Ocean Media appears to have found a course through the choppy seas of change.
The Huntington Beach-based agency projects its billings will near $500 million this year, up from about $300 million it had in 2011, placing it among the largest independent media buying shops on the West Coast.
The growth has been driven by an influx of new accounts over the past 18 months—including foam mattress manufacturer Casper, identity theft protection outfit LifeLock Inc., razor maker Harry’s, gadget retailer Sharperimage.com and Fabletics, an apparel company co-founded by Kate Hudson.
Those wins and others have more than offset the departure of several e-commerce names—Angie’s List Inc., Ancestry.com and Jet.com.
They also coincided with rise in programmatic—or automated—ad buying. That’s a trend that has more than a few industry experts predicting that a good chunk of media buying jobs could become obsolete down the line.
“Programmatic has become a much hotter topic in the industry and we have a number of clients that have been testing [it],” said Jay Langan, Ocean Media’s president, adding that agency’s new digital department is “looking at emerging media,” and that “programmatic will be a bigger part of what we do in the years to come.”
The emerging trend has validated agency’s continued emphasis on providing additional services, including media evaluation to scale client ad spending. Ocean Media focuses on data analytics—measuring “minute-level” information on effectiveness of television, radio or online advertising. It then funnels client’s budgets “toward the most effective media channels” and optimizes “the ad spend on a continuous basis.”
“We make it a point to stay current with media consumption habits of the consumers we’re targeting,” said Annmarie Turpin, Ocean Media’s senior vice president of client analytics. “That in turn fuels our approach to analytics, the backbone of our success—and that of our clients.”
The agency’s strategy appears to be working well for several long-term clients, including Overstock.com, Priceline.com and eHarmony that collectively spend about $200 million on media placements a year.
Ocean Media, which marked its 20th anniversary this year and has about 130 employees, helped Priceline founder Jay Walker and now-Chief Executive Brett Keller launch the travel booking website in the agency’s first year in business.
“Nineteen years later we still do all their media,” Ocean Media’s Founder and Chief Executive Mike Robertson said of Priceline, which distinguished itself with “Name Your Own Price” business model and is now owned by the Priceline Group Inc. “That kind of is a crazy long run. We’ve been through a few different CMOs and CEOs and we’ve gotten along with everybody.”
Ocean Media, in addition to being media agency of record, also negotiated talent deals for William Shatner and Kaley Cuoco, who starred in the popular “Priceline Negotiator” ads.
It began working with Santa Monica-based eHarmony in 2001, when the dating website’s media budget was less than $200,000—it now spends an estimated $80 million a year on marketing. The relationship went on hiatus for about year and a half in 2011, when Omnicom’s OMD picked up media duties. Ocean Media took back the account in December 2012, following the return from retirement of eHarmony’s founder, Neil Clark Warren, whom agency quoted saying “No individual or company outside our own offices has done more to grow eHarmony profitably than Ocean Media.”
“We tend to lose business when there is a change in management and the new regime just wants to go back who they were working with before,” Robertson said.
Ocean Media, which also has an office occupying two top floors of the DuMont Building at 53rd Street and Madison Avenue in New York City, works with about two dozen clients, including Realtor.com; babysitting service Care.com, 1800flowers.com, ZipCar, a Boston-based subsidiary of Avis Budget Group, and website maker Weebly.
Robertson likens the role of his agency to that of a “marriage counselor” —it negotiates ad rates on behalf of clients that also must make sense to media publishers.
“It’s our job to make sure both sides are happy and profitable,” he said. “Clients absolutely come first, but the photo finish second is the media.”
Robertson, who founded Ocean Media after a career as a stock market analyst, looks at the client’s media mix as an investment portfolio, where instead of stocks and bonds he’s negotiating broadcast or print ad slots.
“I feel like I went from managing money in one capacity to another,” he said.
His agency has secured several Super Bowl spots over the last 15 years, and is looking into deals for the upcoming game on behalf of yet-to-be-revealed clients, “that will definitely be participating at a certain level.”
“We have a great (media-buying) strategy we can’t tell you about,” Robertson said laughing. “[I don’t want] to tip my hat to the media that we’re going to be lining up. Next thing I know I’ll be getting a call, ‘OK who is it, what is it, what do you want,’ and negotiating would begin much earlier than I’d like it to.”
