MEDIA: BEHIND THE HYPE - Hopes of Experience rest on its founders' abilities.

The new communications planning agency reckons it can do well, Ian Darby says.

The experience you go through in a room with the three founders of the communications planning agency Experience is not entirely unpleasant.

After all, as James Whitmore, one of the three founders of the agency, says: 'We aren't known for our big egos. We're easy and enjoyable to work with.'

But, in an evolving communications planning market that already contains at least four competing specialist agencies, will the Experience experience prove compelling enough for clients?

Whitmore, an ex-managing director of Mediaedge:cia, who left the agency last July, and Greg Turzynski, a recent managing director of ZenithOptimedia, have teamed up with the former OMD UK and Mediaedge:cia planner David Reid to create the agency.

Experience aims to provide advice on how to 'contact and engage target audiences to deliver business objectives'. It claims it will be accountable, able to collaborate with creative and media buying agencies and will have no vested interests to protect.

Quite similar in positioning, then, to existing agencies such as Naked and Rise. So its success will be determined, in the absence of some mysterious black-box planning product, by the skills of the people involved.