Lowe Roche has hired Joy Sanguedolce as connection planner, a newly formed position in the agency’s strategic planning department. The twist for the agency renowned for its creativity: Sanguedolce comes from the media side of the business. She has been with Cossette Media for the past seven years, most recently as media supervisor.

Sanguedolce joins Lowe Roche on Sept. 6 and media buying is definitely not part of her job description. Brett Marchand, agency president, explains connection planning as a companion discipline to strategic planning. ‘If the strategic planner is in charge of the message – what it’s going to say, what does the consumer want – then the connection planner will be in charge of how you go to market. What’s the role of media, of PR, in-store, word of mouth, or grassroots events?

‘The connection planner will work with the media companies and other partners to figure out how to put out a marketing plan that really thinks about every connection point or contact point (with the consumer).’

Marchand doesn’t really think this type of role is out of character for Lowe Roche. Although the agency has never had a media department, it has always had strategic planners working hand-in-hand with creative. What has changed is the media landscape which is now largely populated by communications opportunities that just a few years ago would not have been thought of as media.

He says the work the agency has done for Virgin Mobile is a good example of how important consumer connection points are.

‘We think the broadcast we did for (the launch) of Virgin was really good but there were a lot of other pieces in that campaign. We put urine-test strips in newspapers. If you didn’t have the right media partner thinking about that (it wouldn’t have happened); normally a creative team would just come up with a newspaper ad.’

This type of thinking is also evident in the latest work for Virgin Mobile, a viral campaign that launched last month. It traces the tragic story of Billy the Finger, a finger that gets caught up in the euphoria of a free phone by signing a long-term phone contract and ends up with The Catch when he learns there is no such thing as free.

The campaign, in both English and French, includes Polaroid prints with handwritten URL dropped in buses, bars/pubs, and posted in public places; black and white ‘wanted’ street postings, online media and banner ads on youth-targeted sites, adult classified listings tagged with the URL, and sex show handbills handed out on the streets.

In just over two weeks, the Web site received 50,000 unique visitors.

Marchand says every contact point matters, ‘You’ve got to try to be provocative and stir emotions about the brand every single time you talk to them. If we had our way, we’d write voicemail messages for our clients.’