OMG's Sean Finnegan on the future of interactive marketing, brand autism, his upcoming iMedia Brand Summit keynote address and more.
Brad Berens: I have the great pleasure of sitting here and chatting with Sean Finnegan who, in addition to being the CEO of OMG Digital, is our keynote speaker for this month's iMedia Brand Summit. Sean, good morning.
Sean Finnegan: Good morning.
Berens: I'll get to the topic of your keynote shortly, but I wanted to open by contextualizing what it is that you do, and your new job compared to your old job. OMG Digital has been called one of the biggest, if not the biggest, media buyers for digital media in the world. Clearly, you are a guy whose decisions count. And, you are relatively new to this position. So, I was hoping you could let the iMedia readers know how your new job is different from your old job, which was United States Director, I think.
Finnegan: My previous position was U.S. Director of OMD Digital: a unit in North America. I had a variety of responsibilities within OMD, principally managing the digital service, but then simultaneously managing our web marketing needs and clients, as well as working on the integration of digital into the greater OMD offering. And at the same time we were doing that, there was also a focus on deeper strategic partnerships and acquisitions, and a global coordination between all of our assets.
And, in this great space, that led to an opportunity to pull together all our key digital media assets on a worldwide level. This was the brainchild of Omnicom senior management and I was appointed to help lead all of our digital media investments across the holding company, and then help to better make sense of that global volume into some key systems, all to the benefit of our clients.
Another charge is to elevate the conversation and the capability of other areas' crucial and critical functions, such as OMG NEXT (our futures unit), Ad Operations, Metrics and Analytics, and a few more that will soon emerge.
Berens: That's an exciting answer. It sounds to me like you are saying, "If it has ones and zeroes, and it is digital, at some point it goes through you and your team."
Finnegan: Our focus and our deliverables are on being an incremental resource and support to everything that is occurring. What OMG Digital is not is the culmination of every digital asset in the company. We are a strategic shared services function.
Our philosophy, if you will, is -- while making sense of everything on a global scale -- to translate it back to the local agencies for their own interpretation and competitive advantage.
Berens: I understand. You are a worldwide facilitator, rather than a dictator.
Finnegan: Right. And, I think if you know me, I am a better facilitator than a dictator.
Berens: Let's talk about integration, which is one of the words that I pulled out of your answer to the last question. At iMedia, as you know as a longtime iMedia Summit attendee and friend, we have the mission to advance the cause of interactive within all of marketing.
Over the last two or three years, I have been seeing the conversation shift from "when is digital going to get a seat at the big kid's table?" to something more robust, like, "how do we go about integrating digital? How do we keep all of the people at the table talking with each other in a productive fashion?"
Finnegan: Right.
Berens: So, my question is, to you: do you share that feeling? And, how would you characterize the maturation of digital advertising over the last two or three years?
Finnegan: It has been great. It has been interesting. And, the conversation has changed dramatically before our eyes: expanding from vertical web marketing initiatives to a time when the philosophy that digital is everything is starting to take root.
The growth of our industry is not necessarily hinged upon one more percentage point on allocations, or the latest technology, or application, or widget to convince a client to have a better program, although those things are all obviously important.
But the growth of digital -- "digital" being defined as a macro term, and not just one vehicle -- is dependent upon its integration and the spreading of the intelligence we get from digital through every aspect of our organization.
Let's take OMD Digital, for example, where there are nearly three hundred people, with five different units supporting it. But, truly, the growth of digital within OMD is going to be about the fact that the audio and the video, the television and radio buyers, all begin to evaluate and purchase and strategize on the digital aspects of their components, such as interactive television, podcasting, streaming, et cetera.
It is also about opening channels for strategic planners to be able to have insight and oversight of any and all media touch points: not stopping at traditional and digital not stopping at the web.
Digital impacts everything, from metrics, to research, to how we bill. It is truly a philosophy that is pervading every aspect of our business. And, I think you have seen that evidenced by some of the key personnel moves in our industry, where some digital people have been taking the opportunity to elevate from web marketing and into more of a macro digital role.
Berens: And, who would you be thinking of? I am of course thinking of Sarah Fay over at Carat, and….
Finnegan: Yes, certainly Sarah and, there are some key leaders that have been brought up, even at the holding company level: Bant Breen from IPG, Mark Read at WPP, the movements at Publicis. These are all great people and interesting migrations.
Our focus is on our clients and new ways to bring value to our clients: through the many different technical and digital services that are out there, the different dynamics that are occurring within our space, whether through acquisitions, strategic investments, et cetera. That is our principal purpose.
Berens: I think that you are also very modest not to include yourself in that list of luminaries, because you coming to your new gig is one of the biggest things to happen to digital in a long time. Let's tease out one other thing. You said, "Digital not stopping at online." And, when I hear that, I think what you mean is digital moving beyond the laptop, beyond the desktop, to things like mobile, to the closing of what I call "the last 10 feet" between the television and the computer. Is that what you mean?
Finnegan: I do mean those things, and those are things we have oversight on today. However, I also look at this as a hierarchy and timeline where you have the digital planner and the traditional media planner moving closer to one another as digital becomes the common platform.
As the general strategist begins to understand and derive implications from interactive television, based off of his television knowledge, we are moving toward the digital strategists migrating toward interactive television from the knowledge of our executions on broadband.
So, you are starting to see everything intermingle and mix. Integration, interestingly, is going to be empowered and executed through the power of people, and not necessarily technology. This is an irony, because the way that we can get to more efficiency and more of a digital expertise is through people, and not necessarily through systems. So, it takes people with big ideas, and open minds, and creative collaboration, and excitement about change than anything.