In an effort to maximize their share of advertiser spending, Canadian media monoliths Rogers Media and The Globe and Mail are scrambling to offer clients and media buyers comprehensive, one-stop advertising services across their various properties.
The Globe, for instance, is offering deals that apply across the entire spectrum of Globe brands, including The Globe and Mail newspaper, Report on Business Magazine, job Web site Workopolis.com, and ROBTV, its 24-hour business news specialty channel.
To that end, the Globe recently appointed Shannon McPeak as its vice-president, corporate sales, with a mandate to integrate ad sales across all the Globe’s properties.
Sandy Muir, the Globe’s vice-president of advertising sales, says the process may not necessarily be consistent from client to client or agency to agency.
‘It’s not as easy as adding it all together and saying I’ll give you 10% off, because the audiences [for each property] are different and often clients buy different products for different strategic reasons,’ he says.
Having said that, Muir acknowledges the company needs ‘new processes and structures to be effective in the new media community – even if we don’t have a definitive vision of what the new media world might look like.’
The complexity of the resulting deals will likely mean bringing senior-level Globe representatives together with senior-level clients to work out the overall plan, Muir says.
For its part, Rogers Communications says it expects to have integrated sales capability by the fall. The company is planning to leverage its diverse media holdings, which include everything from cable television to Internet portal Excite.ca, to trade and consumer magazines to cellular communications.
While some bundling is already taking place, the diversity of Rogers media properties makes integration difficult, according to Frank Dimatteo, Rogers vice-president of marketing administration and logistics.
Rogers comprises different media silos, he explains, with separate profit centres, different computer systems and different sales representatives who are not familiar with the other publications and properties.
Dimatteo is looking at several different configurations but expects a separate sales entity – a Rogers team – will have to be formed in order to sell across media, while the individual divisions continue to retain their own reps.
Media buyers and planners say they’re anxious to see how Canada’s media giants intend to package their properties in order to create compelling advertising opportunities.
Sunni Boot, president of Optimedia Canada, says, by and large, they’ve failed to bundle their properties effectively.
‘They’re saying ‘We’ve got all these products, you’ve got the advertisers, let’s find a fit.’
‘It’s an execution waiting to land on a strategy versus saying ‘Of these products, these are of interest. Now let’s do a multi-media deal.”
