Starcom Worldwide of Toronto has restructured into a more traditional model with ‘fuel teams’ built around a roster of clients, bringing planners and buyers back together again.

Its specialized media investment groups have been disbanded and positions such as that of veteran Theresa Treutler, formerly SVP broadcast investment director, and Val Buckley, formerly director of Internet planning department Starcom IP, have been eliminated.

The ‘fuel teams’ are account teams led by a senior director where planners and buyers sit and work together on one set of accounts.

Paul Maher, CEO of Starcom MediaVest Group Canada, says the new structure better fits the company’s positioning, ‘Fueling Brand Power.’ He also admits that it’s a bit of a step backwards to the way media firms were set up three or four years ago, before many agencies started to separate media investment from planning.

Maher says the new structure gives clear accountability for the entire product through to one person, the director on the business, rather than accountability being split between planning and buying.

‘All members of the team working on an account know what the key drivers for that business are. There’s more focus on account results than with a functional specialization structure.

‘We really believe that in separating those functional roles [planning and buying], we in the industry lost something in the translation. There isn’t communication between those two groups and it’s not as good as when everyone is working together.’

Maher says this restructuring best fits the needs of Starcom in Canada specifically. In bigger markets such as the U.K. and the U.S., agencies are still structured according to the functional specialization model. In the U.S., Starcom is organized into specialist investment groups and specialist strategy groups as it recently was in Canada.

MediaVest in Toronto was never organized into specialist groups and has always had its ‘fuel teams’ in place. Its large clients – such as Procter & Gamble, Kraft, and Effem Foods – will continue to have these dedicated teams.

The effectiveness of this model at MediaVest prompted the changes at Starcom, says Maher.

‘If you say to a buyer that your focus is only on buying, that buyer loses sight of the fact that buying is just part of what we deliver. One of the things we’re going back to is when we bring entry-level people in, we want them to be exposed to more of the business, both planning and buying. It gives them a broader skill base which they don’t get at other agencies.’

The acquisition of Bcom3 by France-based Publicis Groupe, finalized in September 2002, brought Starcom MediaVest Group into an organization which already included another international media management brand, ZenithOptimedia.

Differentiating itself from SMG’s worldwide positioning ‘Fueling Brand Power,’ ZenithOptimedia is now known as ‘The ROI Agency’ for its focus on providing the best return on investment for its clients.

Sunni Boot, president of ZenithOptimedia in Toronto, explains that ‘The ROI Agency’ doesn’t mean that it simply buys more time and space for less.

‘We are concentrating on outcomes not outputs,’ she says. ‘Outputs were what companies did years ago: The post analysis, the delivery of 100 GRPs, a line report and positioning report on magazines and a poster drive. That’s critically important, but an outcome is the sales and volume. Everything we do we want to optimize, measure and it’s all about creating those connections.’