In its quest to stay on the cutting edge of a rapidly changing mediaverse, Aegis North America is going straight to the source.
The media agency group this week announced it has signed a three-year deal to sponsor the MIT Media Lab, a division of the prestigious school dedicated to ‘applying unorthodox research approaches for envisioning the impact of emerging technologies on everyday life.’
Aegis is one of over 60 sponsors of the lab, which has an annual operating budget of $35 million.
As Nigel Morris, CEO of Aegis Media North America tells MiC, Aegis has, in recent years, ‘taken quite a big bet on convergence’ in how its business is structured, and how it approaches its client’s business. Sponsoring the Media Lab offered Aegis the chance to be a part of innovation at the ground level, he says, and not only apply those learnings to its business, but to contribute to innovation and benefit from the outcomes as well.
‘It enables us to get involved with individual projects in areas that we think are particularly interesting, whether that’s social commerce or mobile commerce, different kinds of data analytics, or measurement systems for how people react to different kinds of communication. All of these areas we can actually get in at the prototyping stage and really become involved in the project.
‘There are no barriers to what they do,’ he continues. ‘They’re not trying to work against a particular business plan or budget. At the same time, they’re very practical and they want to develop something that’s commercial as well. But it’s still within an academic environment, where they’re bouncing ideas off one another and the whole building is geared up for collaboration. It’s a really interesting building to be in.’
Aegis is hoping that the investment in the MIT sponsorship will pay off in ideas that can help create scalable innovations in Aegis’s, and its clients, business. All consortia sponsors of the Lab are allowed the right to license technologies gained through the collaboration.
Agencies in the Aegis Media group include Carat, Vizeum, Isobar, iProspect, and Posterscope.
