MEDIA MOVERS

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Medical publishers covet media planners' expertise and relationships with pharma firms and agencies alike. Meanwhile, pinched by consolidation on both sides of the business, media planners are fleeing to the relative safety of the publishing business. "It's going from the frying pan into the fire," jokes AAFP's Michael Springer.

Recent moves include Bob Greene, from CMI to MJ. Mrvica Associates; Marge Casey, from Media Vest to Medical Media Services,; Tina Menzies, formerly of Euro RSCG Life, to the American Osteopathic Association; and Andrew McGuire, from Aventis to Elsevier. The American Medical Association has picked up Sudler & Hennessey's Susan Carrolo, Harrison & Star's Stacy McHugh, LLNS' Maureen Reichart and CommonHealth's Tracy Sears, while Haymarket Medical snapped up Aventis' Martha Welshans and Johnson & Johnson's Maureen Liberti.

Several industry trends have converged to make media planning and buying less attractive as a career choice. Merger mania has wrought smaller media departments. But just as important, notes Menzies, has been the rise of DTC. "As companies spend more on DTC, they're spending less on professional advertising, and as agencies merge into mega-agencies, both the number of jobs and the demand for those services are diminishing." Veteran media planners and buyers say the area is often one of the first to be cut, lacking the glamour of creative or the obvious faculty of account planning. "When we had strategy sessions, media was always the very last to be presented," says Aviva Belsky, who handled media planning for agencies before migrating to publishing a decade ago, and now works on Dowden's OBG Management and Contemporary Surgery. "Media was this orphan stepchild. Back then it was only journal pages. Now it's billboards, websites and keycards, too."

Media allocation has been crunched, even as the job has been complicated with more time-consuming emerging channels, such as Web advertising, CRM and events. As companies have downsized media departments, the burden has fallen harder on remaining staff. "You still have the same number of hours, but you're spending that much more time justifying the spending," says Alison McCauley, who left Cline, Davis & Mann for Haymarket. It's a stressful and often thankless job. "I did all this work on my media plan, and I felt I didn't have ownership of it," says Belsky. "You kill yourself with 18-hour days. The parameters are always changing. And then you don't present it-you just give it to the account people."

Ad sales for journals is hardly stress-free, with spending down and a wave of mergers shaking up the business. However, those who Ve moved to journal ad sales say there they have more control and fewer distractions. "In media planning, you're at the beck and call of someone all the time," says McCauley. "You answer to account people, product managers, new business and other units. You're educating people on the markets, dealing with the reps and the production people at the book. With more convention and Internet business, there's more reps to see." Now add kids to the equation. "A lot of media people have children, and it's harder to balance that with work," says McCauley, who has a young son. "Now I have more time to do his homework with him, to go and see his games."

Diversion publisher Leslie Dubin, who worked on both media and account planning before migrating to publishing, says there can be a downside. "You lose the comraderie of the workplace," says Dubin. "You have to be more motivated, in that there's not someone always watching over you." But there's nothing like having been on the other side of the call. "They're your peers," says McCauley. "They know that you know exactly what they're doing and you know most of the people. It's a small industry."

Advanstar's Alex DeBarr says that expertise filters down through the sales organization. "Publishers haven't evolved their approach to face-to-face selling," said DeBarr. "Find somebody with that kind of perspective, and it gives you the opportunity to train your reps on those nuances."