Publications
Publications
- March 2001 (Revised September 2005)
- HBS Case Collection
Madison Avenue: Digital Media Services (C)
Abstract
By July 2000, Madison Avenue had experienced extraordinary growth in sales, employees, clients, and service offerings. From late 1999 to July 2000, the company had taken several initiatives to redesign its internal processes so that the firm could continue to grow, while maintaining the quality of its service offering and increasing efficiency enough to show profitability. Matt Garvin, the company's chief strategy officer, was considering a host of new service offerings to complement its core service--active management of online advertising. The question to Garvin was twofold: What opportunities made strategic sense for the company? What strategic opportunities matched well with the company's operational capabilities? How reliable, robust, and responsive are they? Can they handle the growth, scale, and scope that Garvin is contemplating. Can be taught alone as a strategy case or in conjunction with the (B) case to emphasize the product-process matching problem. If taught together, one case can be assigned to half the students, the other case to the other half to simulate more fully the organizational challenge of communicating across functional specialties--i.e., the service equivalent of product development, production, marketing, and sales.
Keywords
Service Operations; Digital Marketing; Product Development; Growth and Development Strategy; Advertising Industry
Citation
Spear, Steven J., and Anne Karshis. "Madison Avenue: Digital Media Services (C)." Harvard Business School Case 601-077, March 2001. (Revised September 2005.)