Over the last decade, Linda Thomas Brooks has been one of the highest-profile executives in the media and communications spaces.
From January 2016 to December 2019, she was president and CEO of The Association for Magazine Media, formerly known as the Magazine Publishers of America, or MPA. For all of 2020, she was interim managing director of the Media and Publishing Divisions of SIIA, the Software and Information Industry Association. From January 2021 through December of last year, she was CEO of the Public Relations Society of America.
In all of those positions and more, Thomas Brooks both watched and helped steer these industries as they transformed themselves. In the process, she became widely known as a thought leader, someone with keen insights into various segments of the media industry. “Throughout her multi-faceted career, Thomas Brooks has operated at the intersection of marketing, media, communications and technology,” according to a bio posted on PRSA’s website. “The synthesis of her experiences created business advantage for complex media companies,” the bio continued, referring specifically to her role at MPA.
Since January, she’s been an independent advisor for Spacely, an online marketplace for buyers and sellers of print and out-of-home media.
Thomas Brooks also is an unusually accessible executive, coming to know many people, including the editor of this newsletter, and senior executives at Fox Associates. We’ve found that she always has an interesting and insightful take on our industries, so when we had a chance recently to interview her, we jumped at it. Here’s an edited version of our discussion.
Fox Tales: Tell us what you’re up to nowadays, and where you see your next professional endeavor?
Linda Thomas Brooks: I’m currently catching my breath after eight years running industry associations—four years as CEO of the MPA and then four years as CEO of PRSA. I got to work with fantastic teams, support inspiring members and work on critical issues in the media and communications industry in both of those places. Now I’m considering where my experience and expertise can best move the needle in a new way. Having the time to compare notes with colleagues and industry leaders has been so energizing. There are industry challenges that are truly existential—advertisers are spending more but finding it harder to create marketing effectiveness and business growth. Advertising is showing up in places that are not brand safe—and in some cases support completely unacceptable content—and industry silos no longer reflect the way that consumers interact with media channels. I’ve had the chance to collect and curate many different perspectives on these issues and figure out how to address these critical issues holistically. Now I’m working on identifying the best place for me to help companies and brands navigate in this environment.
Linda Thomas Brooks.
Fox Tales: Tell us about Spacely Media. How old, served markets, founders/leaders/owners.
Thomas Brooks: I have the privilege of serving as an Advisor to Spacely Media, which is a private premium marketplace for media (starting with print and OOH). It was created in late 2022 with some beta testers and has gotten amazing traction in the marketplace since then. The co-founders are David Coker and Beth Mach—Beth was a colleague back in my GM Mediaworks days, so it’s such fun to have those powerful relationships continue! Beth and David created something that I wish had existed years before—I think it can be a game-changer in garnering advertising dollars for magazine brands as well as out-of-home and other media channels.
Fox Tales: How is it revolutionary? What are the innovative elements?
Thomas Brooks: The Spacely platform is revolutionary and innovative because it removes a big barrier for media buyers, disrupting how it has always been done. As more and more media transactions have moved to trading desks and online platforms, off-line media was increasingly standing alone on the shelf of media options. And it took a different, hands-on process to purchase that media—which made it take more time and effort not only for the original buy, but also to try to get it into the tracking and measurement systems. Spacely solves for all that while providing marketplace intelligence in one aggregated place, further reducing the amount of desktop research about consumer behaviors, media trends, and category updates.
Fox Tales: The website copy promising to reduce a week’s work for marketers into a few hours is intriguing. How does that work?
Thomas Brooks: Spacely provides discoverability, which gives clients and buyers the chance to more easily find relevant media options. Once they show interest, there are a number of ways that the work gets streamlined. For example, once a buyer adds the inventory to their cart, the back-and-forth of negotiating price can be done in the platform. Position and issue details can be auto-populated, reducing manual input, and requests to buy can get done with one click vs several phone calls and emails. And, the aggregated planning and tracking of off-line media is centralized on the Spacely platform and can be seamlessly integrated into the brand’s overall plan.
Fox Tales: How do you see the media terrain evolving?
Thomas Brooks: The current evaluation, planning, and buying systems and processes are not calibrated to make sufficient quality distinctions. This is becoming a bigger problem every day. It’s a problem for brands—their advertising can be adjacent to content that is completely unacceptable, or it can be adjacent to content that is just “wallpaper” that does not provide memorability or distinction. The scorecard for “engagement” often rewards content that inspires negative reactions, which can be another problem for brands. It’s also a problem for our society when media spending inadvertently supports inaccurate information. There are a lot of industry conversations about how to course-correct—and I fervently hope those conversations take hold and make those needed adjustments. This is important to advertisers, and it’s also critically important to our society that we have credible media.
Fox Tales: How does a firm like Fox Associates help serve the media ecosystem?
Thomas Brooks: Sales teams are still the best way to prompt desire for media brands. Advertising and media people focus on the consumer journey for their brands and their clients; salespeople do the same. The perspective and expertise that salespeople provide drive awareness and consideration—typically the start of the consumer journey for media buyers. Without awareness and consideration, it is very difficult to move media buyers to a sale, regardless of the platform they use.