‘We’ve got a mission to invest in local news. We’re setting tangible targets to make sure that’s happening,’ says Noah Vardon
Like their partners in the Canadian news industry, the country’s media agencies are undergoing unprecedented transformation. The National Post is having a series of conversations with leaders of Canada’s largest agencies on the fast-changing fundamentals and where the business is going next. This week, Noah Vardon, the president of Havas Media Group Canada, speaks to writer Rebecca Harris.
Advertisement 2
In the past, it was harder to attribute the value of media to bottom-line results for our clients. That has shifted and is now very much a part of everything we do. There is still an art to (media planning and buying) and the people behind it, but (there’s more focus on) the science of media to make sure we’re driving business sales. We’re accountable for that now more than ever … At the same time, we talk a lot about meaningful media, which gets down to the idea of media that people trust and driving relevancy over just (metrics such as) reach and frequency. It’s about going beyond a million impressions and thinking about the full journey and experiences of the consumer and trying to connect all those dots. (Another shift is) the additional services we’re offering now. We used to have traditional, paid media planning and buying, but there are now many other things that make up media planning and buying, whether that’s analytics, content, influencers and now looking at AI.
Advertisement 3
Since I’ve been at the helm (June 2021), we’ve focused on thinking both from a product and service perspective. We’ve talked a bit about our meaningful media and that being a key product to how we deliver our services. But we also think of ourselves as a service, so it’s important for us to attract the best talent in the business. I’ve been trying to build the best team in the country. We have an incredible leadership team and we’ve got great talent at every level. It’s about investing in that type of differentiation (as we build deeper relationships with clients) … We’ve also recently acquired Noise Digital (a Vancouver-based digital agency and data consultancy). That was a response to the evolution of analytics, data and technology, and performance media. We’re expanding our capabilities in that space very quickly within Canada. That has helped us win (business) and we are now one of the largest agencies on the West Coast.
One of our challenges is making sure we’re building an upcoming talent base that can deliver on all the new technology. It’s up to us to make sure that we’re training our teams to understand technology and AI. That’s being done obviously through our education system, but it’s also up to the agencies to be able to deliver and scale that with teams and hands-on training. The more the more we have those types of skills, (the more) it will help advance our industry.
Advertisement 4
Another challenge that we need to continue to work on is diversity. As much as I think we’ve made a lot of headway, it’s an opportunity for us to continually look to do better in that space, so it’s who we’re targeting, who we’re including, who we’re not including, and making sure that’s part of our evaluation and analysis when we’re doing media planning. That transcends into our people and making sure we’ve got people who are represented in every area. It’s a key thing I think every agency has to keep looking to deliver on.
There’s been a lot of discussion around it, which I’m happy to see. I’m part of the CMDC (Canadian Media Directors’ Council) and we’ve got a mission to invest in local news. We’re setting tangible targets to make sure that’s happening across all our (member) agencies. Rather than leaving it up to just the bill, it’s how do we make sure that investment is going into our local news and supporting (that) on an ongoing basis. And so, I’ve been having great dialogue across all the different agency heads, we’ve been having great dialogue with our clients, and our clients have asked great questions about it. Now, we’re hoping there will be an evolution to the bill in the future. Part of democracy is good conversation and debate around something that needs to evolve.
Advertisement 5
I see AI having a potential positive impact on how we come together as an industry. There’s an opportunity to streamline some tough tasks in media that people haven’t necessarily wanted to do [around] the technology of buying. We’re investing in how we simplify that process and how we deliver more precision in things like advanced types of segmentation. I think that will be easier as we have more advanced AI. So, I’m excited about AI and the evolution that’s going to have on the industry.
Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our newsletters here.
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
Bayo Onanuga battles yet another media Punch Newspapers
Source link
|
|
|
|
|
Sometimes, you just have to return to the classics.
That’s especially true as Halloween approaches. While you queue up your spooky movie marathon, here are 10 iconic horror movies from the past 70 years for inspiration, and what AP writers had to say about them when they were first released.
We resurrected excerpts from these reviews, edited for clarity, from the dead — did they stand the test of time?
“Rear Window” (1954)
“Rear Window” is a wonderful trick pulled off by Alfred Hitchcock. He breaks his hero’s leg, sets him up at an apartment window where he can observe, among other things, a murder across the court. The panorama of other people’s lives is laid out before you, as seen through the eyes of a Peeping Tom.
James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter and others make it good fun.
— Bob Thomas
“Halloween” (1978)
At 19, Jamie Lee Curtis is starring in a creepy little thriller film called “Halloween.”
Until now, Jamie’s main achievement has been as a regular on the “Operation Petticoat” TV series. Jamie is much prouder of “Halloween,” though it is obviously an exploitation picture aimed at the thrill market.
The idea for “Halloween” sprang from independent producer-distributor Irwin Yablans, who wanted a terror-tale involving a babysitter. John Carpenter and Debra Hill fashioned a script about a madman who kills his sister, escapes from an asylum and returns to his hometown intending to murder his sister’s friends.
— Bob Thomas
“The Silence of the Lambs” (1991)
“The Silence of the Lambs” moves from one nail-biting sequence to another. Jonathan Demme spares the audience nothing, including closeups of skinned corpses. The squeamish had best stay home and watch “The Cosby Show.”
Ted Tally adapted the Thomas Harris novel with great skill, and Demme twists the suspense almost to the breaking point. The climactic confrontation between Clarice Starling and Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) is carried a tad too far, though it is undeniably exciting with well-edited sequences.
Such a tale as “The Silence of the Lambs” requires accomplished actors to pull it off. Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins are highly qualified. She provides steely intelligence, with enough vulnerability to sustain the suspense. He delivers a classic portrayal of pure, brilliant evil.
— Bob Thomas
“Scream” (1996)
In this smart, witty homage to the genre, students at a suburban California high school are being killed in the same gruesome fashion as the victims in the slasher films they know by heart.
If it sounds like the script of every other horror movie to come and go at the local movie theater, it’s not.
By turns terrifying and funny, “Scream” — written by newcomer David Williamson — is as taut as a thriller, intelligent without being self-congratulatory, and generous in its references to Wes Craven’s competitors in gore.
— Ned Kilkelly
“The Blair Witch Project” (1999)
Imaginative, intense and stunning are a few words that come to mind with “The Blair Witch Project.”
“Blair Witch” is the supposed footage found after three student filmmakers disappear in the woods of western Maryland while shooting a documentary about a legendary witch.
The filmmakers want us to believe the footage is real, the story is real, that three young people died and we are witnessing the final days of their lives. It isn’t. It’s all fiction.
But Eduardo Sanchez and Dan Myrick, who co-wrote and co-directed the film, take us to the edge of belief, squirming in our seats the whole way. It’s an ambitious and well-executed concept.
— Christy Lemire
“Saw” (2004)
The fright flick “Saw” is consistent, if nothing else.
This serial-killer tale is inanely plotted, badly written, poorly acted, coarsely directed, hideously photographed and clumsily edited, all these ingredients leading to a yawner of a surprise ending. To top it off, the music’s bad, too.
You could forgive all (well, not all, or even, fractionally, much) of the movie’s flaws if there were any chills or scares to this sordid little horror affair.
But “Saw” director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell, who developed the story together, have come up with nothing more than an exercise in unpleasantry and ugliness.
— David Germain
Germain gave “Saw” one star out of four.
“Paranormal Activity” (2009)
The no-budget ghost story “Paranormal Activity” arrives 10 years after “The Blair Witch Project,” and the two horror movies share more than a clever construct and shaky, handheld camerawork.
The entire film takes place at the couple’s cookie-cutter dwelling, its layout and furnishings indistinguishable from just about any other readymade home constructed in the past 20 years. Its ordinariness makes the eerie, nocturnal activities all the more terrifying, as does the anonymity of the actors adequately playing the leads.
The thinness of the premise is laid bare toward the end, but not enough to erase the horror of those silent, nighttime images seen through Micah’s bedroom camera. “Paranormal Activity” owns a raw, primal potency, proving again that, to the mind, suggestion has as much power as a sledgehammer to the skull.
— Glenn Whipp
Whipp gave “Paranormal Activity” three stars out of four.
“The Conjuring” (2013)
As sympathetic, methodical ghostbusters Lorraine and Ed Warren, Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson make the old-fashioned haunted-house horror film “The Conjuring” something more than your average fright fest.
“The Conjuring,” which boasts incredulously of being their most fearsome, previously unknown case, is built very in the ’70s-style mold of “Amityville” and, if one is kind, “The Exorcist.” The film opens with a majestic, foreboding title card that announces its aspirations to such a lineage.
But as effectively crafted as “The Conjuring” is, it’s lacking the raw, haunting power of the models it falls shy of. “The Exorcist” is a high standard, though; “The Conjuring” is an unusually sturdy piece of haunted-house genre filmmaking.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “The Conjuring” two and half stars out of four.
“Get Out” (2017)
Fifty years after Sidney Poitier upended the latent racial prejudices of his white date’s liberal family in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” writer-director Jordan Peele has crafted a similar confrontation with altogether more combustible results in “Get Out.”
In Peele’s directorial debut, the former “Key and Peele” star has — as he often did on that satirical sketch series — turned inside out even supposedly progressive assumptions about race. But Peele has largely left comedy behind in a more chilling portrait of the racism that lurks beneath smiling white faces and defensive, paper-thin protestations like, “But I voted for Obama!” and “Isn’t Tiger Woods amazing?”
It’s long been a lamentable joke that in horror films — never the most inclusive of genres — the Black dude is always the first to go. In this way, “Get Out” is radical and refreshing in its perspective.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “Get Out” three stars out of four.
“Hereditary” (2018)
In Ari Aster’s intensely nightmarish feature-film debut “Hereditary,” when Annie (Toni Collette), an artist and mother of two teenagers, sneaks out to a grief-support group following the death of her mother, she lies to her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) that she’s “going to the movies.”
A night out with “Hereditary” is many things, but you won’t confuse it for an evening of healing and therapy. It’s more like the opposite.
Aster’s film, relentlessly unsettling and pitilessly gripping, has carried with it an ominous air of danger and dread: a movie so horrifying and good that you have to see it, even if you shouldn’t want to, even if you might never sleep peacefully again.
The hype is mostly justified.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “Hereditary” three stars out of four.
Read the full review here. ___
Researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed from New York.
Freeland says she’s ready to deal with Trump |
NASA astronauts won’t say which one of them got sick after almost eight months in space
43 monkeys remain on the run from South Carolina lab. CEO thinks they’re having an adventure
Freeland rallies a united front ahead of Trump’s return to White House
Deputy minister appointed interim CEO of AIMCo after Alberta government fires board
Montreal says Quebec-Canada dispute stalling much-needed funding to help homeless
S&P/TSX composite index down Friday, Wall St. extends post-election gains
Mitch Marner powers Matthews-less Maple Leafs over Red Wings
Comments
Postmedia is committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion and encourage all readers to share their views on our articles. Comments may take up to an hour for moderation before appearing on the site. We ask you to keep your comments relevant and respectful. We have enabled email notifications—you will now receive an email if you receive a reply to your comment, there is an update to a comment thread you follow or if a user you follow comments. Visit our Community Guidelines for more information and details on how to adjust your email settings.
Join the Conversation