With its appointment last week of packaged goods marketing veteran Dan O’Neill as COO, Molson Breweries may have in its employ someone willing and able to make the kind of marketing spending cuts that James Arnett, the brewery’s new CEO, has suggested lie in waiting.

Although the grumbling from Molson’s executive suite may say something about the brewery’s ongoing battle with arch rival Labatt, which has been letting a little of the fizz out of Molson’s flagship brand sales lately, it probably has more to do with a changing perception of the value of expensive mass advertising campaigns and professional sports sponsorships.

Some people in the ad business believe Molson intends to divert a good portion of its estimated $200 million annual marketing budget away from sponsorships and mass ad campaigns and focus more of its attention on the kinds of grassroots promotional efforts that provide more readily identifiable returns on investment. The brewery’s recent decision to hand the assignment for its next Molson Canadian campaign to Toronto-based Encore Encore Strategic Marketing, instead of AOR MacLaren McCann, is evidence of that.

And rumours are swirling that Molson intends to sell off the storied Montreal Canadiens hockey club, as the team continues to pile up losses, both on the score sheet and on the financial ledgers, in the new Molson Centre in downtown Montreal.

In terms of shock value, Arnett’s pronouncement to reduce spiraling marketing costs is a far cry from the decree handed down from by the mountain six years ago by Labatt CEO Hugo Powell, who beseeched the Canadian advertising community to deliver more on their clients’ needs. In the long run, however, the impact could be greater.

In the wake of Powell’s ‘wake-up call’ to the Canadian ad industry, a great deal of soul searching went on in the community and a vast number of agencies set about ‘redefining’ themselves. But, more than half a decade later, many of the same complaints about lack of agency accountability are still heard among clients. Only, now, those complaints are being backed up with some pretty serious action.

With technological advances making it increasingly easy to measure the return on one’s marketing or advertising investment, the pressure is on everyone in the ad community to perform. The recent goings-on at Molson may not be heralded as a wake-up call to agencies, but perhaps they should be.

David Bosworth

dbosworth@brunico.com