This agency president would like to see the industry's manpower shortage solved this coming year.

Tom Hespos is the president of Underscore Marketing, an agency specializing in cross-platform communications. His clients include Schering-Plough Consumer HealthCare Products (online AOR), The MathWorks (AOR), Eurail, The European Travel Commission and Terumo Medical Devices.

iMedia: It's near the end of the year. What would you say was your personal and/or your agency's biggest triumph this year?

Tom Hespos: I would say Underscore's biggest triumph was going five for five in pitching new business at the end of the summer. We landed work from some terrific companies, including a couple of AOR assignments. It feels good to be on a winning streak.

My biggest personal triumph was getting on South Beach and fitting back into the clothes I wore in college (smile).

iMedia: What are you still struggling with or frustrated with that you thought would be history by 2006?

Hespos: There are so many of these -- measurement, reach and frequency, the cookie issue, privacy, broadcast thinking in a narrowcast world. I thought that we would make significant progress on many of these, but I think many in the industry would like to see some of these issues swept under the carpet. It's a shame because we're in an industry famous for its smart people and I know we could tackle all or most of these if we put our minds to it. We're getting around to it: Dave Smith is reminding everyone that we still have plenty of work to do on reach and frequency. Trevor Hughes and the folks from the NAI are getting the word out on cookies. And we've got the Aspen Group meetings at the iMedia Summits to remind us to refocus.

As far as issues specific to Underscore, I thought we would be able to overcome the perception that we're just an online agency. In actuality, we plan, buy and execute all forms of media. But since our people are best known for their thought leadership in emerging media, we're often pigeonholed as an online shop. I had planned on launching an effort to address this earlier in the year, but we're so busy with client work that it just wasn't feasible. What's that they say about the cobbler in town? That his shoes are usually the last to get repaired?

iMedia: How has the role of your agency changed to meet the needs of clients in a world of fracturing media habits?

Hespos: We haven't had to change much, since Underscore's people have always been thought leaders in media and we're often among the first to adapt. But our clients have changed. They're learning to rely on our advice more. They're also warming up to the idea that meaningful communication at a micro level is infinitely superior to broadcasting messages at a macro level. The issue was never that audiences are fragmented; it was that advertisers didn't know how to communicate via anything other than the broadcast model. They're coming to realize that personal communication and cultivation of loyalty are keys to success, not the "spaghetti against the wall" trick.

iMedia: What are some of the latest ways your agency is integrating different media to achieve client objectives?

Hespos: We're going places where other agencies fear to tread. We were among the first to sponsor blogs. Now, clients are asking us about how else we can help them participate in the citizen publishing movement. We're looking at podcasts, blog sponsorships, and even Conversation Departments, which are specialized people within a company that can represent that company to the blogosphere and to the market in general.

We're not integrating emerging media just so we can brag or win lame awards. We're doing it to show that it works. If you read my blog last year, you know that we tested a number of blog advertisements for one of our clients last summer. We knew it would work, to the point that we put those blogs up against all the other sites the client had traditionally carried on its media plan, both at the time and in the past. And you know what? One of the blogs was the top performer across their campaign. It blew away everything they had seen before. They asked for more.

iMedia: What other emerging media have you tested/are you using for clients?

Hespos: The blogs, podcasts, online community marketing, mobile, RSS and many more. We make a concerted effort here to stay on top of the development of new vehicles, so that as they emerge, we can bring them to the table for clients in an appropriate way. We're not going to try to force a square peg into a round hole -- if the new medium doesn't fit the task at hand or the client's brand, it's not getting used. When these media are appropriate, however, we recommend them. Thankfully, we tend to attract clients that truly value our advice and counsel, so a good deal of the new campaigns do tend to get executed.

iMedia: What are clients most afraid of (either device, like cell phone or technique, like blogging)? Why?

Hespos: A lot of clients are afraid of the loss of control that comes with sponsoring blogs or community content. They're terrified that folks will trash their brand. But they're coming around and beginning to understand that markets are conversations and that you have to take the good with the bad. The really great brands out there separate themselves from the crummy ones in part by how they respond to criticism. Put some TLC into it and any damage you might suffer as the result of someone calling you out on a blog or review site will be negated. In fact, when people see that you care that much about your customers, your brand goes well beyond redeeming itself and it builds positive perception by showing people that you care.

iMedia: How is marketing/working with a small company different from working with a large company -- in terms of openness to innovation/experimentation/use of emerging platforms? Any industries more innovative, willing to take risks than others?

Hespos: The thing I dig about working for a small company is that we can actually take calculated risks. I used to work for larger agencies, and there were always naysayers further up the food chain that nixed a lot of great ideas because they were afraid to stick their necks out a bit, even if the recommendation was bulletproof. These days, there are no such constraints. When we know an idea will work, it gets recommended, and clients reap the benefits. Our clients are attracted to that. It's that kind of thinking they're looking for when they hire us. Of course, certain clients are more conservative than others. Some have to be -- they're in regulated industries or they have decades' worth of brand equity they don't want to risk damaging. 

The clients targeting the younger audiences tend to be the ones who are more innovative. They need to be in order to connect meaningfully with their customers. For instance, we were just appointed AOR for a company that controls approximately 20 percent of the mobile ringtone market. Their target audience regularly uses media that their parents have never even heard of. They're forced to be innovative, and that makes it a very fun and rewarding account to work on.

iMedia: If you develop an innovative campaign that is successful for one company, can you use that success story for companies in other verticals? How can you pitch it to convince other verticals that these results might apply to them too? And how can you share learnings when so many clients consider them proprietary?

Hespos: That used to be such an uphill battle… Some of the other agency management types and I used to complain about this on a regular basis. (It's one of those things agency CEOs talk about after you get a few beers in them.) You would take a case study to a client and they would say, "Great, but you have no proof that this would work in my industry." So you'd bust your butt to find something in their particular industry sector, show it to them and they'd say, "Terrific, but here's how my business is different..." So you would eventually wind up in the position of having to get proprietary data on their closest competitor somehow or they would tell you it doesn't work. We came to understand that this behavior is client-ese for "We're just not that risk-tolerant right now."

Thankfully, the dynamic is a bit different these days. With so many marketers shifting budgets to emerging media, the perfect case study is no longer a requirement. Clients usually want to know if you have experience dealing with that medium, whether you've implemented it on behalf of any other clients, and whether you've had success. But that's about it. They're beginning to realize that if they "Case Study" things to death, their competitors jump on the idea, own it and effectively lock them out of it.

iMedia: What's the interactive campaign over the last 12 months that you wished had come from your agency? Why?

Hespos: Have you seen the Axe Body Spray fake news spots that were developed for iTV? They're taking on a life of their own online. My business partner Eric sent me a link to it when he first saw it and we sat around at our laptops chuckling, watching it with our headphones on. I thought the creative execution was hilarious, and I thought to myself, "Damn, we could have done that. And we probably would have gotten a lot more mileage out of it, too."

iMedia: What's the biggest communications problem that you have in your work -- either internal within your company or external with clients -- and what strategies work best for you in tackling this sort of problem?

Hespos: I would say it's figuring out the level of detail a new client needs to see in our communications with them. Figuring that out is sometimes tough, because when you're starting a new relationship, you don't know how much time a client has to review analyses, reports, points of view and other documents they request from you. We're very detail-oriented, so we tend to want to cram in all the little details to support our recommendations, instead of just the broad strokes. We want to point out to clients, "Hey, look at this pocket of activity over here. It's doing really well. Here are five reasons why." But at times, we find they just want the topline bullet points. While we're careful to manage expectations, sometimes we assume that our clients have plenty of time to read everything that we send them. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. Such is business, such is life.

iMedia: What are your goals for the coming year?

Hespos: I'd like to solve the manpower problem that's plaguing our industry right now. When the bubble burst, lots of really talented people fled the industry. Working in the media business was no longer sexy or lucrative. While that seems to be turning around nicely, all the entry-level folks who had to leave in 2000 would have been the supervisors and associate directors of today. Their departure from the business left us with a gaping hole in the talent pool. To an extent, we've been dealing with this through training. We train our people to be media generalists rather than specialists. Someone working at Underscore understands that they'll be trained to handle planning, buying and executing all forms of media. They appreciate that we're helping them build valuable experience more quickly than they would at another agency, where they might be a media buyer for sites beginning with the letters A though H only. The shortage of smart mid-level people is doing some funny things to salaries and job expectations, but I think if we continue doing what we're doing, we won't be as affected by this as other agencies might be.

I'd also like to continue our winning streak from a new business standpoint. We've won accounts away from agencies hundreds of times our size. I won't lie -- it's immensely flattering to have a client select you instead of one of the big guys.

I'd also like to continue our organic growth. Somebody from a private fund called me the other day and told me that it was a "gobble or be gobbled" business. I told him that I disagreed with him strongly. We don't want to get big just for the sake of getting big. That's how you start to suck. We started Underscore with our own money. We're accountable to our clients and to ourselves, not to investors. There are so many advantages to that, but the biggest is that we can focus on long-term growth instead of short-term numbers.

But mostly, I'd like to continue our success with our clients and their businesses. Last year, I presented a media plan to one of our clients and he was blown away. This year, he gave us his international business and he's letting us expand into new media channels. Here's a guy who had used business magazines as a cornerstone of his campaign for the past decade, and has seen his audience fragment across multiple channels. Now he's getting into online sponsorships, search, webcasts and all the other vehicles into which his audience migrated over the past several years, and he's happy. So we're being asked to do more this year. Nothing is quite as satisfying as getting a nice pat on the back from a client along with an expansion of responsibilities. I'd like to be able to continue that.

Dawn Anfuso is senior editor for iMedia Connection.