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MediaVest Promotes Angelo Lomonte on Kraft Account

Nov 7, 2007  •  Post A Comment

If you want proof that media buying relies heavily on caffeine, just talk to Angelo Lomonte.
Mr. Lomonte, promoted in August to VP and connections associate director at MediaVest USA, leads the planning work on Kraft’s coffee brands. Earlier in his career he worked on Pepsi. He’s also worked on new business, which often means long days and late nights.
“Working on the new-business team, that’s a lot of caffeine,” he said.
While Mr. Lomonte thinks about coffee most of the day, about 80 percent of the beverage is consumed during the morning. Although that makes it important to reach consumers in the a.m., they often go to the store to buy coffee at other times of the day.
“We’ve actually looked at a recency approach to get people before the purchase happens,” Mr. Lomonte said. “When you reach them in the morning, they’ve already got whatever brand they have in the cupboard. For a CPG [consumer packages goods] brand, we prefer to get them before they make the purchase.”
On of the Kraft brands Mr. Lomonte works on is the supermarket version of Starbucks.
“One of our base challenges is that we need to communicate to the consumer that the product has many different flavor varieties. It’s not just one type of coffee,” he said. “And the other challenge is communicating that we’re in the grocery. Most of the consumers that we found, especially for the higher-end coffees, don’t know Starbucks is available in grocery stores.”
MediaVest pushed the messages through more traditional forms of media, such as print ads, TV, radio and the Internet. But it also secured signs on the side of grocery store delivery trucks.
“You can’t get more point-of-purchase impact than that,” Mr. Lomonte said.
Now that he’s been promoted, Mr. Lomonte spends more time involved in Kraft’s integrated marketing communications process. Kraft brings together all of its media agency partners—including consumer promotion and public relations—to help create a marketing plan for the year. MediaVest tries to take a lead role in the process by maintaining an agnostic approach to communications.
“We’re the facilitators in helping get everybody together and getting all the ideas together and present the best points for the client,” he said. “If there’s a CP [consumer promotion] idea that’s really great and we feel like money can go from media to CP, we’re fine with doing that. It’s whatever is in the best interest of the brand.”
Mr. Lomonte was born in New York and grew up in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, before it was trendy, he said. Like other kids his age, he grew up wanting to be an astronaut, but wound up a media planner instead.
At Baruch College, he was at first interested in psychology, until he took a psychology of advertising course.
That led him to advertising courses, and before he knew it he was an advertising major with a psychology minor.
Mr. Lomonte wanted to get into the media area because “account management seemed interesting, but the media seemed to have the most impact on what we do,” he said. “”Without the media, there really isn’t advertising.”
He got his first job in the media department at Doyle Dane Bernbach, which became part of OMD. He worked on the Hershey, Merck and Pepsi accounts there.
Then, after the New Yorker got married, he and his wife, a speech pathologist, decided it was time to try something different, so he got a job working on the TGIF restaurant account and doing new business with the Los Angeles office of Deutsch.
“California seemed as different and as far away as we could go while staying in the United States,” he said. “And that was a wonderful experience.”
But after two years, and the birth of their daughter, his family told him it was time to come home, so they returned.
Now he spends time with his family at home in Long Beach on New York’s Long Island, where he has become active in community groups.
It seems the local government voted for a 25% tax increase, then found there was actually a budget surplus.
“That got me a little upset when I had a couple of extra grand taken out of my paycheck,” he said. So he got involved with a few watchdog groups, including the Long Beach Coalition, which monitors what’s going on in the local government, making sure everything is on the up and up.
Mr. Lomonte said he could see himself running for a post on the city council at some time in the future. For now, however, it may be too time-consuming.
“Most people on the council have careers that are a little more flexible than advertising is,” he said. “Our hours make it a little more difficult to go to meetings every week at 7 o’clock.”
Who Knew: Mr. Lomonte was a DJ for many years, spinning records at such well-known New York clubs as the Tunnel and Limelight.
“I can’t take credit for being a front-room DJ. I was usually doing the back room,” he said. That’s where people went when they were tired of house music and needed a change-up. He tended to play ’80s tunes, such as “Mickey” by Toni Basil, which he said would create an “instant party.”
DJing left him with a huge collection of more than 4,000 CDs and about 100,000 songs on MP3s.

16 Comments

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    Thank you,
    Theresa

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