You’re reading part three of our roundtable series. Read part one here and part two here.

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.

We’re in a very volatile landscape. Everything’s shifting. Are there any scenarios that you’re actively planning right now where you’re building something that will still matter if every algorithm changes tomorrow?

Harpreet Dhaliwal, Havas: Infrastructure is not a new conversation but definitely one that needs to be elevated a lot more with a lot of clients. We need to be aware of all of the information our brands have and make sure that their back-end is set up.

That’s not just a media thing. That’s not just a marketing thing. It’s a brand and business challenge, and we often will have those conversations with our clients about their tech stacks, marketing platforms and overall infrastructure. If they’re not able to get those to where they need to be in a few years, they’re going to be way behind. It’s surprising to see how many brands aren’t thinking about that, even big brands, in terms of unifying all of those systems. They have so many systems that are talking in different ways, but not to each other, even internally.

Gah-Yee Won, Intuit: It’s funny, I haven’t had this many compliance and legal conversations in my entire career. I literally have our lawyer on speed dial, because there’s so many things that come up every day around data usage and future planning, to your point. Maybe I’m not going to use that data now, but what does stewardship of our customer data mean for the long-term? That’s an ongoing conversation.

Dhaliwal: For us, the tools that we are using are open source, so it’s not specifically tied to one provider or one entity. We’re not locking out anyone specifically. We can pick and choose which data we want. Let’s say, for example, we bring Environics into our data, for example, tomorrow we can change it and bring somebody else, so that allows us to still remain nimble in whatever the future brings.

Derek Bhopalsingh, Publicis: I think the marketing industry as a whole is having these conversations because they’re being forced to – whether it’s a result of privacy laws or cookie deprecation. To Gah-Yee’s point, we are probably more involved with the legal side of things than we’ve ever had to be in our entire collective careers. So there’s constant scenario planning. And I think when you break it down, there are things like signal deprecation from data, what constitutes usable data, what’s the ethical use of data – those are things that are constantly under the microscope. And now that the federal government is settled in Canada, we’ll see even more focus on that as the mandates move forward.

Scott Stewart, The Epitaph Group: It’s pushing brand safety to the forefront of a lot of conversations where, in the late 2010s, we were just putting it aside because many companies were so reliant on Meta and Google. They built their business on those platforms, so brand safety became an after effect. But having spent the past half decade working on a financial services company that had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to the provincial government, you start to learn valuable lessons about the handling of personal information and the use of data in that space. I think one of the things that I actually measure success on is whether we are able to move away from having media conversations with our clients to having actual business conversations. And when we do that, we push ourselves a lot farther upstream the value chain.

Do you think brand safety standards are improving fast enough?

Bhopalsingh: Based on recent press, maybe not as fast as they should be. The challenge with the digital landscape is that it’s moving at a speed that it’s never moved at before. And so there’s always going to be some level of risk to advertising in the digital ecosystem. I think the systems and partners that are out there right now are working as quickly as they can to keep up, but it’s never going to be absolute zero risk. And I think most marketers who have been in this space for a while recognize that, and they use the tools that they have at their disposal to protect their brands as much as possible.

I think it really starts with having the most basic understanding of your exposure to risk. Are you low, medium, high risk? Are you a family-oriented brand that wants to be in safe content as much as possible? There are things like inclusion lists, exclusion lists, keywords, so on and so forth. There are tools to mitigate risk, but by no means is it absolute that you’re protected in that space, especially in areas like UGC, especially with moderation being pulled back. So there’s always going to be some element of risk, and you really need that framework and strategy in place, and leverage the tools at your disposal to protect your brand.

Won: But brand safety is always a reactionary thing. I’ve never found anyone who can be preemptive, truly. And so brand safety is always one of those things where I’m like, we’re always going to be trying to play catch up here.

Bhopalsingh: There’s brand safety and then there’s also brand suitability. Those are two very distinct things. They play off each other, but it’s important that brands don’t re-evaluate that on an annual basis anymore. You have contingency or scenario planning in place for global conflict, a change in the macroeconomic environment, government policy, etc. So there has to be a preparedness and constant conversation about what is suitable for a brand in a world where things seem to be coming up quarterly, if not monthly.

Kelvin Mak, UM: The more we can plan ahead – even though we know that it won’t be completely focused – the more we can widen that aperture to the type of risk we may be exposed to, and then we can adapt quickly. Because it’s never about being preemptive and proactive, it’s about having a strategy that’s our own and suitable for the brand to mitigate against it.

Amber Winters, Pizza Pizza: We come from a very conservative place. One of our biggest customers are our schools, parent councils or lunch program. So we start off with a very conservative mindset and outlook. And over time, with social conversations, we are able to see how that evolves, and that there’s an acceptance that we’re relevant to the cannabis community or people who might be halal. So as much as we like to target, it’s never a perfect science. But we realize what the tolerance level is from our audience on where we can step into those new spaces and evolve the conversations that we’re having in different areas.

The social conversation has guided that for us, and we were able to learn a lot from it, but it’s never perfect. And we will always know when it’s gone a little too far, but I think for the most part, we’ve started from a conservative place, and we’ve been able to really move that forward in the last decade.

What are your thoughts on the future of these platforms as content moderation falls back?

Bhopalsingh: Not that I’m making excuses, but content moderation as it existed up until recently, wasn’t sustainable because of the sheer volume of content that was being put out there. And that’s why they moved to the moderation policy, similar to X. But what you’re seeing overall, from a trend standpoint, is this decentralization of content into places where people can own and have more control over monetization. So if you think about Mastodon, Discord or Bluesky – they give the platforms better control to monetize the content, and give advertisers (eventually, when ads are introduced) more control to be involved with the conversations where they want.

Have you experimented with those platforms and identified successful strategies yet?

Bhopalsingh: A lot of those aren’t monetized yet. What’s interesting about Bluesky, and why folks are a little bullish on it, is because it was created by Jack Dorsey, who created X. But what we’ve seen to be really effective are when brands are engaging from a community perspective, because that’s really the only way to do so.

Won: What we’ve found on Reddit is that people will defend your brand on the platform without prompting. This is the other thing that we found. And that’s actually made us change how we look at Reddit, because you end up getting those brand advocates.

Stewart: There’s that question of the value and what’s more important – the platform or the peer-to-peer connection? And it goes back to the democratization of the internet. If you’re brave enough and if your brand is strong enough for you to put it in the hands of the consumer, sometimes that’s more valuable than the traditional push strategy. I think that’s a pretty big deal, because when we’re looking at digital decay or whatever’s happening in the space, maybe scale is peer-to-peer and not necessarily the reach of the platform.

Julia Cooper, Endy: I’d say Reddit is where content moderation is alive and well, because the actual participants on Reddit are the most ruthless and the most attuned to who is joining in the conversation. If you’re a brand jumping in, you will be torn to shreds by that community. But because of that, there is an authenticity that people trust the conversations on there. So we’ve actually started advertising on Reddit as a way to have a presence there that’s not shoehorning our way into the conversation.

Any closing thoughts on the future of digital media? Are you optimistic or pessimistic?

Bhopalsingh: I’m optimistic. I look at the iterations of the internet since the ’90s and it’s gone through a number of cycles and iterations, and what’s driven it is consumers and users demanding a better experience. If you look at it right now, it’s not a great experience from a design standpoint, from a storytelling standpoint. But now we’re seeing this shift in consumer behaviour that’s dictating this need for what is essentially Web3 properties that are developing. You can also look at gaming as another community and how that’s evolving.

So I’m excited for what’s coming. It’s going to be better than what we have now. How we monitor and how we advertise on it is going to be interesting, but I think we’ve hit on a few of the pillars that are going to be super important, which is authenticity and knowing consumers and where to find them.