Digital media: Get used to it

The recession won't keep the world from going digital. So don't expect it to stop the courtship between old and new media, either. "If you want to grow in this advertising cycle, you'll need digital assets," says Bob Ennis, a veteran of both News Corp. and IAC/InterActiveCorp who recently joined investment bank Petsky Prunier Securities LLC.

It's fortunate for Ennis, not to mention his New York-based employer, that few media companies are anywhere near correctly configured. The cash-rich but hidebound will need to purchase online additions at the slightest sign of a credit thaw, whereas the cash-poor but digitally complex will find they can sell parts of themselves to fairly strong demand. Either way, Ennis stands ready to help.

His tour at News Corp., from 1999 to 2002, trained him in traditional-media M&A overseas. There he helped build an outdoor-advertising business, bought and sold radio and television stations and pursued acquisitions in satellite broadcasting when it was still boss Rupert Murdoch's "dream beam."

His tenure at IAC, from 2003 to 2005, had Ennis doing digital deals with public and private companies at such a pace that boss Barry Diller eventually elected to simplify the company by breaking it into five verticals. Of the five, Ennis had amassed transactional experience in three: financial services, online travel and real estate.

"We have a keen understanding of what diversified media companies need to do strategically," he says. "Our plan is to help satisfy those needs by presenting them with the right M&A opportunities."

The job isn't all that different from what Ennis had been doing at Tensor Advisors LLC, the strategic advisory and merchant bank he founded after leaving IAC.

Then, as now, he focused on digital media.

This focus of Petsky Prunier's newest managing director dovetails with the firm's historic emphasis on advertising and marketing services. The specialties combined, Ennis says, position the 10-year-old boutique "to leverage Petsky Prunier's strong track record into adjacent verticals like digital media and interactive commerce."

Adds his new partner, John Prunier: "So-called leading national advertisers until recently found greater reach and productivity in traditional media and the market research and media measurement companies that served them. Bob is going to help us play a leading role in propelling a reconfiguration of media, marketing services and technology value propositions as these companies seek to provide the solutions that major advertisers increasingly require."

As for the credit crunch these companies face, Petsky Prunier also has a solution. "The firm is now a broker-dealer," Ennis explains, "so we can help our clients complete placements."