Citing a wireless service client in the US, Uva said Cingular had amassed a huge distribution capability through its pool of 25 million subscribers.
"Twenty-five million makes it a very powerful medium in a market like the US because the biggest cable operator ComCast has 22 million subscriber households, AOL has 29 million screen names and DirectTV will have about 18 million household subscribers," said the OMD president and chief executive officer.
The emergence of distributors as an advertising medium will be accelerated by the increasing commoditisation of wireless services and the need for marketers to reach their target audience in a TiVo-ruled world.
Uva, CNN's former client services champion, noted: "Everywhere in the world it's about price and how many minutes you get of usage. It commoditises the (wireless) marketplace and sooner or later, the margins are going to be very, very small.
"But there are ways to help those providers differentiate themselves through the services that they offer, particularly when they can be information and entertainment-based services that consumers would look to.
"They can provide an additional value other than connectivity; we believe that there's a benefit and that's why it's important to have those kinds of relationships (for clients)."
Since joining OMD in January 2002, Uva has been restructuring the company to sharpen its competitive edge globally. His efforts at plugging geographical gaps went into overdrive when OMD lost the US$300 million global Gillette brief because of holes in its network. "(The McDonald's global) win certainly demonstrates that we have addressed the geographic weakness in our network that existed as recently as the end of the second quarter of 2002, before we decided to launch the Latin American part of our network."