• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, May 25, 2006

Shortly after Publicis Groupe unveiled Denuo, I sat down with Rishad Tobaccowala, the new media practice's CEO, and asked him to explain its business model to me. "I can't really do that," he said, adding, "because it keeps changing."

Instead, he described elements of what he thought Denuo might do. It would advise marketers and agencies on new media developments and futures. It would help research and develop some of those futures by working with next-generation media companies on behalf of marketers and agencies. And, when appropriate, it would consider backing some of those efforts financially with venture funds. Beyond that, he said, the market would decide, conceding, "Six months from now, our business plan may be completely different."

That may seem like a startling admission of lack of vision for a man who previously served as Publicis' chief innovation officer. But in reality, Tobaccowala is once again ahead of the curve in identifying a new trend. Call it ephemerality, or the state of being perpetually in flux. That's the world we live in. Media, and the business models that support them, are simply changing too fast to use static plans. The secret to success  and maybe even survival  will be staying nimble, fleet of foot, adaptive, flexible, and perhaps most important, open-minded.

If you doubt that, just consider the changes that have occurred since Madison Avenue began planning its current fiscal season last year at this time. Everything changed on Oct. 12, 2005, less than a month into the 2005-'06 TV season, when the Walt Disney Co. and Apple announced plans to begin distributing prime-time ABC TV shows as iTunes downloads. A couple of months later, Nielsen added time-shifting to its TV ratings. Broadband has emerged as an established TV distribution platform alongside broadcast, cable, and satellite. Plans and expectations that were made coming into this season have changed coming out of it.

The point is that the rate of change in the media business is accelerating so fast that long-range planning may no longer be prudent. Planning has to be done in real time. And real time is becoming Internet time. Remember the hyper-accelerated pace the media world hiccupped through in the late 1990s? Well, it's back again. It's happening in the realm of metrics, too: Big companies are using things like Web traffic to plan future business scenarios once again. The reason, says Joe Marchese, head of the online media practice group at management consulting firm Bainbridge Inc., is that marketers can no longer afford to take the time to do linear research, planning, strategy, and execution. They have to do it simultaneously and continuously.

Take a three-month research and planning project, for example. "By month 1.5, three or four major things have probably changed," says Marchese. "New companies have emerged. New competitors have emerged. New ways of doing business have emerged. Everything you've done up to that point has changed."

That's why we're seeing companies like Denuo and Marchese's group emerge. Others are applying this iterative approach to research and planning. Stacey Lynn Koerner's new consumer experience practice at Interpublic is doing that to understand how people are influenced by media content, technology, and brands. Only a smidgen of the work Koerner's group is doing involves conventional media research. Most of it is on-the-fly kind of stuff. And a good portion of it involves a continuous dialogue with consumers themselves, tapping online social communities, monitoring online and offline buzz, and even bringing them through Interpublic's new media lab to see what they think.

The way consumers experience media is changing rapidly, and so should the way advertisers and agencies think about those experiences, says Koerner.

Likewise, Bainbridge's Marchese says business relationships are changing as a result of the way consumers relate to media. And it's happening faster all the time.