire relevant and creative work today."

One of the solutions, Benvenuto said, is to embrace complexity, and that means navigating through the broad array of deliverables in today's media world:

Campaigns that deliver a message
Programs, which include dialog, channels and communities
Products, applications and interface that facilitate a value exchange
The media landscape is no longer just about paid advertising. There are huge opportunities out there in the big picture that include brand-sponsored content, brand-generated content, consumer co-created content and consumer media.

"An idea is a solution to a problem that makes new meaning and provides a value exchange between the brand and consumer," she said. "It takes saying and listening, and essentially ascribing new meaning to the brand."

For planners in the traditional media world, the approach was all about perceptual insights, and now it is crucial to bridge that discipline to include a mixture of cultural and contextual elements as well as content planning, channel planning, interactive planning, and account and community planning.

Several years ago, working perceptual insights into a campaign included brand strategy, creative, media and post analysis. But today, for direct marketers, that process must integrate behavioral insights, content strategy, media and data, creative and optimization.

Interactive planners must balance user insights, content strategies, design and system integration, online media and interaction metrics to find success in online media.

"Today the planner has to be a MacGyver," Benvenuto said, referencing the 1980s TV series that featured a lead character who could do anything, fix anything and get himself out of countless dangerous situations through ordinary means. "Universal planning crosses the divide."

As supporting examples of the new paradigm for interactive marketers and advertisers, Benvenuto used the "Nike Plus" campaign that successfully fused brand, product and digital media to market Nike and Apple technology.

Another example was a campaign produced by R/GA called the "Verizon Beat Box Mixer," which aimed to create awareness of Verizon Broadband as an entertainment brand and not just a broadband provider. The campaign utilized many platforms to reach consumers, including blogs and viral videos on YouTube.

A final example was the "Nike Women" campaign that gave birth to the popular "Rock Star Workout," a choreographed workout sequence that proliferated across multimedia platforms to promote Nike's line of women's workout apparel.

Part of the success of the "Rock Star Workout" campaign was due to the vision of the R/GA planning team, which rather than reverting to "old media" mentality and shooting the campaign's footage on film, shot in high-definition knowing the footage would be used in diverse multimedia formats that needed to adapt to any screen resolution, including mobile.

Benvenuto's "New Order" approach to today's media world includes:

A posse of insights: full engagement strategies that include the consumer
Format and content: not just distribution
Paid and non-paid media
Accountability as forethought
"We don't always have a big media budget, but with innovation, a campaign can simply take off," Benvenuto said. "To really succeed today, you need a 360-degree view through a broad, experienced and integrated workforce."

Gretchen Hyman is executive editor for iMedia Connection. Read full bio.