Pitching companies on the naked truths

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: It takes a bit of courage, and perhaps a lot of ego, to tell large companies that their ad campaigns have been failing miserably. But that’s exactly what the advertising firm Naked claims to do regularly.

“We get up in front of a group of agencies and tell them, very nicely, that they have wasted tens of millions of dollars,” said Ben Richards, senior strategist at Naked New York.

For that advice, of course, Naked hopes to earn a chunk of the supposedly wasted money. The company specialises in helping a client select the right balance of media for its message—shifting away, perhaps, from television and toward the Internet, or ads inside stores, or in other directions.

Naked is one of the specialists in an emerging area in marketing called communications planning, which tries to look beyond the 30-second spot to new ways to reach potential customers. The company, which started in 2000 in London and opened a New York office two years ago, was acquired by the Photon Group, an Australian ad holding company, in February. Last year, Naked New York signed up several large clients, including Kimberly-Clark, Coca-Cola and Johnson & Johnson.

Unlike many ad agencies, Naked does not create ads or purchase the space for them from media companies. Executives at Naked say they are “media neutral”, meaning that they are indifferent to where the advertising dollars of their clients are spent; this, they say, distinguishes them from agencies that might tend to steer clients toward television, for example.