‘The challenge for advertisers in general is not just about (reaching customers) at the right time with the right message, it’s making sure they notice it and that they remember it’
Like their partners in the Canadian news industry, the country’s media agencies are undergoing unprecedented transformation. The National Post is holding conversations with leaders of Canada’s largest agencies on the fast-changing fundamentals, and where the business is going next. This week, Karel Wegert, CEO of Media Experts, speaks to writer Rebecca Harris.
How have the fundamentals of media planning and buying changed in the last few years?
Where is your agency seeing success?
Being able to evolve and be more than a media agency (is one area). But ultimately success for us has been finding the right fits — and this is as true for the client as it is for the agency. The most positive relationships we’ve had over the years and today are those with the best cultural and team alignment. They tend to create a closer, tighter relationship where communication flows more easily. When (it comes to) the fundamentals of our business, that’s one thing that not only hasn’t changed, but if anything is probably more important in today’s world … (Clients) don’t just want a transactional relationship with their partners. They want to know what you stand for as a company. They want to know what you do in your communities. They want to understand what your people are like and how they’re going to behave when they service your business, which is all great because those are the things we’ve built our business on over the years and certainly what Mark (Sherman, the founder of Media Experts) stood for.
How is your agency winning business?
How has the meaning of the adage “right person, right time, right time” changed?
(There is an) evolution of attention. Our customers see more ads today than they’ve ever seen before, and they probably notice fewer ads today than they’ve noticed before. So the challenge for advertisers in general is not just about (reaching) them at the right time with the right message, it’s making sure they notice it and that they remember it. And so we spend a lot of time thinking about attention in the context of like, how can we evolve the metrics that we use to measure our advertising with? How can we be a little bit smarter about not just delivering impressions, but delivering impressions that lead to a lasting impact to actually drive towards some kind of action.
What’s your forecast for the media planning and buying landscape?
We just went through a significant consolidation phase in media, with the rise of the (Google-Meta) duopoly and triopoly with Amazon included. A lot of media spend was consolidated into a relatively small number of partners. That was coming out of a very fragmented period in the early days of digital and programmatic, where it was kind of the opposite. People were spending diversely across a whole bunch of different platforms, and we didn’t have the same consolidated scale that the big players offer today. I believe we’re heading back towards a certain degree of fragmentation.
We obviously see pressures from changes around privacy and the cookie, and the impact on targeting and measurement that continue to happen across both the Google and Metas of the world. (This) certainly has the potential to open the door for other solutions and more of a diverse spending approach (or) even just targeting ability. You can also look at what’s happening with Bill C-18 and the narrative and pressures there. The bigger point is there are pressures coming from all kinds of different places, which could certainly lead to more diversification of spending for Canada in general.
