William Morris Launching Agency 3.0 With Amp’d Founder Adderton
By Rafat Ali - Tue 20 May 2008 06:15 PM PST
William Morris Agency is launching a new branded content and marketing division, called Agency 3.0, working with former Amp’d Mobile CEO and founder Peter Adderton. The division, which will operate as a separate company, has most of the creative team behind Amp’d’s critically acclaimed content services, and has signed on Qualcomm and Clearwire as clients, we have learned, though the company refused to confirm these clients. Our sources also say that WMA is going to invest as much as $3 million into the venture over time, though again, the company refused comment on any amount.
Other executives in the new company include Greg Johnson, former founder of Interpublic’s Emerging Media Lab, who will head the company’s practice addressing consumer brand companies and traditional agencies; Steve Stanford, the former CEO of Icebox, and former COO of Amp’d, who will head the company’s practice in the entertainment industry; Scott Anderson, former creative head and co-founder of both Boost Mobile and Amp’d Mobile, who will lead the creative and design team at Agency 3.0. A total of about 20 employees are in the new company. WMA is the joint owner of the company, along with Adderton as the key executives...the new company will be based on of WMA’s Beverly Hills headquarters. More after the jump...
Essentially the new firm is part ad agency, and part strategic and operational development firm which is working with corporate clients and brands, and will help in “designing, implementing and monetizing” their online and mobile assets, as Adderton told me earlier today. Among the core functions Agency 3.0 will help in include digital strategy implementation, new product and brand development, content creation and user interface (UI) and content platforms development. With Clearwire (NSDQ: CLWR), as we reported earlier, it has helped in the development of its Clearmedia platform, though exact details are not known. On Qualcomm (NSDQ: QCOM), it is working on the MediaFLO mobile TV service, possibly developing some branding and creating a separate content channel on the service, we have learned. MediaFLO is now live on Verizon Wireless (NYSE: VZ) and AT&T.
This is also in keeping with WMA’s strategy of diversifying beyond its core agency business, as it did with the new Mailroom Fund, a new film financing venture, and more such initiatives to come, as WMA CEO Jim Wiatt explained it to me in the same interview. This also moves the traditional agency model from just pure management of talent to more active role in implementation, as digital media helps talent go direct to consumers, he explained.
Considering Adderton’s controversial background with Amp’d Mobile, this new company will certainly be heavily scrutinized, and remains to be seen if it can move beyond the conceptual idea of reinventing the traditional agency model into something more concrete, both on the product as well as the business model side. He did say that among the few things that worked at Amp’d were the content services and the UI (Lil’ Bush, the Comedy Central show, came out of Amp’d), and that’s the kind of services he would like to develop going ahead.
Posted in: Advertising, Marketing, Entertainment
Tags: jim wiatt, agency 3.0, peter adderton, william morris agency,
