Digital advertising pioneer, Stuart Bogaty, spoke recently with Brand Connections President and CEO Brian F Martin. Now an Executive Vice President and Global Managing Partner at Universal McCann, Bogaty shared his experiences over 15 years in the digital space and explained why “media” has become an irrelevant term.
Bogaty traces his interest in the agency business to television show that was popular during his college years in the late 80s. Intrigued by the advertising professionals depicted on Thirtysomething, he entered the industry on the media side and hopped between agencies in the early going. When the avant-garde Modem Media agency approached him in 1993, Bogaty bolted from Saatchi & Saatchi to pursue another one of his passions. “I’ve always had a technological bent to my interest. I’ve always been very interested in technology and this Internet thing kind of appeared on the horizon. I took to it in a pretty significant way.” According to advertising lore, Modem placed the first ads on the web for Zima. That particular product and campaign were less than wildly successful, but Bogaty’s interactive innovation with JCPenney, MasterCard and iVillage-forebearer Parent Soup all prepared him to ride the building digital wave.
“We started in a place where, obviously, we were all feeling our way through things,” Bogaty recounts. “Back in the early 90s we knew impressions, we knew CPMs, cost per impression – we knew how to price these things. We knew how to look at audience, we knew how to find audience, and associate brands with audience so that we were doing efficient media planning.” Today’s advanced ROI- and auction-based metrics have helped transform the interactive and digital segments from an obscure new option into a marketing necessity. But there remains much more to be explored on the digital frontier. “We’re still, I think, a little too complacent and a little too comfortable with sticking with what we know, as opposed to really trying to break out of the box and look at what the digital marketplace brings to the table in terms of the ability for brands to communicate differently with consumers. I think we’re barely scratching the surface. We’re still being pro-active or reactive, and we’re not being as much a part of the conversation.”
