Brooks challenged DAC to boost YoY revenue and dominate Cyber Week. DAC optimized by eliminating low-ROAS keywords and leveraging remarketing lists for search and shopping ads – delivering Brooks’ highest revenue year in history.
Managing Director Adam Luck describes DAC as something unique in the Canadian landscape.
And it’s not just about the scale – though the agency’s size does set it apart, with a team of more than 600 people spread across three Canadian offices, plus another 11locations in the US and Europe.
According to him, it’s really about the offering. While DAC’s digital performance expertise has long been one of its defining strengths, over the past few years the agency has expanded its capabilities to offer a comprehensive list of full-funnel services. The goal is to manage the entire customer journey, from the top of the funnel to the bottom, integrating paid media, search optimization, location optimization, creative production and web development to deliver results at every stage.
DAC used Media Mix Modeling to optimize channel performance, reallocating budgets to drive incremental revenue. This included increasing investment in top tactics like out-of-home.
Client-wise, the agency specializes in enterprise-to-local companies, seamlessly creating national brand strategies and implementing down to street level, ensuring every touch point is strategically optimized for success and drives measurable business outcomes.
Luck says DAC’s full-funnel approach is thriving because, “having one holistic media team with performance media and marketing at the core allows proactive budget adjustments between different media partners.” Or, in other words, it’s easier for DAC to shift resources between upper- and lower-funnel strategies based on real-time results.
The Fresh Market partnered with DAC to tackle declining visitor numbers and drive store traffi c at a very competitive cost. Using a local strategy, DAC tailored budgets for each store location, achieving a 32% traffic increase in just 38 days at a cost per visit way below the target.
And although today’s complex media environment demands such agility, it’s really an approach that DAC has used for over 50 years, since its first media ad buys.
“In digital marketing or in media as a whole, we’re setting a strategy at an enterprise level and then executing that at localized levels. That’s permeated through everything that we’ve done and it hasn’t left us,” says Luck.
With DAC in 2023, Holland America Line was able to increase overall organic traffic, gross online bookings and revenue significantly.
Case in point? Consider longtime client Carfax Canada, which offers vehicle history reports for potential car buyers. The media strategy originally focused on search, social and display ads, but DAC and Carfax Canada realized that harvesting existing demand wasn’t enough. DAC created a smaller media plan to begin to understand what additional channels best served their awareness and revenue goals. Based on the results they used media-mix modeling to optimize channel investments and moved more budget into the channels that best drove awareness and revenue. Not only did Carfax Canada’s revenue increase, the efforts significantly improved unaided awareness in key markets like Quebec and non-metro Ontario.
Elsewhere, DAC’s work for chartered professional accountancy and business advisory firm MNP demonstrates its expertise in performance digital marketing. The agency grew MNP’s Consumer Insolvency business through a mix of media, SEO and Local Search solutions.
Luck explains that DAC applied its “TotalSERP” methodology – a cohesive search strategy that blends paid, organic and local –to the MNP division’s media plan, focusing on the understanding that all search is interconnected and equally important in the consumer journey. Working in each of those three disciplines allowed DAC to dominate the search results for the terms that drive MNP’s business. It also resulted in the client and DAC winning 2024 Global Search Awards for Best Canadian PPC and SEO campaigns.
DAC and Holland America Line won Best Use of Search – Travel/Leisure (SEO) at the 2024 US Search Awards, with non-brand keywords surging significantly for their main themes.
Another DAC client is challenger brand Fit4Less. The gym operator wanted to increase premium subscriptions and national awareness, but in a way that wouldn’t cause problems with per-facility customer capacity.
It was, says Luck, “a great example of needing to be able to achieve objectives both nationally and locally, balancing between the upper and lower funnel.” Finding that sweet spot, DAC delivered the most net-new subscriptions the brand has had in any year, especially in that valuable premium tier.
DAC was shortlisted for the OMMA Awards and Global Agency Awards for their work with Brooks.
These kinds of results have led to the agency’s consistently high Net Promoter Scores (NPS), an index of client satisfaction. Measured biannually, the agency boasts an average NPS score of 9.3 out of 10. As Luck explains it, “you don’t get a nine or a 10 from a client if you aren’t achieving two things: meeting or exceeding performance targets and delivering great customer service.”
Ultimately, DAC’s pitch is straightforward. For brands seeking a partner capable of optimizing media spend across channels, balancing data-driven performance with creative ingenuity and executing localized campaigns seamlessly, DAC stands out.
“If you’re looking for an agency that’s going to fundamentally improve the performance of your marketing spend, and drive powerful outcomes leveraging unique expertise and technology,” sums Luck, “we are a fantastic fit.”
CONTACT:
Sonia Allard
VP marketing communications
sallard@dacgroup.com
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