Strategy asked the top brass at media agencies across the country to give credit where it’s due and name their brightest young media minds. The winner will be selected by the strategy Media Agency of the Year jury and announced this fall. Here’s our second batch of contenders.

THE BRAND INTEGRATOR
Razvan Luca, account executive, Mediacom

Claim to fame
Razvan Luca puts a lot of focus on making things seamless. He believes that brand integrations should make sense, not make you feel like you’re getting hit over the head with a hammer.
That tenet guides the work he does for Mediacom’s P&G Media Marketing Program (MMP) business, liaising with stakeholders to help develop and execute content-driven associations anchored in TV.
Gillette Drafted, where he worked with sports channel The Score, is an example of such a program. It debuted last fall, planned by Starcom and executed by Mediacom, and started its second season in May. It featured aspiring sportscasters competing against each other for a one-year contract with Score Media and a one-year spokesperson contract with Gillette.
Luca’s particularly proud of a Gillette shaving booth set up on the street outside The Score studio to build awareness and trial for each of the brand’s five categories. Drafted contestants were challenged to get pedestrians to take a seat in the booth and partake in a shaving experience with Gillette Shave Care’s full regimen of products.
“It provided us with a nice means of showcasing our products in an entertaining fashion,” says Luca. 
The first season of Gillette Drafted resulted in over 125MM impressions for males 18 to 49 and a 60% reach against the demo.
Bringing brands to life in fun new ways is something Luca also achieved with a Nice ’n Easy movie sponsorship on W Network, which saw a series of vignettes air during commercial time. They were hosted by two best girlfriends who were sitting at home watching the W Saturday night movie while experiencing Nice ’n Easy.
The idea behind the program was that colouring one’s hair is so easy it can be done during the commercial break. It provided an experience for the viewer that worked seamlessly around the movie sponsorship, resulting in a 45% reach against women 25 to 54 and nearly 20MM impressions against the demo.   

A little more on Luca
Luca, 25, moved to Canada from Romania with his family when he was eight, settling in Toronto. He studied marketing at Ryerson University, and media isn’t exactly where Luca envisioned he would end up. His original goal was to be a brand manager, but when a friend alerted him to an opportunity at Mediacom he made the move.

What do you like most about your job?
“I’m happy that I have a client that offers me the opportunity to work across different brands. It gives me the opportunity to really learn about each of those different categories and always provides a different challenge.”

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Dorothy Zarska, communications strategist, M2 Universal

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