After nearly three years working as programmatic expert for Dentsu, Nikolas Paradis was offered a job at Omnicom Media Group’s Touché! as a digital team lead, where he would manage a team of 10 people.

“It was a big step, coming from being a type of one-man band, to leading people. That was quite the challenge,” Paradis says from his office in Montreal. “The first year was very intense. I had to learn not only how to manage people, but also how to be an expert in different fields of the activation performance landscape.”

But after being thrown into the deep-end like that, Paradis not only quickly learned how to swim, but, as a leader, found a way to drain some water so that the deep-end wasn’t so daunting. Metaphorically speaking, of course. 

What Paradis actually did was introduce technology to a system that desperately needed it. He and his team were in charge of supporting the dealer network of Bombardier Recreational Products (BRP) – first in North America, then globally. 

With more than 1,200 points of sale for BRP’s six main brands (Ski-Doo, Sea-Doo, Can-Am Off-Road, Can-Am On-Road, Manitou and Alumacraft), his job was like a word problem on a math exam: If each dealer needs a unique media campaign for each product segment sold, how many unique activations need to be managed annually? Answer: Around 10,000. 

“There’s so much volume that we have to rely on technology to optimize what we do,” Paradis says. “We worked closely with Meta and their engineering team to build a beta program where we can use dynamic ads for all of our dealers and regroup all of their campaigns within one campaign.

“So we went from 3,000 campaigns to one campaign program. It was efficient on a production standpoint. We did not have to produce all the assets beforehand, we were able to use a Photoshop folder and basically dynamically change the aspect of the creative based on every dealership. So we were able to customize everything.”

Taking the initiative to work with Meta on its beta ended up generating 300 times more actions on the dealer’s website, Paradis says, making each dollar go further. In doing so, they were one among the first to use Meta’s program at scale. 

“This technology has enabled us to automate the campaign creation process – geographical parameters, targeting, budget – as well as dynamically personalizing our messages for each dealer and brand,” says Guillaume Duhamel, director, digital at OMG. “None of this would have been possible without Nikolas’ great vision and leadership.”

Perhaps the clearest indication of Paradis’ performance is that, by the time you read this, he’ll have a new job entirely within OMG. He’s excited, not because he didn’t like being a team lead, but because he’ll get to do more of what he’s passionate about: making work easier. Only now, he’ll be helping clients more directly. 

“I’m very excited. I feel like I’ll be able to bring all my performance background with more of a strategic vision and be more involved with clients,” he says. “And I’m very excited that [Touché!’s] clients [are] going to get that new role.”