Editors’ Note

Melissa Moschetti joined Active International in September 2006 as an account coordinator and media buyer and then progressed through a number of roles within the company. She graduated from Fordham University’s College of Business Administration with a B.S. in business with concentrations in marketing, management and globalization.

Company Brief

With 35 years of experience, Active International (activeinternational.com) is a global financial solutions company that drives performance and improves business outcomes for leading brands. A data-driven company, with media as a core competency, Active operates a full-service omnichannel media agency. In addition to media, Active brings to bear a broad portfolio of competencies such as Asset Disposition/Merchandise Sales, Real Estate, Retail Marketing, Travel and Hospitality, Freight & Logistics, and Lighting. Through the application of its core business model, Active is able to create financial benefits to serve its clients. Active International is based in New York and has offices in 15 countries.

Will you discuss your role at Active and how you focus your efforts?

I sit in our media division, leading teams in our local television and radio, as well as the unwired group.

My teams work with our clients and agency partners to deliver on their full media objectives while driving the financial solution possible by Active’s trade model.

I am fortunate to work with a team of media professionals who are dedicated to implementing and delivering around the clock on behalf of all of our clients.

Will you discuss the opportunities that Active’s Unwired platform presents?

We constantly look at the media industry, and how media is being transacted and consumed; this led to our creation of a product that would help marketers and advertisers solve some of the challenges that they faced in the media landscape, namely increasing costs and declining ratings.

We found that we could access local inventory commercial time that runs in each of the different markets and piece it all together to create a national footprint, providing marketers with a different way to buy media. This eases the cost issue because it creates more inventory. As to ratings, we ensure our marketers 100 percent delivery, because we can plan for it with our technology.

We learned quickly that we could build the early business in Excel but certainly we could not scale it that way. We invested in technology and developed a proprietary platform that allows for our clients to transact in this space with ease and transparency. This is an example of Active’s goal to Achieve More for our clients.

Are the full range of Active’s capabilities and the size and scale of its media power and influence well understood?

Active definitely has a great reputation as a leader in the corporate trading arena. Our immense capabilities are probably less understood than we’d like, which we are addressing.

How valuable is it to maintain an entrepreneurial culture that has always been at the core of Active?

It’s invaluable. The leaders here have always given me lots of leeway, and it’s led to many great ideas for our marketers, one of which is XACTV. They ask for my input in figuring out how to make ideas work, and we have a two-way conversation. Entrepreneurship is present throughout the organization: if someone has an idea, it can easily be surfaced.

In our group we often say that no one is smarter than everyone, so if someone is the only one talking, then we’re not going to get the best ideas or outcomes. We really foster that concept and ensure that everyone shares what they’re seeing from their interactions with clients, partners and vendors.

If we don’t continue to do that every day, we’ll become stagnant. Active was founded by entrepreneurs so that spirit is strong here.