Just as Jackie Kulesza is becoming one of the most influential
players in television’s upfronts, her job keeps changing.
“Technology changes everything. It is the catalyst that is enabling the
consumer to watch what they want when they want on what device
they want,” says Kulesza, who is known for her work in broadcast and
kids television for clients including Bank of America, Kellogg’s and
Allstate. “It offers just a ton of opportunities for marketers to better
engage with the consumer and be more relevant to the consumer than
they’ve ever been before.”
Starcom is all about “human experiences,” and since those experiences
are changing, the agency has been changing its approach to video, with Kulesza’s television and
Starcom’s digital teams, led by Anne Enright, working more closely together.
“There’s a lot of things I’m involved in now that I was not involved in before, speci" cally a lot more
involved with the science, and how digital planning and buying works,” Kulesza says.
One goal at the agency is to get away from planning based on who is selling what and to keep the
focus on the consumer. From a buyer’s perspective, that means there are several points in the planning
and buying cycle where money could shift from something like traditional television to online video, and
vice-versa.
“We have some great tools that allow us to look at client needs in a number of different ways, so it
might happen fairly upstream where they think about a video goal, and very quickly they get to what
platform, and then the look at the content within each platform,” Kulesza says. Or it could happen further
downstream, where a client identifies content it wants to be in and wants to buy the platforms where that
content lives.
“A third way is where, when we’re in a marketplace doing buys for one platform or the other, we’re actually
doing them together on vendors that have that capability. And we’re making decisions on the fly based
on the marketplace conditions and based on the goals of the client,” Kulesza says.
