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Challenges Suit Her

Jan 31, 2007  •  Post A Comment

Christine Merrifield is always up for a challenge.
When MediaVest’s recently named senior VP and director of video investment and activation and operations was in college at Buffalo State, she initially took courses to be a teacher. She got straight A’s but was “bored out of my mind.” The same thing happened with computer courses. Finally she settled on business classes. “That I felt was more challenging,” she recalled.
Her new post is proving to be challenging as well. When the promotion was announced in November, she was expecting to add new client responsibilities. Along with taking the lead on Capital One and overseeing Activision, Heineken and USB, she picked up the Mars Masterfood business. Now the agency has added two new pieces of business, so she’ll also have oversight over the Wendy’s business and the Wal-Mart group will report through her.
In adding the operational role for the agency’s video investment and activation (VIA) group, Ms. Merrifield is also assuming responsibility for personnel and training. In addition she’ll be developing marketplace strategy for upfront and other long-term negotiations.
The big workload doesn’t seem to be a concern. “I’m pretty good at stamina. I have three kids,” Ms. Merrifield explained. “I tend to pride myself on that.”
MediaVest’s VIA unit buys video, whether it’s on broadcast, cable, broadband or mobile. “At the end of the day, it’s one big screen and what’s coming through the screen is what the consumer really wants, and they want what they want,” said Ms. Merrifield, who remembers the days when Fox was an emerging network.
The change is what makes the media business fun. “I do have the luxury of [knowing] what it used to be back in the day,” she said. Now the agency and its clients are pondering devices that put network programming-and national commercials-on cell phones. “It’s amazing to see the transformation of the business. It continuously changes and re-adapts because at the end of the day, we’re all working for our client and at the end of the day our client is the consumer.”
Ms. Merrifield started working in media buying during a college internship at McKibben Communications, which hired her after she graduated. “I fell in love with the business,” she said, and decided that if she wanted to be in advertising, she should be in New York.
So she returned to her parents’ home on Long Island and looked for jobs. One day, she had two cold calls for jobs. The first was at Ogilvy, where she was offered a position in local buying. The second was at Grey Advertising, where she was interviewed by Bo Argentino, now senior VP of advertising and media sales at NBC Universal.
“I went there really just to say, ‘Thank you, but I already got offered a job this morning, and I’ll never forget this,'” she recalled. Ms. Argentino told her not to take the Ogilvy job because she needed to work in national. The only problem: there was no job available at Grey.
Ms. Argentino told Ms. Merrifield to go home and that she’d call in a week. Despite skepticism from her parents, Ms. Merrifield decided to wait a week and wound up at Grey, working for Ms. Argentino and Gerri Wong, now senior VP of prime-time sales at ABC. She climbed the ladder in the media department of Grey, which became MediaCom, working for the legendary Jon Mandel and Donna Speciale, now her boss at MediaVest.
In her off hours, Ms. Merrifield is mostly engaged in activities with her three kids, Catherine, 12, Patrick, 9, and Bridget, 6. Her husband Patrick is not in the media business; in fact, he couldn’t be in a more different line of work: He’s a police officer. “He keeps me sane,” Ms. Merrifield said.
Right now the big thing with the kids is indoor lacrosse. They live by the beach and when the weather warms up, they’ll either be in the new pool or in the ocean. Every summer they travel to the Outer Banks in North Carolina and Ms. Merrifield and her eldest daughter go hang gliding. “It’s not as daring as it sounds,” she says They jump off 25-foot dunes in Kitty Hawk. “It’s not like I’m jumping off a 50-foot cliff.”
Who Knew: Ms. Merrifield claims she’s got the minivan of kayaks. Hers is big enough to hold her and her three kids, and she takes it out on Carmen’s River in Brookhaven Village, N.Y. She says it’s hard to paddle, although the kids are starting to pitch in. Harder than paddling is getting the craft into the water. That’s where her husband comes in. “I’m only 5’1″ so getting that kayak up and off the roof of our car is not an easy task.”
This article is part of TVWeek.com’s Media Planner newsletter, a weekly source of breaking news, trend articles, profiles and data about media planning edited by Senior Editor Jon Lafayette.

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