GroupM’s Urania Agas on brand love – and brand longevity

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Like their partners in the Canadian news industry, the country’s media agencies are undergoing unprecedented transformation. The National Post is holding conversations with leaders of Canada’s largest agencies on the fast-changing fundamentals. This week, Urania Agas, Chief Client Officer of GroupM Canada, speaks to writer Rebecca Harris.

How have the fundamentals of media planning and buying changed in recent years?

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I think the fundamentals are still very true around – our job is to focus on consumers, consumer insights, behaviours. All those things remain very true. Obviously, though, with the amount of fragmentation that has happened and the change from a landscape standpoint, we have to continue evolving how we find consumers, how their behaviour is evolving, and that goes from planning all the way through to buying. Because certainly there are many more platforms we need to consider, many more channels we need to consider, and we need to ensure that we’re still reaching our audience and our target with respect to each of our client’s business. I think the other side is the identification of the diversity of the Canadian population. So, that has certainly changed over my time here and it continues to evolve within our country and ensuring again, the fundamentals are still the same. We need to determine where they are, how they behave, how they interact with media, and make sure that we’re making those right choices for our clients and our brands.

How is your agency responding to these shifts?

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It’s 100% our requirement – and I talk about this all the time from an individual perspective as well – it is our responsibility to stay on top of all these changes, all these movements. I think our way of responding, particularly with our brands that are open to taking risks and open to shifting their dollars, is testing and learning. Test and learn has never been more important. We don’t live by it, but I always love the 70/20/10 rule of making sure that we’re always taking that 10% of our budget and testing new channels in order to move it into the 20 area and then the 70 and scale it up for ourselves. Sometimes they don’t always work, but certainly sometimes they do … We need to continue to be relevant to our consumers, particularly as our generations change. And we need to look at where generations are investing their time and investing their energy, and how they’re responding to brands and ads being served to them.

How are you winning new business these days and what are clients looking for?

New business for us starts internally with respect to evaluating an opportunity. We evaluate an opportunity based on, is it the right fit for both our agency as well as the client? Will we be able to deliver value to that client? Is it the right scale for both of us to deliver value? The second element is culturally. So, is this client, is this brand the right fit for our agency culturally? Are we a good fit for them culturally? Do we understand their culture? Will we complement each other? Because that’s very important. And then finally, we also, of course, have to look at whether it’s an open category for us, from a competitive standpoint, whether it’s an industry, an area of the business that we want to be a part of and do we have a competitor in that space or is that something that’s open to us. I think from clients, what I’m seeing is there’s been a lot of discussion as of late around doing more with less. It’s never been more important. And we’re facing really difficult economic times. We’ve always had a pressure to do more with less, but it’s almost never been more real or it’s even a bigger pressure today. And having to prove and justify our media investments are delivering results to a business is critically important.

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I think the other side is the funnel. Again, it’s never been more important. We’ve certainly had a big swing to performance marketing and making sure we are maximizing every single dollar of what it can return to a client’s business. But many more clients and many more marketers are also thinking about the upper funnel and making sure we’re bringing enough new customers into our brand. I think they’re really facing questions around will our brand exist five to 10 years from now? Do we have enough brand equity? Is there enough brand love to sustain us?

Finally, all clients are also thinking about brand safety, privacy, data ethics and where do I stand, what are the important pieces. I think from a data ethics standpoint, we often say just because we can doesn’t mean we should use a particular data. So, I think having those conversations with the client, making sure you’re workshopping all those elements before jumping in and continuing to evaluate each of those areas, whether biannually or on an annual basis to make sure it’s still laddering up to a brand’s ethos is important.

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Can you talk about how your agency is doing more with less and justifying those media investments today?

Justifying the investments has to ladder back to media principles and strong media planning. Today, when you’re trying to do more with less, you need to be really sharp on, where am I investing? Why am I investing here? We talk about investing with intent. And even though there might be something that’s new or on the horizon, is this the right time necessarily to get involved? You really need to stay sharp on… breaking through in the channels you are using in the platforms that you’re in versus spraying wide necessarily. It goes back to strong media planning and strong media fundamentals and believing in your principles. So as much as sometimes there’s a shiny bobble – and we love shiny bobbles – when you’re going through this kind of time, we really need to make sure that we are doing the best, the smartest, most effective and most efficient planning and execution activation.

Can you share your predictions on what’s next for the industry?

I think what’s really exciting for the industry is commerce. Retail commerce is playing a far larger role in our business today than obviously it ever has, and it will continue to grow. I think the opportunity for increasing commerce interactions with consumers directly through channels, for example, connected TV, taking that to the next step where we can make a transaction for consumers seamless through that channel is very exciting. And how commerce will continue to be infused in all channels.

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