KEY POINTS:
Antony Young is a true media junkie. The US-based Kiwi expat keeps a family blog, listens to digital radio in his car, power watches dozens of new TV pilots via digital video recorder and wouldn't be caught dead without his Blackberry 8705 (even while sleeping - it doubles as his alarm clock). His favourite papers are the Wall St Journal, the New York Post, the Sunday Times and, like any hard-out media addict, the News of the World.
The former Wellingtonian, who was appointed president of US media and advertising agency Optimedia US in June, is briefly in New Zealand to talk media and marketing at the Going Bananas conference in Auckland this weekend. A former head of media departments at Saatchi & Saatchi in Asia and in Britain, Young has made a career of figuring out what media will best suit different advertising campaigns for some top global brands such as Sony, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, HSBC, Nokia, Procter & Gamble and Toyota.
Media technology is in its golden age, he says, and the last couple of years have seen broadcasters embracing new media rather than fearing it.
"They've stopped talking about 'will the internet kill TV?' and have got their heads around digital technology. You only need to look at Rupert Murdoch buying Myspace, and NBC [which recently bought the biggest mobile tech company]."
However, the rules of marketing have changed to keep up with new technology, he says.
Where advertisers and media owners used to talk about "sticky content", the new buzzphrase is "stretchy content", which can be used in various types of media. Examples, Young says, include the plan by Britain's ITV to launch mobile clips of perennial favourite soap Coronation St, or US channel Fox launching "mobisodes", one-minute clips from its hit show 24 which are sent to mobile phones.
Also, companies don't need to communicate so much information about their products and services during ads and marketing campaigns anymore, he says, because people can find the details online.
"So advertisers are moving into offering 'experiences' where you go to a car maker's website and 'experience' the car. That's the new marketing tool."
However, if media technology is experiencing a golden age, the advertising and marketing industry has to work a lot harder to prove its worth, because it hasn't been great at proving "payback".
Young has just written his first book, Profitable Marketing Communications, which encourages advertising and marketing companies to focus on improving clients' return on investment (ROI) and to show "results not ratings".
"A company's ad spend used to be a great barometer for whether it was making money or not - if it was, it bought a lot of advertising," he tells The Business.
"Now they're asking, do ads actually work?"
Apparently not. Young points to a recent study by US marketing consultant Copernicus which found that 84 per cent of the marketing programmes for the 500 companies it surveyed were "decidedly second-rate" and reduced market share.
Young says marketers interviewed for his book shied away from ROI measurement because they couldn't deliver it.
"There's an obsession with getting more customers instead of focusing on retaining the ones you've got. And advertising and marketing is the first thing to be cut from the budget when the company's looking to cut costs."
Young, 42, has come a long way from his days as delivery boy for Wellington's Campaign Advertising.
He was 25 when Campaign (eventually bought by Saatchi & Saatchi) made him media department head. Five years later he was in Hong Kong as Saatchi & Saatchi regional director, managing the company's 13 media departments and setting up new offices in China, India and Japan.
Saatchi & Saatchi separated its creative agencies from its media departments, with Young called on to set up Saatchi's Zenith Media Asia which, under his leadership, twice won "Media Agency of the Year" and claimed Asia's first Cannes Media Gold Lion.
In 2003 he transferred to London as CEO of ZenithOptimedia UK Group, before being shoulder-tapped for the Optimedia US job based in New York.
The US advertising industry is a "phenomenal" US$160 billion ($222 billion) market, Young says. Optimedia isn't the biggest media agency in the US but he guesses that the company is "probably bigger in dollars than all New Zealand's ad industry put together".
Young lives with New Zealand wife Nancy and their three children in New Jersey, a half-hour drive from work. He shares a SoHo office building with Saatchi & Saatchi head Kevin Roberts and loves the thrill of working in Manhattan, where "everything's happening and Hollywood is just over the hills". But, he says, he's just as happy kicking back and reading the weekend papers, and taking his two boys - and Blackberry - to baseball, of a weekend.
