Sharon Otterman left the agency world for ESPN last year, and fits right in on the other side of the desk with a “brand that takes risks.”

As vice president of media strategy, Sharon Otterman is the primary media liaison and contact point for ESPN’s advertising agencies and works with them to develop the best media planning scenarios. She also helps guide implementation of media plans both on and off channel. Otterman develops planning benchmarks that will determine (over time) the most effective levels of exposure and timing, and the best promotional initiatives and media mix for ESPN and all of its assets.

When last we talked with Otterman, she was vice president, director of media at Modem Media. We asked her about her transition into the brand world, and about current projects she has going.

iMedia Connection: Why did you make the move from Modem Media to ESPN? Has it been a good transition?

Otterman: It’s been a great transition. I made a move from one great place to another, so it wasn’t the place itself—it was an opportunity to do broader marketing vs. just interactive marketing, and to be able to see the while picture. And then to be able to leverage the ROI skills I had learned in the Internet space and apply those to traditional media as well—trying to be sure we get the best bang for our buck.

iMedia Connection: What do you like about working for a brand?

Otterman: It was great to have an agency background to work on multiple brands, and to really get a sense of all the different industries before this experience. Working for the ESPN brand is great—I’m a fan of the brand itself which is always fun. It’s a brand that people are loyal to and have so much attachment and emotion for. And it’s a brand that takes risks, which is fun as well.

iMedia Connection: What kinds of risks do you mean?

Otterman: We have an irreverent brand that’s not concerned about laughing at ourselves, evidenced by our SportsCenter spots, and we’re a brand that likes to have fun. In that way, it’s risk taking. And just the foray that we’ve made into interactive media has been risk taking and really embracing the new medium. So we’ve always had the cable network and the magazine, and now with dot-com, there’s the Web site and using the Web to market as well.

iMedia Connection: What specific knowledge from your agency experience do you bring to the brand?

Otterman: I think one thing is being able to understand a lot of different industries, because when you’re on the agency side you can see how a lot of different businesses operate and how they measure success. Being in the entertainment industry, you can apply a lot of that learning of packaged goods and retail and all that. And I think the second thing is being on the interactive side specifically is that with every program we did we measured success, and we’re trying to do the same thing with all of our media not just interactive media.

iMedia Connection: What are the most significant roles online plays in building and expanding your brand?

Otterman: For us it’s immediacy/recency. Most of our campaigns promote tune-in, so we’re trying to get people to watch a show at a specific date and time. For us to be on the Internet a couple hours before that show is going to go live is incredible for us, so we’re trying to promote a 9:00 tune-in on a Sunday night by advertising that Sunday. It’s been a medium in which we can really isolate people before they go home from work, and encourage them to tune in and learn more about our shows.

iMedia Connection: What can’t online do, despite what everyone would like to believe?

Otterman: I think online still has some of the same concerns of proving return on investment that the rest of the other media vehicles do. It’s held to a higher standard that just because it’s online you can look at click rates and impressions, but I’m not sure that means a lot when you’re not trying to drive e-commerce. So defining success, whether it be from interactive or TV or newspaper or radio, is still challenging.

iMedia Connection: How does online fit in with the rest of your marketing efforts? Does it stand-alone or do you take an integrated approach?

Otterman: We look at it as one integrated plan, so we try to use the full media mix for every marketing campaign we do. So not only do we look to TV, radio, newspaper and print, but online is included in that as well. We think it rounds out the entire plan of being able to drive tune-in at different points in time before the show is about to air and at different times of day to get different audiences.

iMedia Connection: Will the amount of online within your mix change this year?

Otterman: It actually has been increasing. I’ve only been here seven or eight months, and it has increased for each campaign that we do. So we do think that will continue to grow.

iMedia Connection: What has been your biggest online success—alone or as part of a larger campaign or promotion?

Otterman: We’re still trying to define success. This is our third go-around at doing interactive marketing. Our most recent success has been with a show called “Playmakers” and a show called “NFL Countdown”. For both of those campaigns we had a pretty blown-out online marketing effort leading up to the tune-in of the first episode. And we feel that the response that we got, the interaction with the campaign, helped to drive our viewership for that first night.

iMedia Connection: What’s your biggest online frustration or challenge?

Otterman: The biggest challenge is still working with media properties to really understand our goals and what we’re trying to do. It still works differently from traditional media in terms of forming that partnership, and we would love to work closer with the media properties to understand our marketing challenges and the solutions that could help solve those challenges.

iMedia Connection: What do you have to spend time convincing management that online can or can’t do?

Otterman: That’s a good question because we never really have to do any convincing. It’s so much a part of our business that it really isn’t convincing—it’s more a matter of being able to really figure out and explain the final return on investment, and what part of the media mix is contributing to people watching more of our shows—is it all the elements together, just interactive, or just TV?

iMedia Connection: What one thing would you like agencies to understand about your needs and your business?

Otterman: That it’s not just a separate medium—it’s one part of the media mix. Sometimes it has an elitist, separate thing about it, but it is just one element of our overall media mix, and it has to be planned and placed and executed as part of that.

iMedia Connection: What’s the next big thing online and how will you use it?

Otterman: I think the next big thing isn’t going to be rich media or anything glitzy. That big thing was defined five years ago. I think the big thing in the next year is going to be around metrics and defining success—making it an easier medium to buy and plan and prove success on. It’s not going to be as sexy as something that has bells and whistles, but it’s going to be the thing that makes it the must-have in every plan because it’ll be easy to plan and easy to see if it worked.