Madison Avenue: Digital Media Services (A)

Introduces a "new-economy" company, Madison Avenue, facing challenges of mega-success. In the two years since its founding, the company's revenues have grown from zero to nearly $30 million, head count has swollen from the start-up handful to more than 200, and the client base has gone from one to dozens. In the company's short life, Madison Avenue's managers have already tried four organizational forms to more efficiently and reliably meet the needs of its customers. Despite the intense, ongoing efforts to find an appropriate organizational form, employees struggle to keep pace with ever-increasing demands. Ted Samson, an implementation engineer at Madison Avenue and a reservist in the Marine Corps, expresses a collective frustration in an e-mail to his boss. The case contains a history of Madison Avenue, starting with its serendipitous creation as an outgrowth of a family business's efforts to advertise on the Web and the collateral development of an expertise in Web advertising and the evolution of the company's business model. Gives a detailed explanation of the internal processes by which Madison Avenue creates, implements, and optimizes online advertising campaigns for its clients. The case asks students to analyze how Madison Avenue currently does its work and then to design a "target condition"--based upon analysis of the company's "current condition"--of how Madison Avenue's internal processes might be redesigned in order to produce higher quality ad campaigns, at less cost, with shorter lead-times, and with greater flexibility in responding to customer needs.

• Advertising
• Operations strategy
• Service management
• Economics
• Organizational structure and design
• Internet
• Organizational change
• Business growth