The unchecked bleeding of Canadian ad dollars into Silicon Valley needs to be stemmed to preserve Canadian media jobs, Sarah Thompson, lead for the Canadian Media Means Business (CMMB) initiative, told the FWD Conference in Kelowna.
Thompson, who also serves as Executive Managing Director of independent media agency Glassroom, delivered an unapologetic reality check to the room of Western Canadian broadcast executives.
Touting data from CMMB’s most recent study, released in April, she outlined a trajectory for the Canadian media landscape that indicates by 2030, for every $100 invested in media in Canada, just $21.32 will stay in the country.
As of 2024, for every $1 million invested in a Canadian media organization, 8.3 domestic jobs are created or sustained. CMMB directly links Canada’s radio and TV broadcast sector shedding 1,100 jobs in 2024 to domestic advertising outflow, driven by automated, programmatic buying.
“If a dollar is a dollar, we’re only keeping, let’s say 25 cents of it in 2024,” Thompson warned. “You can do the math of how much money we are sort of defunding our local economy. And that should be something that everybody raises a red flag and goes, ‘I have a crisis in place.'”
Agency failures
When asked by attendees why money continues to flow seamlessly to platforms like YouTube and Meta despite local media outperforming them in memory retention and brand safety, Thompson pointed to systemic failures within modern media agencies.
She maintains that the collapse of senior buying talent during the pandemic left agency desks staffed by overworked, 26-year-old planners who are forced to turn around massive briefs in under 15 days.
“How much are you actually understanding the Canadian media environment within 15 days, or the nuances of it?” Thompson asked. “You’re gonna do the thing that you were certified in, not the thing that’s hard work…it is easier for me to buy YouTube. I can have it done in two days ’cause nobody’s gonna hold me to account if it’s a bad buy. Clients aren’t gonna ask how effective it was; they’re just gonna ask how cheap it was.”
Compounding this is a corporate holding-company culture that financially incentivizes agency executives to play ball with tech giants rather than local publishers.
“Who, as a leader of an organization, do I give time to? Probably the one who’s contributing more to the bottom line of the agency,” Thompson admitted. “That’s not just me being cynical. It’s just money.”
She also called out the industry’s reliance on flawed data, noting that lazy agency implementation of Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) frequently evaluates radio on “garbage” monthly aggregates rather than granular, weekly impression metrics.
To combat the “wolves at the door,” Thompson urged Canadian broadcasters to abandon polite humility and challenged rival networks – like Rogers, Bell, Corus, and Pattison Media – to stop viewing each other as the competition and start cooperating to leverage their collective data and scale.
“All of our Canadian broadcasters, from an audience size…collectively, are bigger than Netflix, Amazon, and everything else, but they don’t collaborate enough in that way for that to happen,” she observed. “And so, it always ends up being a warfare of one-to-one. And that’s a hard battle to fight.”
Her final directive to the broadcasters was a call to step out of the shadows, invest heavily in behavioural data, and aggressively re-engage with agencies and brands.
“Please don’t be invisible,” she urged. “Be a little bit more braggadocious. Have a little bit more swagger…show them why you are a better alternative to Mark Zuckerberg. That’s my dream.”
