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Ad Agencies Embrace Video-Neutral Future

AdAge reports that online video emergence is changing attitudes. As a proliferation of digital channels makes content long limited to your TV available on a range of other devices from your iPod to your laptop, the ad industry is undergoing a semantic shift that�s ousting broadcast TV as its central organizing principle.

In its place, a more flexible notion of video is emerging, one that is rendering obsolete many industry silos, forcing the rearrangement of TV and Internet buying, planning and selling units, and bringing newbie digital types into ever closer proximity to grizzled broadcast buyers.

In what may be the biggest bellwether for this shift, Publicis Groupe�s MediaVest, which buys for giants like Procter & Gamble, announced this month that it�s rechristening its TV-buying teams as �video investment and activation units.� That reorganization, which puts digital experts alongside its broadcast buyers, is one of the most decisive acknowledgments of the zeitgeist -- even in an era of big statements and bold claims, where every ad agency is trying to structure itself to produce more digital content and escape the box of the 30-second-spot.

Changing the terms of discourse, after all, acknowledges a changing reality, not only in how agencies are organized but also in how the work of reaching consumers has been upended. �Broadcast is not dying; broadcast still works,� said Donna Speciale, president-U.S. broadcast and programming at MediaVest. �But we have to follow the consumer to where he or she is getting content and that means being video-neutral.�

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