You’re reading part two of our roundtable series. Read part one here, and come back tomorrow or the final part in the series. 

Is it just us, or does it feel like the internet is on fire?

Google, Meta and Amazon are currently embroiled in several lawsuits across the U.S. and Europe. There’s a potential breakup of some of their businesses, and with that, implications for the way brands and agencies reach audiences. Data collection is getting more and more restricted. AI is flooding the web and creating sludge that many are already overwhelmed by. Misinformation is spiking. Moderation is rolling back.

Lawsuits, restrictions and AI chaos may feel like sparks flying in different directions, but together they point to one reality: the digital world is being rewired. The challenge now is figuring out how to reach audiences in whatever new ecosystem eventually emerges.

We turned to industry experts to find out if/how they’re thinking about what feels like a crumbling digital infrastructure, and how to prepare for future bumps in the road.

In addition to Media in Canada and strategy‘s Mary Maddever, Lisa Faktor, Jennifer Horn, Neil Ewen, Jonathan Russell, as well as the Globe and Mail‘s Penny Hicks and Tracy Day, the roundtable included media and marketing leaders:

Derek Bhopalsingh, EVP, platform media at Publicis Media; Scott Stewart, EVP, managing director, The Epitaph Group; Chimi Beaumont, VP, investment, GroupM; Kelvin Mak, VP, innovation, product, UM; Harpreet Dhaliwal, EVP, client experience, operations, Havas; Gah-Yee Won, head of marketing, Intuit; Maja Neable, SVP, CMO, TD; Julia Cooper, VP, marketing, Endy; and Amber Winters, senior marketing director, Pizza Pizza.

As moderation fades and misinformation grows, how are you protecting your brand’s reputation online? Maja, you work in a very high-trust category, how are you navigating this potential minefield?

Maja Neable, TD: Trust is the most important thing we have with our consumers. Sometimes it’s about asking, “What really matters to our customers and what authority do we have to help our customers?” We find that in our industry, people get information from all kinds of sources that are not really trustworthy. People get financial information from various bloggers who are not regulated and they can say whatever they want.

And then there’s the brand guidelines. I would say ours are fairly strict, and they will probably stay that way because it’s the right thing to do for the consumer and for the brand. And then there’s looking at the linkage between the brand and performance marketing, and not looking at it as a separate set of KPIs, but more as one-and-the-same, which is getting more difficult in the degrading internet.

How do you strike the balance between putting out enough content to stay visible and making sure it’s high quality? And how do you avoid the trap of feeling like nothing you post is loud or authentic enough?

Scott Stewart, The Epitaph Group: You always have to be testing to ensure that there is an intentional business impact – whether it’s pulling away from something or trying something new. You’ll find the mantra “always be in beta” built in every good marketing ecosystem.

Neable: I’m going to challenge that a little bit, because I find that sometimes we just get into this same loop of tests that move from bucket A to bucket B, and so forth. But what’s the really meaningful lift? Especially for a big brand like [TD]. How do you make it more relevant for consumers? We have so many measurement methods, and we’ve tried them all to make sense of it.

I also don’t think the industry has always served us, because sometimes when you talk to business CEOs, they’re like, “I talked to this measurement company and they told me that for this marketing dollar, I can get exactly this.” And so there is this misinformed point of view. I’m a mathematician by background, so I can tell the difference between art and science. With regards to test-and-learn, you can get into a loop that’s not really effectively lifting anything in total. Because our business would always say, “Well, that’s all good and great, but where’s my revenue?”

Julia Cooper, Endy: I’ve been thinking about influencers as a “channel” that has the human element baked in, but feels more and more like an algorithm output each day. To go back to your question about where to pull back and where to lean in, are marketers being honest with themselves? Just because you’ve been investing in a channel, when was the last time you did an audit of how it’s performing? And do you remember why you went there in the first place?

Influencer is a space that’s so different today than it was 18 months ago. We’ve scaled our influencer program back dramatically. When I joined, we had 130 active influencers at any given time on a three-month rotation. And when I asked why, no one could really answer. It used to bring in real revenue that we could track, and that was easy to pinpoint. But then, with more affiliate sites going up, it gets murkier. Is it the influencer that was driving the results, or was it that other affiliate site? And then the data becomes almost too hard to parse that you just put faith in a strategy that you wrote years ago.

And so for us, maybe we won’t be as scientific in our measurement of influencer, but we know that we could do some great storytelling there – and that maybe that’s a place where we can be authentic. It’s also important that we help create the narrative for an influencer. For example, we ask them, “Can you explore for us this notion of ‘Rise to Shine’ [Endy’s platform]? How do you wake up in the morning after a great night’s sleep?” It was really energizing to see how they took that and ran with it and made content that didn’t look like every other unboxing of mattress content in the world.

Harpreet Dhaliwal, Havas: I think that’s a piece that we miss. People throw a lot at you. We want to do this and we want to do that. But why? What is the intention behind this? And in every brief that we get, how do you have a conversation with clients about what we are actually going to be focused on? Ultimately, you’ve got a revenue goal you need to hit. But does it actually make sense, or do we need to pull back and think about who we’re talking to and what is the value for my customer?

Cooper: I heard the concept recently of building a “go-to-community” strategy rather than a go-to-market. And I love how simple that reframe is of getting back to the ground floor and being a little more grassroots, even if you still leverage traditional channels.

Amber Winters, Pizza Pizza: That direct-to-community piece is something we’re lacking. How do we reach smaller communities? Right now, influencers are one of those. It might not be the best way, but there are very few ways where you can hear from a local voice. We used to have community newspapers that really benefited our franchisees in their own markets, and so I think it comes back to what are the other options locally that are affordable and scalable? I think we’re still limited in what we can offer smaller communities.

So then do you see DTC and CRM becoming more central – what are you doing to own the channels and content versus renting online? 

Gah-yee Won, Intuit: For us, we create our own high-quality content. So we’ve made beautiful video series with Canadian small businesses. We work with the Globe and Mail, and we do really big feature content pieces. We are very choiceful in how to use AI. And I think that’s really important, because there’s a place for AI in content, but there also needs to be human intervention.

And so I think it’s about being very thoughtful about how you’re creating content, and making sure that you’re putting out as high quality content as possible. For us, we’re an authority on tax for a lot of people, and so there’s an obligation for us to make sure that we are going out there with content that is accurate. Sometimes we even rank above the CRA on our tax content, which is pretty huge, because they’re supposed to be the authority. And so making sure that you have accurate and well done content is so important in the world that we live in today.

Kelvin Mak, UM: We talked a little bit about trust earlier, and I think trust can mean different things to different people. It’s a big word. In some cases, it can be tied to transparency. In other cases, it can be around reliability. So how do you then contextualize that content expertise you have for somebody that’s part of your consumer set, so that they can make sense of it and feel like that content is emotionally and functionally calibrated versus just content that’s out there?