The Institute of Canadian Agencies (ICA) will host its annual Canadian Marketing Effectiveness Summit on Oct. 24, inviting the industry to take a closer look at the latest economic trends impacting Canadian marketing effectiveness. The day will include the announcement of the Grand Effie winner, the Effie Canada Marketer of the Year and the Effie Canada Agency of the Year.
This year’s speaking guests include: former head of commercial revenue at Shopify Ali Leung; McCann Canada chief strategy officer AJ Jones; Scotiabank global CMO Laura Curtis Ferrera; and McDonald’s Canada VP, CMO, Alyssa Buetikofer.
Director of effectiveness at The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) in the UK Laurence Green will also take part in a fireside chat with TBWA Group Canada CCO Adam Reeves; Campaign spoke with Green about some of the hot button issues and topics he expects to discuss in that chat.
When it comes to effectiveness awards, Green said he’s always looking at ongoing themes like value, creativity, focus, media smarts, creative consistency over the years and betting long vs short.
He believes the biggest challenges for agencies trying to demonstrate effectiveness in today’s landscape, is a shift in how performance is measured, and a lack of data to inform it.
“The industry is drifting away from long running brand building into being a kind of sell tomorrow industry,” he said. Brands can know within days, if not minutes, whether performance media is working, he said. But that means that creative agencies and their clients are missing data related to brand health, and ongoing profitability–information that is typically held by media agencies.
The problem is that media agencies and creative agencies haven’t been working together, he said. Media and creative agencies need to come together around data and insight to make sure that it isn't just measuring short, but also understanding the long term results. In the UK comparatively, he said effectiveness isn’t treated like a department, but rather as a culture for agencies and the industry at large, and that should be the model.
He went on to explain that it is a matter of the people who are setting up their businesses to methodically find the right problem, solve it in an interesting way, and prove out that it works, not just to the CMO, but to the board around the CMO.
As for client expectations, there’s a similar thread. “There’s more demand from their boards for evidence that [the advertising] works,” said Green, but also more need for assistance when it comes to understanding the data.
“There's just a huge exhaust pipe now attached to what we do because there's so many media choices and there's so much data flow back from them, so I think clients are looking for help navigating their way through that and mainly they're looking to understand what matters,” he said.
The Canadian Marketing Effectiveness Summit will take place on Oct. 24 from 1:30 pm to 5 pm, and will be Live Streamed on LinkedIn. You can register here.
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