The Bell Canada account group at Cossette Communication-Marketing has been realigned, in response to recent structural changes made by the telecommunications giant.

The Bell account teams in Ontario and Quebec have now been integrated, and will both work under the direction of executive vice-president Daniel Rabinowicz, who is based in the Montreal office.

Mary Koven, the vice-president, general manager previously responsible for the Bell Ontario account, will be moved to other duties.

Suzanne Sauvage, vice-president, strategic in Montreal, reports to Rabinowicz and is the agency’s point of contact with Sylvie Lalonde, chief communications officer for Bell.

Lalonde says the changes on the agency side mirror the way Bell’s marketing organization has structured itself internally.

The telco’s overall marketing direction is now set by chief marketing officer Karen Sheriff, who is based in Toronto, but works directly with staff in both Quebec and Ontario.

"We’ve put in place similar organizations at both the agency and at Bell," Lalonde says, "to make sure that when we communicate, we communicate as if we were two mirrored organizations."

No jobs are expected to be lost at Cossette as a result of the realignment.

Google Canada and agency Church + State have produced a new spot informed by research from the search giant that suggests it is a primary connector for Canadians to the news that matters to them – a direct shot across the bow of the legislators presently considering Bill C-18.

In a spot titled “Connecting you to all that’s news,” the search giant harnesses archival footage reflective of many of the issues Canadians care about deeply, including the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, truth and reconciliation and the war in Ukraine, to demonstrate the point that many Canadians turn to Google as a gateway to the information and news they’re seeking.

“From St. John’s to Victoria and everywhere in between, when Canadians want to understand or get updated on the most pressing topics, Google connects them to the news sources that provide it,” says Laura Pearce, head of marketing for Google Canada. “All of us at Google are proud to be that consistent and reliable connection for Canadians to the news they’re searching for.”

In some ways, the goal of the campaign was to tap into the varied emotional responses that single news stories can have with different audiences across the country.

“News may be factual, but how people respond to it can be very emotional,” explains Ron Tite, founder and CCO at Church + State. “Importantly, those emotions aren’t universal. One news story can create completely different reactions from different people in different places. Because of that, we simply wanted to let connecting to news be the focus of this campaign. We worked diligently to license a wide variety of actual news footage that we felt would resonate with Canadians.”

The campaign can be seen as a statement by the search provider on Bill C-18 – the Online News Act – that is currently being deliberated by a parliamentary committee. That legislation seeks to force online platforms such as Meta’s Facebook and Alphabet’s Google to pay news publishers for their content, echoing a similar law passed in Australia in 2021. The Act has drawn sharp rebukes from both companies, with Facebook threatening to ban news sharing on its platform.

Google Canada is not commenting on whether this new campaign is a response to C-18, but it has been public in its criticism of the legislation. In testimony delivered to parliament and shared on its blog, Colin McKay, the company’s head of public policy and government relations, said, “This is a history-making opportunity for Canada to craft world-class legislation that is clear and principled on who it benefits.” However, he noted that C-18 is “not that legislation.”

The campaign launched on Oct. 24 and is running through December across cinema, OLV, OOH, podcast, digital and social. Airfoil handled the broadcast production.