Coming up with a new approach to media planning is no small feat. Implementing and customizing that approach across every piece of business that your media agency runs? Seems impossible. But that’s what Lynn Lewis, East Coast president and CMO of IPG Mediabrands’ UM, has been doing since she helped craft the data-driven, moments-based planning tool and dedicated shop, J3, for Johnson & Johnson in 2011. So far it’s led to a slew of new business wins, including Accenture, Hulu, GoPro, Fitbit and even Coach. At the end of 2016, UM’s year-over-year revenue increased 9 percent globally and 12 percent in the U.S.
“The product that Lynn piloted on J3 is the product that is UM’s global media capability now,” says UM’s U.S. president Kasha Cacy. “We modeled everything we did off of that J3 model and that’s the model that brought in Coke, that brought in any of the wins we’ve gotten in the past three years—they were really grounded in the work that she did at J3.”
Adds Cacy: “Lynn is a pioneer and she’s a strategic thinker, but she can actually make it happen, which is so important.”
