DM Magazine October 2023

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VOL. 36 • NO. 10 • OCTOBER 2023

THE AUTHORITY FOR THE DATA-DRIVEN BUSINESS

BRAND EXPERIENCE: An Interview with

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Vol. 36 | No. 10 | October 2023

PRESIDENT Publisher & Editor-in-Chief Steve Lloyd - steve@dmn.ca

talking points

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Talking Points

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INTERVIEW

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Sarah Lightfoot Michael Menard Stephen Shaw Christina Summers

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talking points

Intent, Navigate, Inspire, Timing and Execute.

The book gives business leaders an insight into how to transform business with a 50 percent increase in deal size, a 28 percent increase in revenue win rates, and a 40 percent increase in cross-selling. The awardwinning pair confront the inherent business challenges of siloed marketing, sales and customer service departments, reimagining core internal and buyer relationships.

This brand-new end-to-end selling process, methodology and ethos transcends the traditional way of thinking to incorporate a

department or team but should be the fabric of the business and culture. Infinite Selling peels back the curtain to reveal a new holistic and fundamentally modern approach.

Embracing our INFINITE methodology will require a paradigm shift, but one that will deliver exponential results.”

A complementary tool kit, designed for Infinite Selling readers and those eager to find out more about the methodology, will be available to download from Mentor Group’s website.

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STRONG Pilates, a rapidly growing fitness movement from Australia, is expanding its unique fitness franchise to Canada and has hired Strategic Objectives, the nation’s most award-winning communications firm, to help launch the brand into Canada.

Matt Webb (CEO) and James Barton (Chief Solutions Officer) of UK revenue transformation company Mentor Group

‘Infinite Selling’ confronts the business identity crisis hindering revenue transformation.

Matt Webb and James Barton lift the lid on the challenges of revenue transformation to re-envision a new sales ethos and methodology for today’s modern buyers.

Infinite Selling: The Modern Approach to HighVelocity Revenue Generation and Realisation challenges business leaders’ notion of sales and revenue generation within today’s digital landscape and ever-evolving complex buyer cycles.

Authored by Matt Webb (CEO) and James Barton (Chief Solutions Officer) of UK revenue transformation company Mentor Group, the book unveils a new methodology — INFINITE— designed to transform revenue generation and maximise performance at every touchpoint throughout the customer lifecycle.

INFINITE tackles both the revenue and qualification strategies, as well as outlining key attributes revenue enablement leaders require to power through success, such as digital literacy, buyer-centricity, strategic thinking, continuous learning, revenue orientation and key value drivers.

Formed from an acronym for commercial success, INFINITE confronts each stage of a buyer’s journey: Interest, Need, Friction,

true vision of Revenue Transformation. Infinite Selling also drives discussion around the crucial but often overlooked aspect of mental fitness and resilience, equipping sellers and sales leaders with the tools and skills to maintain a positive mental framework to withstand the pressures and challenges of the modern sales environment.

An award-winning business that counts Lenovo, Adobe, Syngenta and Infor amongst its international customers, Mentor Group’s Revenue Velocity Accelerator provides a fully integrated, scalable revenue transformation offering designed to revamp revenue performance.

Said Webb: “At Mentor Group, we’re focused on enabling our partners to acquire and maintain customers efficiently, maximizing revenue gained through each stage of the customer’s journey by focusing on delivering great customer experiences. With over 30 years of commercial experience, working across a variety of industries, we’ve followed the lead of others as well as carved our own path. Distilling that knowledge into a new revenue methodology to re-enable revenue allows us to share our expertise with others in a way that will empower revenue leaders of today and tomorrow.”

Said Barton: “Sales is a noble craft, but it’s too often talked about in terms reserved for the dark arts. It cannot be left to one

With the mantra of “STRONG. Down for More”, this industry disruptor works to give everyone more out of their workout, more out of their week, and more out of their life. Set to open its first studio in Toronto’s Little Italy in January 2024, STRONG Pilates Studio will offer Canadians high-intensity, low-impact full-body workouts like nothing this nation has seen before. Part resistance, part cardio, Pilates inspired, the 45-minute classes focus on promoting long-term, sustainable training through low-impact movements thanks to the purpose-built equipment: the patented Rowformer — part rower, part reformer — and Bikeformer — part bike, part reformer.

The unique hybrid fitness experience delivers results without typical HIIT highimpact movements, such as plyometrics, which can increase the risk of injury. Plus, STRONG Pilates offers a range of daily classes alternating between full, upper and lower body, cardio, core, Pilates, or a combination of all.

More is More

“We are excited to share our innovative fitness experience with Canadians, and Strategic Objectives is the ideal partner to help us spread our message,” says Alyce Luczak, Director of Operations & Performance, STRONG Pilates Canada. “Together we will connect with Canadians who are Down for More: more cardio, more sweat, more strength and more confidence. But we also know there is more to being strong than muscles: it’s about strong minds, bodies, friendships and beats. That’s why our workouts are untraditional and ultra efficient.”

STRONG Pilates first launched in October 2019 in Melbourne, Australia. Since then, it has opened more than 40 studios across Australia and New Zealand, and has 100+ locations set to launch across the UK, Asia,

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talking points

Schulich’s Master of Marketing Program Ranked #1 in Canada & Top 10 in North America. QS ranked the Master of Marketing program at York University’s Schulich School of Business #1 in Canada and 10th overall in North America.

To compile its 2024 ranking, QS surveyed 131 Master of Marketing programs in 26 countries around the world using a number of criteria,

popular source of comparative data about university and business school performance.

Known as Canada’s Global Business School™, the Schulich School of Business in Toronto is ranked #1 in Canada and among the world’s leading business schools by a number of global MBA surveys, including The Economist, Forbes, and QS. The KelloggSchulich EMBA program is ranked #9 in the world by The Economist, #9 in the world among joint programs by QS MBA, and #1 in Canada by the Financial Times.

Global, innovative, and diverse, Schulich offers business programs year-round at its state-of-the-art complex at York University; at its Miles S. Nadal Management Centre located in the heart of the Toronto’s financial district; and at its campus in Hyderabad, India.

The School also has strategic and academic partnerships with a number of the world’s leading business schools in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Schulich offers undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate business degrees that lead to rewarding careers in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors, and has more than 35,000 alumni working in over 90 countries.

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Vendasta raises $20M to fuel strategic acquisitions and the Saskatoon-based software company welcomes Foundry partner Brad Feld to board of directors.

Canada, New Zealand and Australia in the coming year. The launch communications campaign in Canada includes targeted media relations, influencer unboxing experiences and tastemaker trial sessions.

“We all have our own fitness goals to achieve and our own version of strength to develop,” says Sadie Tory, Director, PR & People, Strategic Objectives. “That’s why the STRONG Pilates approach resonates. It’s a completely unique experience that promotes strength in body and mind. The STRONG fitness method understands our unique needs, and optimizes classes, so we can spend more time living our lives.”

Watch for more details on STRONG Pilates as the January launch approaches. STRONG is a fitness movement combining row and ride with Pilates-inspired movements using the new, innovative Former machine. A classic STRONG class lasts between 45-50 minutes, incorporating a mixture of cardio HIIT training and Pilates-inspired resistance training. For more information, visit www.strongpilates.ca. ❱ DMN.CA

including employability, thought leadership, class and faculty diversity, value for money, and alumni outcomes.

Schulich’s Master of Marketing program ranked 10th in the world in the category of Alumni Outcomes — the extent to which the school’s graduates have gone on to pursue highly successful careers.

For complete details regarding the 2024 QS Master of Marketing ranking, please visit: https://www.qs.com/rankings-releasedqs-world-university-rankings-businessmasters-2024/.

“We’re very pleased to have been ranked the #1 Master of Marketing program in Canada and one of the top programs in North America,” said Schulich Dean Detlev Zwick.

“Today’s ranking results are a reflection of our world-class faculty, the high quality of our students and program, and the success of our graduates.”

QS is the world’s leading provider of services, analytics and insight to the global higher education sector and its QS World University Rankings is the world’s most

At the same time, a CAD $52.5 million debenture converted to equity. This financing provides the company with a clean capital structure and funding for future acquisitions to accelerate growth. Vendasta was recognized on the Globe and Mail’s 2023 list of Top Growing Companies in Canada with 135 percent growth from 2020 to 2022.

Brendan King, Vendasta’s founder and CEO said, “Vendasta is the industry leading platform for channel partners to market, sell, bill, fulfill, and deliver digital solutions to SMBs. Today over 200K small and medium sized businesses are serviced through Vendasta’s platform. These new funds are earmarked for strategic acquisitions to achieve our mission. We won’t stop until our channel partners can provide everything their SMB customers need to run their business from a single login.”

In the past two years, Vendasta has acquired four companies: ❯ CalendarHero, to provide meeting and scheduling solutions to SMBs. ❯ MatchCraft, to equip channel partners with tools to effectively advertise on Google, Bing, Facebook, Instagram, and other social platforms on behalf of SMBs. ❯ Yesware, to advance its core CRM by allowing for email outreach at scale. ❯ Broadly, to help local businesses engage OCTOBER 2023

// 7 with leads and customers, automatically send review requests, and streamline invoices and payments.

Foundry led the financing, with Brad Feld joining the Board of Directors. “We’ve gotten to know Vendasta over the past year through their acquisition of two of our portfolio companies. We believe they have built the most compelling platform in the market for selling and delivering B2B software to SMBs,” said Feld.

“Today, there are thousands of B2B SaaS companies whose growth has slowed while they are sub-scale. We believe Vendasta is a natural consolidator of these companies.”

King concluded by saying, “We’re super excited to work with Brad and the entire Foundry team with their deep experience in high growth software companies. Vendasta has enjoyed remarkable growth over the past several years and I am really pleased that Vendasta will be profitable by the end of the year. SMB’s more than ever need digital solutions to grow and compete. Through internal R&D and acquisitions, we are positioning Vendasta to capitalize on satisfying that growing demand.”

Vendasta is a provider of digital solutions that help businesses operate and grow. It delivers these solutions through a vast network of channel sellers and through its direct brands. In September of 2023, Vendasta was listed on The Globe and Mail’s 5th annual list of Top Growing Companies in Canada with 135 percent growth over the past 3 years. Based in Saskatoon, Vendasta is now a global enterprise with offices in Saskatoon, Boston, Boca Raton, and Chennai and employs over 750 people around the globe.

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iWave, the industry’s top-rated fundraising intelligence provider, is delighted to announce the acquisition of Nonprofit Operating System (NonprofitOS), a revolutionary generative AI platform designed by fundraisers to assist fundraisers.

This acquisition will make iWave’s worldclass fundraising insights more actionable so nonprofit organizations can expand their reach, more actively engage donors, and ultimately have a greater impact on the causes they care about.

NonprofitOS is an AI-powered copywriting tool that gives fundraisers first drafts so they can edit and distribute more content quickly.

OCTOBER 2023

It enables any fundraising professional to automatically create the first draft of everything from website content to social media posts to fundraising appeals, in minutes instead of hours. This enables them to take back their time and focus on what matters most for their organization, creating impact and building personal relationships.

Unlike other AI solutions, the NonprofitOS platform does not use personally identifiable information (e.g. donor personal information), learns exclusively from nonprofit community input, and is tailored to frontline fundraisers. iWave’s fundraising intelligence platform brings big data, automation, and Al together to power modern fundraising efforts. iWave’s donor insights coupled with generative AI from NonprofitOS, will enable nonprofits to expand, understand, and engage their donor base, improving donor retention, increasing revenue, and maximizing their impact like never before.

“As a fundraiser myself, I’ve lived the challenges fundraisers face daily,” said Cherian Koshy, Founder of Nonprofit Operating System.

“That’s why I created NonprofitOS — to help fundraisers focus on meaningful interactions with donors. With iWave’s acquisition, we’re aligning two worlds that were always meant to be together: actionable fundraising intelligence and empathetic engagement. As an iWave user, I am incredibly excited about this shared vision. Together, we’re setting a new standard for what’s possible in nonprofit fundraising.”

“We are so excited about what this combination will mean for fundraisers,” said Craig O’Neill, CEO of iWave. “Cherian and his team have built an incredible product that, just like iWave, is designed and built exclusively for nonprofits. Everyone here at iWave is passionate about helping nonprofits do even more good, and this announcement is an important step in expanding the ways we do that. But we’re not done yet. Stay tuned for more exciting news coming soon.”

As part of this acquisition, iWave is excited to have NonprofitOS Founder Cherian Koshy joining iWave, focused on driving continued innovation of iWave’s generative AI solution. iWave, the industry’s top-rated fundraising intelligence solution, enables nonprofit organizations to fundraise with confidence.

In a new era of nonprofit fundraising, iWave solves critical challenges facing fundraising professionals today: how to identify, qualify, and retain donors to raise more gifts. The Nonprofit Operating System is a platform that democratizes access to AI and other tools for nonprofit organizations. The generative AI system empowers nonprofit organizations to achieve their missions and make a greater impact in the world. With this platform, nonprofits can make data-driven decisions, improve their outreach and communication, and ultimately have a greater impact on the causes they care about.

Foundation Magazine is the Canadian bi-monthly publication and media channel which reaches more than 25,000 individual executives in Canada who represent the full charity and foundation sector and the major donor community, as well as the spectrum of companies which support, supply to, and advise all aspects of the not-for-profit industry.

To advertise or to get more information and a media kit:

Contact Steve Lloyd for details,

steve.lloyd@lloydmedia.ca www.foundationmag.ca Twitter: @foundationmaga1

Foundation Magazine is a Lloydmedia, Inc publication.

Lloydmedia also publishes DM Magazine and Total Finance Magazine.

DMN.CA ❰

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BRAND EXPERIENCE:

VECTEEZY.COM

KICKER

An Interview with

Allen Adamson, Co-Founder of Metaforce

BY STEPHEN SHAW

A STEPHEN SHAW is the Chief Strategy Officer of Kenna, a marketing solutions provider specializing in delivering a more unified customer experience. Stephen can be reached via e-mail at sshaw@kenna.ca

❱ DMN.CA

t this year’s Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity NYU’s marketing superstar and provocateur Scott Galloway asked the audience at his packed session to take a red pill.

“I think the era of brand is over” he bluntly declared, knowing it would rattle everyone in the crowd whose livelihoods depend on brand messaging.

This is the same guy who once said, “A brand is the face of a business strategy”. Has he suddenly become an apostate? Not exactly. He was simply acknowledging what everyone in the room is reluctant to say out loud (especially if they work for an ad agency or media company): traditional brand building through advertising is dead. “People aren’t watching ads anymore”, he emphatically said, adding that “many ads are a tax on the people who are unable to avoid them”.

Marketers have always had a tough time distinguishing between ads that generate sales and branding. Or they choose to do one at the expense of the other. They take it as an article of blind faith that consistent brand advertising will eventually lead to revenue growth because they’ve been repeatedly told that mind-share is crucial to converting shoppers into buyers.

The problem facing most marketers, of course, is that saying your brand is better or best does not make it so, no matter how large a share-of-voice you

may have. And getting an ad noticed, never mind remembered, has never been harder in this age of media fragmentation and clutter. Yet advertising remains the main crutch marketers use to promote their brands, notwithstanding evidence to suggest that it is becoming less and less effective, as Galloway noted.

Marketing’s job is to build brand equity but that is not to be confused with brand image. Brand equity has to do with how important the brand is in the lives of people.

As the legendary brand expert David Aakker once wrote, “The really strong brands have gone a step beyond achieving visibility and differentiation to develop deep relationships with a customer group — that is, the brand becomes a meaningful part of the customer’s life”.

Brands that are on the periphery of people’s lives — that are me-too products — that lack a clear and distinctive identity — that are perceived to be substitutable — are doomed to compete forever on price. Whereas the most successful brands today offer a winning combination of product superiority and an enriching experience. The quality of that experience — the extent to which it becomes a “sharable” story, not just a credible one — is what earns a brand a loyal base of “fans” and keeps customers buying again and again.

The challenge, of course, is gaining the confidence of customers that the brand deserves to be a part of OCTOBER 2023

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INTERVIEW their lives. To do so, marketers have to set their sights on changing those lives for the better, argues the noted brand consultant Allen Adamson, whose latest book “Seeing the How” chronicles how various innovative brands were able to do so. The trick, he says, is to deeply examine how people go about their day-to-day lives and the obstacles they face. He says the differences between products are so slight today that the only thing that can differentiate one from the other is the novelty and utility of the experience.

Shaw: Your career has spanned four decades now. You’re one of the foremost branding experts in the world. What would you say has been the biggest shift in brand strategy over that time?

Adamson: There’s no such thing as a unique selling proposition anymore. Today if you have a new product there’s going to be five more just like it in no time. When I worked at Unilever they made Dove soap which had unique properties for your skin. That advantage lasted 15, 20 years where all they had to say is Dove doesn’t dry your skin like ordinary soap. Dove’s only task was to keep that message fresh and relevant and believable. I also spent a big chunk of my career working with P&G. They’d show a plate washed in Dawn and a plate washed in something else and say, “Look how much cleaner this is”.

Or they’d say, “This shirt’s been washed in Tide, see how much whiter it is”. But those days are gone. Try to define the difference between one laptop and another, one car and another. I rent a lot of cars when I travel, and it’s really hard to tell the difference between a Mercedes and a Hyundai.

Shaw: So product parity is forcing brands to move away from an emphasis on functional superiority in their messaging?

Adamson: Right. You don’t have to be a marketing expert to know when you go down the aisle at Target and try to buy almost any product, it’s really hard to tell the difference between one shampoo and another. It’s a sea of sameness.

The challenge of marketing is exponentially more difficult. That’s one change. And, of course, the other big change is that there’s OCTOBER 2023

so much more media now. So two things have happened to the consumer. One, they don’t pay attention to anything anymore.

And two, the average consumer has attention deficit disorder.

They’re not going to listen to a long story as to why this product is better than that product.

Shaw: Are there brand orthodoxies that persist today which you’d like to see retired?

Adamson: I think a lot of the basics still apply. I’ll tell you a story.

I was working at Ogilvy and was just out of business school. Very excited. I was assigned to Maxwell House, and the Creative Director said, “We’ve got a new campaign.

Give me a brief.” I went back to my office and put together a two-page email: where the beans were from, where it was roasted and the taste.

I was really excited. I brought it to her, she looked at it, and said, “This is really fabulous — you’ve got incredible depth here.” And then she took a corner of the page, ripped it off, waved it at me and said, “Alan, when you can put what you want to communicate about the client’s coffee in this little scrap of paper, come back and see me.” The lesson: when you want breakthrough creative, you better figure out the one thing you’ve got to communicate.

Shaw: Well, I think that’s always been a challenge for the industry: creating concise Creative Briefs that cut to the heart of why the brand should matter to people.

Adamson: Yeah, and it’s hard.

But what hasn’t changed, I think, is that we’re still in a world of nonlinear problem-solving. You just can’t put all the facts on a piece of paper, add them up, divide them in two and say, there’s the answer.

The catalyst for breaking through is being able to look at all the facts and come up with a completely fresh way to communicate that’s relevant and different. Because in today’s marketplace, there’s so much noise that if you just say, I want to tell you about our coffee and three reasons to buy it, you don’t even get to reason number one before somebody swipes and you’re forgotten.

Shaw: In the analog days, you at least had some breathing room

to tell your story.

Adamson: To tell your story — right! Now you have a TikTok second. Every year I watch the Super Bowl for the ads. You’ve got maybe 30 brands, each spending however much. And of those 30 brands I probably don’t remember 15. The remaining 15, you sort of remember. And only three or four might break through — tell you something about the product that you will actually remember. That just shows you how difficult it is to do today.

Shaw: In the book, you make the point that points of differentiation alone are not enough to sustain a brand.

You also get a little bit into this idea of distinctiveness versus differentiation which is always an ongoing industry debate.

What will sustain a brand if it’s not being seen somehow as bigger or better or best than the competing alternatives?

Adamson: That ties to the first point we talked about at the start, which is that even if you have something distinctive, you have a limited advantage before other competitors begin offering the same thing. Ultimately, a brand needs to solve somebody’s problem. And you have to constantly be looking at that problem and asking, “Am I solving it in the best way possible, and better than our competition?”.

Think of cell phones: try to differentiate between the 10 leading smartphones. They all have the same apps, they have the same camera. Maybe Google’s phone takes better pictures or Samsung has a larger screen, but ultimately they’re just showing off their features. Apple is staying ahead because of customer service. You call AppleCare, and somebody will spend 20 minutes, 40 minutes, an hour with you. You don’t have to line up at a Genius Bar. That’s all about the experience.

Shaw: Today the line has blurred between product and service, hasn’t it?

Adamson: I tell this story often.

We were working for a pizza chain in the US., a big one, I won’t name it. And they were saying, “Look, we’ve just done this research and 78 percent of our consumers like

the taste of our pizza, they like the restaurant, but our sales are down so the advertising can’t be right or something has to change.” And then a smart moderator from the research firm said, “Well, let’s ask another question. Let’s ask, if this company went out of business, what would you do?”. And we heard them say, “Oh, I’d go to Papa John’s.” So you have to be careful when you ask, “How am I doing?”.

Because no one wants to tell you how they really feel. Finding out what it will take to get people to go, “Wow!”, that’s an entirely different challenge.

Shaw: The answer “You’re about the same as the other guy” is pretty scary to any brand.

Adamson: Exactly. If you can’t see the difference, why pay the difference?

Shaw: Another contentious topic these days is striking the right balance between traditional long-term brand building and sales activation, or performance marketing as they call it.

Adamson: In most cases, it’s not one or the other, it’s both.

And if you don’t have the brand differentiation figured out, you’re going to spend a lot more money on demand generation because it’s going be a lot less effective. A lot of brands don’t have a clear story.

Lots of marketers get instantly enamored with brand activation, and don’t focus enough on telling the right story.

Shaw: Explain the difference between brand and branding.

Adamson: A brand is your story.

When someone hears your product or company name, what story pops into their head? Once you get the brand story right, then branding is how you get it from PowerPoint into somebody’s head. And it could be through advertising, it could be owned media, it could be customer experience, it could be influencers — there are 50 ways to get a brand story into someone’s head. But there’s usually not enough pressure testing. Is it the right story? Is it clear? Is anyone going to care?

But you get people who say, “Oh, our sales are down, we must need a new ad, or we must need a new identity”.

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INTERVIEW Shaw: Or they’re gloating about the number of likes and followers.

Adamson: Yeah, exactly. If you get lots of likes, that’s seen as success.

I ask my students often “What’s Gap’s problem? Is it a brand or branding problem?”. And students will usually say, “Their advertising is boring, or the stores are generic, or the jeans are not that nice”. I argue that if you go into a Gap store and ask a sales associate for something typically “Gap” to wear, they will have no clue what “typical Gap” is. And so, yes, the Gap has lots of issues on the branding side.

But if no one on the floor can tell you, “This sweater is really Gap”, if it’s just “Come to the Gap because we’ve got lots of great stuff on the floor or online at a decent price”, that’s not a good story.

Shaw: How important is purpose to building strong brands?

Adamson: I think it can be important, but my take on it is it’s really hard to do and it has to extend well beyond what the marketing department does. Because to truly deliver a brand purpose, it needs to be a commitment of the entire company.

But often today marketers say we have this purpose, they do an ad campaign and, one, it’s hard to believe, and two, they’re not convincing people that they really stand for something. So while everyone gets excited about it, I think for every 10 purpose brands, only two are successful because it’s hard to execute.

Shaw: A core theme in your book is that a brand has to be entrenched in people’s lives to be successful. And it only really works if the brand is truly perceived as a North Star in the minds of all stakeholders, not just consumers.

Adamson: Right, because otherwise, if it’s just marketing communications, it’s perceived as spin. And the one thing we know about today’s consumer is they’re more skeptical than ever.

Shaw: I want to reference one of your colleagues at NYU Stern School of Business, Scott Galloway. He was at Cannes recently, being his usual provocative self, where he ❱ DMN.CA

declared the era of the brand is over. What’s your perspective on that?

Adamson: The reason Scott was able to go to Cannes and be on his yacht is because he started and later sold a pretty big brand firm called Prophet. And even though he says brands are dead, he’s built a personal brand that’s better than most.

Shaw: You state in the book that the most important thing a brand can do today is help people experience the world differently.

Adamson: Going back to our conversation at the start, there’s not that much meaningful product differentiation anymore. So if you’re only saying, “Buy this brand because it’s better than some other brand”, tough to do. So you have to look at how your brand is going to make people’s lives better in a way that goes beyond its immediate value.

Shaw: I particularly liked your comment in the book that average is over, average doesn’t win you many sales anymore. So is the objective here to create distinctive experiences?

Adamson: The objective is to figure out how the product is going to fit into someone’s life, and then determine how to make the overall experience better. A brand has to make the product really easy or fun or different to use, make it shareable, do something that surprises people, or solve a problem in a slightly different way.

Shaw: In many of the examples you cite in the book, the companies have actually rethought the entire category by enhancing the experience in some novel way.

Adamson: This story isn’t in the book, but I took my new car to be serviced a couple of years ago and it’s always a challenging experience going to a dealer and trusting their recommendations. This time I got a text from the dealer with a video from the mechanic working on my car and he says, “We’re under your car now, and I want to show you your brake pads. You see this shiny thing, that means they’ve already worn through. Now, I don’t think we need to replace that right now, but I want to show you that when you come in next.” That’s a

great example of rethinking the experience: how can I make your service experience better?

Shaw: Most brands, I would argue, live on the periphery of people’s lives. But the word entrenched would suggest being central to those lives.

Does the brand have to become indispensable, something they can’t live without?

Adamson: I’m a big fan of Delta.

You get to the airport and their app tells you not only that you’re at Gate 42 and your flight’s at 10:05, but it will also tell you how long it’s going to take you to get through security, to get to the gate, to get to Starbucks. That’s something I can’t live without now — Delta is entrenched in my life.

Shaw: You state in the book that customer-centricity is a concept most marketers don’t fully understand. Why do you think that is?

Adamson: Customer-centric is probably one of the most overused words in business. Most marketers are so busy in meetings and reading emails that they lose their observational skills; they miss out seeing things firsthand. Most executives glance at a top-line customer satisfaction metric on a dashboard which tells you how you’re doing at a macro level; but by the time those indicators move, it’s usually game over and too late to respond. And so part of it, I think, is the need for marketers to realize that they should be the ones inside the company closest to the customer. They need to take a bigger role in innovation and be the ones to suggest to the service department, “Why don’t we share videos with our customers?”.

Customer-centricity means that they have some sense whether their customers are happy.

Shaw: You state in the book that identifying opportunity means seeing things other people don’t see. Is that an argument for first principles thinking? For divergent thinking?

Adamson: It goes back to something we just touched on, always keeping fresh eyes. I remember a conversation I had with HBO about eight years ago — they were doing something really

interesting. They would hire interns from universities but instead of putting them to work in a cubicle they used these 20-something kids to keep their Executives informed on what’s going on with millennials and Gen Z because the higher up at HBO you went, the more out of touch you became.

Shaw: But how do you facilitate the shift to divergent thinking?

Adamson: If it was one simple answer like, “Take two aspirins and call me in the morning”, everyone would do it. But the problem is, it’s a complex challenge. Part of the answer is diversity in hiring — bringing in people with different backgrounds, from different parts of the country, with different experiences. Otherwise, everyone tends to think the same. The other thing that’s bad in companies, and the bigger the company, the worse it is, there is tremendous pressure to never disagree with the boss.

And then, you have to learn to fail quickly — in other words, don’t spend a year polishing things and then fail. It’s better to put it out there, try it, iterate. And execution matters. Lots of companies fail, not because they have the wrong idea, but because they only executed it 80 percent.

I like the Calendly story from the book. Calendly looked at the calendaring market — Outlook, Google and so on — and saw that the problem was not creating the calendar entry, it was finding a time when someone was free to meet. It just took somebody who was outside the category to make a better calendar system who saw the real problem.

Shaw: What will it take for organizations to look forward instead of backward and rattle the chains of complacency if they have to?

Adamson: No one really gets serious about changing anything until the sky starts falling. So that’s why the more successful a company is, the more vulnerable it is to being disrupted because they’ve already moved to the cost optimization phase. They just want to play it safe and stick with what they hope is a winning card hand, when what they should be doing is taking a gamble and asking for a new hand.

OCTOBER 2023

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TRENDS

Four Forces Reshaping Marketing

A

s marketers adapt to profound trends — the arrival of generative AI and large language models (LLMs), the convergence of adtech and martech, and greater attention to privacy issues — the right technology stack is essential to great marketing.

In their new report, Modern Marketing Data Stack 2023, the marketing technology company Snowflake analyzed what its customers use most often to enhance marketing data analytics and more accurately measure performance and ROI.

1

ADTECH/MARTECH CONVERGENCE: Walls Come Down

The technologies that support advertising and marketing activities, respectively, grew up independent of one another, just as advertising and marketing teams were usually separate, or at least not tightly integrated. The ecosystem of tools to manage paid channels was therefore separate from the tools to manage owned channels.

To manage paid channels, we got ad servers, ad exchanges, demandOCTOBER 2023

2

AI/ML

and supply-side platforms, paid and social management platforms, and one set of measurement tools. To manage owned channels, we got CRMs, email marketing systems, SEO, and another set of measurement tools. Over the last decade or so, the two disciplines and their respective tools have increasingly converged. This convergence has been driven largely by a number of factors: ❯ The frenetic and fragmented media landscape means that marketers have to work harder to both identify and reach their target audiences. Guiding a new customer from first impression to loyal fan involves many touches across different stages of the journey. Doing it right requires a precise understanding of who your target is (when the data may be siloed in various martech or adtech tools) and where and when to deliver your message (which may be complicated if your marketing and advertising campaigns are not coordinated). ❯ There’s a lot of data out there to help with exactly that challenge. But that data is largely fragmented, too — siloed in specialized applications.

3

Privacy

4

Unified Data

A business may have a lot of information about a potential customer’s interests and behaviors scattered ineffectively across a dozen solutions used by the advertising, marketing, and sales organizations. ❯ Inefficiency costs money. Think of the technologies connecting a marketer who wants to advertise and the publisher who has the ad inventory as a supply chain.

Each link in the chain has costs.

A marketer with a dollar to spend on digital advertising will use multiple solutions to unify, enrich, and activate data on a potential customer on the way to that ad platform, and each step costs money that could be spent on more impressions. These technologies improve the quality of the campaign, but economic pressures drive marketers to get there as efficiently as possible — and drive vendors to improve the power of their own solutions to deliver value. ❯ Business leaders are always looking to cut expenses.

Especially in chaotic economic times, the message is “do more with less” and quantify the results of every expenditure.

That means that almost

VECTEEZY.COM

1

Adtech/ Martech Convergence

everything can be seen as trimmable fat, even when marketing has been charged as a growth driver. The need to better acquire, retain, and upsell customers while showing greater ROI and efficiency is exactly why a focus on a well-understood target audience is indispensable.

In addition to the economic pressures to contribute more value, and prove it ASAP, the art and science of marketing is being reshaped by the rapid convergence of adtech and martech, the emergence of LLMs as the hottest area of AI, issues around data privacy, and the imperative to focus on a unified approach to data as an antidote to silos, security/ governance headaches, and costly inefficiency.

What makes the years-long trend important now, and necessary to call out in the 2023 Modern Marketing Data Stack, is that we’re moving from the idea of convergence to actual implementation — and having the right tech foundation can accelerate that evolution. The larger worlds of adtech and martech are still far apart in DMN.CA ❰

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TRENDS

significant ways, but for many of the customers we see in the Snowflake Data Cloud, the wall is beginning to come down.

Identity providers in particular want to bridge the adtech/ martech gap, with vendors increasingly offering such classic martech practices as creating unified customer profiles, delivering personalized customer experience, and measuring the success of marketing campaigns to understand the full customer journey. It’s worth noting that many organizations within this category, such as LiveRamp, Neustar, and Experian, are building identity, enrichment, onboarding, activation, and other capabilities within Snowflake as Snowflake Native Apps (in preview as this report is published), enabling these processes to happen faster and with greater security.

Essentially, this means there is no need to copy and move data between any of these solutions and the Data Cloud, adding agility and governance while reducing latency.

A broader example: Traditionally, adtech uses cookies and third-party data segments of cookies to profile audiences, while martech relies on lists of email addresses. As thirdparty cookies shuffle off this mortal coil, email lists increasingly power paid channels. That’s an instance of the adtech/martech convergence playing out within the customer data platform (CDP).

Each of these factors drive marketers to find actionable insights by creating a unified approach to a potential customer, from first contact through purchase and beyond. The goal is a clearer and more measurable picture of the buyer’s journey, and an ability to focus not on siloed email or ad activity, but on the overall customer experience as a seamless journey that’s persistent and consistent.

As publisher platforms and marketers have wrestled with these challenges, there’s another factor, driven largely from the adtech side: Rising privacy concerns have created serious disruptions for both martech and adtech, though challenges around the thirdparty cookie have been a major headache for adtech in particular. Advertisers rely on ❱ DMN.CA

third-party data, such as cookies, to target their ads. The slow death of third-party cookies, increasing regulation, and other privacydriven upheavals have meant that a business’s advertising strategy, like its marketing strategy, must rely more on first-party data—that which comes directly from the business’s relationship and interactions with its customers.

Thus we have a thinner wall, if any, between modern advertising and marketing teams. Their more unified technology approach results in fewer silos; cleaner, more trustworthy data; better governance, compliance, and security; greater insight; more ability to take action on their data; and more bang for every ad dollar spent.

The adtech/martech convergence has moved from idea to actual implementation.

2

AI/ML: The Emergence of LLMs

The transformational impact of large language models and natural language interfaces will be felt throughout the marketing data stack, and throughout the marketing organization. In particular, LLMs and generative AI are expected to automate and improve a wide range of marketing functions and goals, including: ❯ Ad campaign optimization: Insights to improve audience segmentation and ad placement will emerge from large data sets that can include tables with rows and columns but also images that LLMs can parse, improving conversion rates and campaign ROI. ❯ Content generation: If you’re looking for serviceable text, quick and cheap, generative AI tools will write your blog posts, ad copy, web pages, emails, and more. They can pretty much do all that already. ❯ Natural language processing: LLMs are built on advanced NLP techniques, meaning that marketing tools will better interpret and respond to human language. Chatbots that don’t infuriate your customers and virtual assistants that don’t frustrate you are just

the beginning. NLP-powered sentiment analysis can also help marketers gauge public opinion and sentiment toward their brand or campaigns. ❯ Market research and competitive analysis: Throw it all into your LLM: tweets and online retailer reviews, market research reports, news, publicly available data sets.

The algorithm can process all of it to give marketers deep insights into consumer trends and sentiment, the competitive landscape, and shifting market opportunities. ❯ Customer personalization: Similarly, LLMs can take everything you know about a customer, and similar customers, and tailor campaigns and interactions based on behavioral patterns and more.

The outcome: more effective campaigns, happier customers, better campaign results.

The primary and most obvious effect on a marketer’s day-to-day will be in terms of productivity.

Advanced AI capabilities will meaningfully upgrade pretty much every technology in the stack and increase the amount of data that marketers can leverage, the quality of the insights and outputs, and the speed of pretty much everything. Whereas querying data today involves going to a data science team that can code the specific queries or provide the algorithmic model to analyze the data, marketers with no coding skills will be able to ask more questions in natural language, and get the outputs directly.

Where data scientists do need to code, the process of writing queries or shaping a data model will be much faster, in part because LLMs don’t need nearly as much structure; with guidance, the model figures out the structure itself. That means that data science teams will also be faster and more productive.

But there’s a subtler, and arguably more important, change that the rapid, widespread adoption of LLMs and AI generally will drive: We’ll trust algorithmic outputs more. Right now, a lot of data outputs come to marketers in frankly mysterious ways. The process of working with data is

complex, difficult, and obstruse.

We see the outputs, but we understand that the process of obtaining them doesn’t necessarily feel … organic. Algorithms are inexplicable, remote. When we can simply ask our data tool to explain something to us, and the answer comes to us in natural, conversational language, we’ll trust the output more because it will feel more human. Depending on how generative AI models develop, this heightened tendency to trust could be either helpful or problematic. But without a doubt, this trust will further accelerate the adoption of AI and change the way we work. Nontechnical and less-technical knowledge workers will find working directly with data as natural as we now find using search engines, email, and instant messengers throughout the workday. And the accuracy of recommendation engines, churn predictions, and marketing attribution tools will dramatically increase, delivering the speed of automation while increasing the effectiveness of human decisionmakers.

The evolution of the modern marketing data stack is being driven by the sheer volume and variety of data out there.

It’s possible for marketers to understand their customers much more deeply than ever before, and to act more quickly and precisely on those insights. But the aggregation of so much data, as well as the need to collaborate on that data with various partners, raises privacy concerns. As does the fact that the eCommerce era means that a business has a direct relationship with a customer’s data. A retailer, for instance, no longer buys ads from a TV station or newspaper promising their audience, on average, fits a certain age, gender, and/or income level.

Now the retailer is using data that is, in part, provided directly by the consumer through past purchases and loyalty programs, among other sources. That retailer serves its message directly to the consumer through email or by placing ads on the sites that their target consumer visits. How the retailer uses that data, and which partners it shares the data with, can complicate the relationship OCTOBER 2023

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TRENDS

between company and customer.

Yet if efficient and insightful data technologies have created this privacy challenge, they can also help solve it.

Bringing all one’s data together to create a unified picture of a target customer can improve management of privacy responsibilities. Consumers both provide data and make consent decisions through a variety of channels. They check yes or no on an offer to receive marketing emails.

They sign up for a loyalty program that trades data for discounts. They accept or reject the cookies that provide a more personalized online experience. All of these decisions and permissions live within various marketing technologies.

Bring that data together and it’s easier to meet obligations to the customer and the relevant regulatory regimes.

Increasingly on Snowflake, we’re seeing our users do exactly that, unifying this data to create not only a holistic view of the customer and a clear view of that customer’s privacy preferences, but also to earn trust and simplify the ability to act on consumer data subject requests.

A unified data structure, with privacy and consent features built in, will also be essential to properly inform LLM training, allowing the removal of data for which consent has not been obtained.

This structure also improves the consentpreserving data collaboration within the adtech ecosystem, as we are seeing with market frameworks that let advertisers, ad agencies, and publishers track consumer consent for web page visits.

Speaking of privacy-preserving data collaboration within adtech, we’ve seen increasing adoption of data clean rooms as a way to share customer data without exposing sensitive details. As brands seek increased collaboration to counteract the deprecation of cookies, data clean rooms allow collaboration and privacy compliance to coexist.

Efficient and insightful data technologies helped create a privacy challenge. They can also help solve it.

3

PRIVACY: Navigating the Challenges

We’ve covered three macro forces shaping the marketing landscape: economic pressures to show ROI, the epochal arrival of LLMs in the AI space, and the convergence of adtech and martech. There’s a fourth force at play, even closer to the technology stack itself: The need to build a technology infrastructure that by its nature prevents silos and maintains a unified approach to OCTOBER 2023

data. That’s been a pain point for years, but one that most organizations have yet to resolve. Looking ahead to our first category, we’ll consider the technology stack, analytics, and data capture, pausing to consider technologies such as Heap, Snowplow, Piano, Mixpanel, and Amplitude, all listed as leaders or up-andcomers. An essential difference between the technologies that lead the modern marketing data stack and the ones that aren’t on the list is that these solutions build directly on your data layer, operate directly from it, or leverage modern data sharing to work directly from your enterprise data platform with no friction.

You don’t have to pull the data outside, creating a new copy to manage, so that your tool can get to work on processing the data. These tech makers (and many others we’ll meet in the following pages) are driven by that fourth force: the need for agility that brings the applications closer to the single, unified data store, equipped with native processing capabilities.

4

UNIFIED DATA: Single Source of Truth - and Value

That sounds like an in-the-weeds discussion of infrastructure, but it’s more.

By working with tools that are closer to the data, you’re optimizing the expensive time of your data engineers. You’re cutting the time and expense of getting your campaigns right.

And with that, you’re able to be proactive, rather than reactive, in your marketing, and that’s the key to winning in an ever-faster, ever-more-competitive landscape. Marketers shouldn’t be hampered by data friction. Instead, they should be working on what they love to do: delivering differentiated campaigns with optimal speed, accuracy, and agility.

Conclusion With all that in mind, you are urged to look at leading solutions that some of the most sophisticated, data-driven marketing organizations are adopting to modernize their marketing stacks.

ABOUT SNOWFLAKE: Snowflake enables every organization to mobilize their data with Snowflake’s Data Cloud.

Customers use the Data Cloud to unite siloed data, discover and securely share data, and execute diverse artificial intelligence (AI) / machine learning (ML) and analytic workloads. Wherever data or users live, Snowflake delivers a single data experience that spans multiple clouds and geographies. Thousands of customers across many industries, including 639 of the 2023 Forbes Global 2000 (G2K) as of July 31, 2023, use the Snowflake Data Cloud to power their businesses.

How Air Canada Shifted Their Data Analytics Process

Air Canada, Canada’s largest commercial airline, provided scheduled air transport to 37 million customers across 185 destinations worldwide in 2022. After the acquisition of Aeroplan, the company found itself managing different data sets — including flight bookings and revenue, point transactions, member profiles, and marketing campaign response data — across multiple onpremises and cloud-based environments. This meant that the Customer & Loyalty Analytics team was forced to locate, copy, and aggregate data at the customer level to run post-campaign analysis.

The limitations of this process meant that it took weeks after campaign completion to have access to insights. Also, the process was not scalable, with insufficient capacity to perform post-campaign analysis on all campaigns.

The company migrated from Teradata and other cloud-based and on-premises data platforms to Snowflake, which now serves as its primary data platform. The ease of accessing data in Snowflake helped streamline analytics processes. All data ingestion as well as pre- and post-marketing campaign analysis is now done in Snowflake, leveraging Dataiku as the data science tool. The Customer & Loyalty Analytics team can now curate audiences based on a data-backed, 360-degree view of the customer, assessing campaign performance at an individual level. This enables increased relevance, maximization of conversion, and shifting nonresponsive targets to reduce opt-out rates.

Impact

With Snowflake and Dataiku, a campaign analysis that once required two weeks now takes 3.5 hours to run, with a fixed one hour of data scientist time per week, as opposed to 20 hours per campaign. ❯ These rich insights allow the marketing team to better understand targeted marketing efforts, what’s working and what’s not, and to track key metrics like website traffic, leads, and conversions to optimize future campaigns for better results and help maximize marketing spend ❯

ROI

Easy-to-apply data masking rules allow the airline to protect customer data, more easily and effectively complying with GDPR and other privacy regulations. ❯ Data scientists spend 80 percent less time doing data prep — thanks to advanced analytics processes automated by Dataiku and Snowflake — putting more effort into high-value deliverables. ❯

DMN.CA ❰

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MARKET RESEARCH

The Death of Direct Mail – Fake News

BY SARAH LIGHTFOOT

D

irect mail has shown remarkable resilience over the past 10 years.

Direct mail volumes remain consistent in Canada. As we endure the digital takeover of marketing endeavors, we can see that direct mail is remaining a relevant communication method according to Canada Post’s annual reports. Since 2012, Canada Post reports that the volume of direct mail campaigns has declined by 18 percent. A large portion of that decline came in 2020 during the pandemic where the volume dropped an astounding 27 percent.

Since then, reported volumes recovered a total of 20 percent in the two years following. Depending on how Q3 and Q4 goes for 2023, there possibly could be more adding to that recovery.

using multichannel approaches, including direct mail, to ensure their customers aren’t lost to CASL miscommunication. Direct mail has not lost its relevance in Canada.

In fact, it complements digital strategies by providing a tangible and personal touch to the customer experience. The synergy between the two approaches allows for a

more holistic marketing strategy.

If you are looking to bolster your direct mail campaign, get access to ResponseCanada™ Consumer as an excellent resource to locate your target market in Canada. You can do your own real-time queries with Cleanlist’s online tool at cloud. cleanlist.ca or book a meeting with us today to find out what Cleanlist

can do for you!

SARAH LIGHTFOOT is the Product Manager for Cleanlist, Canada’s largest customer data company. About the data: The data presented in this report was summarized from Canada Post’s Quarterly Financial Reports Q1 2022 to Q2 2023 and Annual Financial Reports 2012 to 2022.

To learn more about the data or for additional information, contact sales@cleanlist.ca.

Canada Post Quarterly Volumes There is an expectation that direct mail would be a dying marketing effort in the digital age. However, the rate in which it is declining isn’t what most people would expect.

Here’s a potential reason as to why: Published by Cleanlist, October 2023 | Data Source: Canada Post Quarterly Report 2021-2023

The Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) and Multichannel Marketing The Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) plays a large role in the impact that digital marketing can have on Canadian citizens. Uniquely Canadian, this legislation requires marketers obtain explicit opt-in consent, before sending even the first message. On top of that, they must offer the standard opt-out clauses on every digital out-reach, giving the individual the ability to stop digital communications without reason.

However, opting out doesn’t always translate to being “not interested”. A customer declining digital communication could mean they are opting out to keep their devices tidy. For this reason, more and more marketers are ❱ DMN.CA

Published by Cleanlist, October 2023 | Data Source: Canada Post Annual Report 2021-2023

OCTOBER 2023

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MARKET RESEARCH

Top 5 Industries Leading New Business Growth in Canada

Published by Cleanlist, October 2023 | Data Source: ResponseCanada™ Business

BY MICHAEL MENARD

D

ata collected from Cleanlist’s ResponseCanada™ Business database shows that 157,030 (on pace for 188,436) new businesses have opened in Canada since the beginning of 2023. Here are the top 5 industries leading the growth in 2023: ❯ Real Estate Agents ❯ Full-Service Restaurants ❯ Consulting Services ❯ Beauty Salons ❯ Law offices Let’s take a look at why these were the top industries:

1

Real Estate Agents (3,586 Opened) The Real Estate Industry remains the top growing industry in 2023. It was the top growing industry in 2022 with an astounding 13,336 new agents and firms. However, the housing market has been cooling and we are beginning to see this industry cooling with it; but for now, it’s OCTOBER 2023

still the top industry experiencing growth.

2

Full-Service Restaurants (3,414 Opened) In second place, we have the Full-Service Restaurant industry which has been making a steadyresurgence since the pandemic (3,476 in 2022 and 3,172 in 2021).

Many franchises are expanding; restaurant entrepreneurs are getting around to finally starting up their dream restaurant; or seasoned owners are reopening their restaurants after a period of financial recovery. Either way, the public loves a new restaurant experience, and demand remains steady.

3

Consulting Services (2,713 Opened) Consulting services took the bronze medal in terms of growth this year with 2,713 offices and firms opening up. However, similar to Real Estate Agents, these firms saw its largest growth in 2022 with 5,111 new firms. When there are fewer new businesses opening up

you will notice a correlation with consulting services. However, although we are experiencing less business growth in 2023 compared to the past 2 years, consulting services still remain in the top growing industries in Canada.

4

Beauty Salons: Redefining Self-Care (1,911 Opened) Beauty Salons are the shocker when it comes to growing industries in Canada. With 1,911 already opened this year, this has already surpassed last year’s fullyear total of 1,374 and 2021’s total of 1,663. Could this be the sign of a burgeoning industry? Or could 2023 be the year of self-care and well-being?. The industry might have needed the extra support given that they are still working through that backlog of postponed weddings and events.

5

Law Offices: (1,906 Opened) Year after year, the growth of the law industry remains

consistent. With 1,906 this year, we are actually seeing a very slight uptick from previous years (1,612 in 2022 and 2,118 in 2021).

Honourable Mentions:

Fast Food (1,322), Residential Building Construction (1,243), HVAC Contractors (1,079) The total number of businesses started in 2023 to date is 157,030.

This number is on pace to reach 188,436 which is approximately 16 percent less from the 224,296 new businesses started in 2022.

If you are looking for business data for sales and marketing, or industry research, ResponseCanada™ Business is an excellent resource. You can do your own real-time queries with Cleanlist’s online tool at cloud. cleanlist.ca.

MICHAEL MENARD is a Product Specialist with Cleanlist. About the data: the data presented in this report was summarized from ResponseCanada Business, Canada’s largest and most up-to-data commercial database.

DMN.CA ❰

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DATA ANALYTICS

How a NonProfit uses Data to Improve Social Services STAFF

Edmonton, AB – Health Cities, a non-profit organization committed to promoting innovative solutions to improve health outcomes and economic growth in Alberta’s healthcare sector, is pleased to launch a new initiative aimed at improving the delivery of social services using data and technology.

In the first phase of the project, named the Edmonton Community Data Warehouse, Health Cities partnered with PolicyWise for Children & Families, an Albertabased organization with industryleading expertise in evaluating policies and programs, and creating processes to analyze data for organizations serving children, youth, families, and communities.

The integration of key data was done in partnership with the project working group, comprised of six Edmonton-based social services agencies: ❯ Bissell Centre ❯ Boyle Street Community Services ❯ Canadian Mental Health Association ❯ Islamic Family ❯ Mustard Seed ❯ Seniors Association of Greater Edmonton (SAGE) This transformative project can improve the capacity for social service organizations to collect, organize and analyze data — a critical first step to better serving client populations in Edmonton and across Alberta. The collective power of the information allows agencies to better understand the populations they serve, assess changes in those populations over time and advocate, as one, for policy outcomes to address shortcomings.

PolicyWise’s experience and knowledge was instrumental in assisting the working group to assess their current data environment, and establish effective pathways for collecting and managing safe, meaningful and useful data.

“This is an important ❱ DMN.CA

collaboration to build data capacity across the Alberta social sector,” said Jody Wolfe, Research and Policy Manager at PolicyWise for Children & Families. “We are excited to embark on this new venture and committed to working closely with our partners to make a real difference in our communities using our Build Better Data tools.”

Data plays a critical role in addressing the complex challenges facing our communities today,” said Reg Joseph, CEO of Health Cities.

“By using data to better understand the needs of the community, we can inform where our resources are needed most — and through partnership and collaboration, we can provide solutions which incorporate and address social determinants of health.”

“The community approach to working with data is the most exciting part for me,” said Maria Savidov, Analysis and Evaluation Manager at Bissell Centre. “It’s just been so delightful to see the enthusiasm of different agencies about joining our data sets and breaking down inter-agency silos.”

The Edmonton Community Data Warehouse has already moved into its next phase involving building the architecture, governance, and privacy protocols for the warehouse. Health Cities plans to scale the pilot project provincewide with participation from other social services agencies looking to collaborate, understand and shape the services they provide to Albertans.

For more information about the Edmonton Community Data Warehouse and Health Cities, please visit healthcities. ca. For more information about PolicyWise for Children & Families and our Build Better Data tools, please visit policywise.com Health Cities is a Canadian not-for-profit corporation that works with clinicians, innovators, philanthropic organizations, and companies to develop new models of care that can drive better health

outcomes and economic growth in the health sector. Our focus is on transforming innovations from our health sector into solutions that have commercial application and global relevance, adopting them for impact locally and scaling them for export to global markets.

PolicyWise for Children &

Families is an Alberta-based nonprofit that informs, identifies, and promotes effective social policy.

We focus on improving the wellbeing of children, families, and communities so that they thrive in respectful, safe, and supportive environments shaped by wise decisions.

Creating a More Complete Picture of Human Trafficking in Alberta PolicyWise for Children & Families is continuing to celebrate 20 years of impacting meaningful change. As part of their 20th anniversary celebrations, they are sharing stories about successful projects, both past and present.

Frontline service providers, police, and survivors have stated those experiencing human trafficking may never appear in the statistics. They feel the data misses the breadth of Victims’ and Survivors’ experiences.

Human trafficking, including labour trafficking and sex trafficking, is a crime and a human rights violation. The most used and widely available data on human trafficking in Canada comes from Statistics Canada.

Statistics Canada’s report, Trafficking in Persons in Canada, 2020, states that 515 police-reported human trafficking incidents occurred in Canada in 2020. Yet, the scale of human trafficking is much larger.

The Provincial Human Trafficking Network, a collaboration of more than 30 organizations working in human trafficking, wanted to see if they could work together to better describe what human trafficking looks like in Alberta.

In 2021, the facilitative organization #NotInMyCity was awarded a grant from Alberta Community and Social Services to help address this challenge on behalf of the Network through the Alberta Human Trafficking Data Portal project.

The project aims to create a more complete picture of the scale, experience, and nature of human trafficking in Alberta by bringing data together in a secure and usable way. We worked alongside #NotInMyCity to support the project by creating: ❯ A prototype that gathers data on human trafficking from law enforcement and community services. ❯ A roadmap to support improving data collection, management, sharing, integration, and analytics in the human trafficking sector.

Ultimately, the data work on this project will contribute to preventing human trafficking, protecting and supporting Victims, and prosecuting offenders.

This project was sponsored by the Buckspring Foundation.

OCTOBER 2023

Resource Directory

Date:

July 4, 2013

AD:

Carter

Client:

Cleanlist.ca

AM:

Sinclair

Docket:

3540

Version:

F6

Application:

Print, 4x4.325", 4C

Media:

Direct Marketing Magazine

DATA ANALYTICS

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PLEASE NOTE This file has been optimized for its intende application only. For uses other than inten please contact Seed for alternate formats.

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TV Streaming Trends According to Roku:

Opportunities for advertisers to drive reach, engagement and ROI

BY CHRISTINA SUMMERS

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COURTESY ROKU

he TV streaming landscape is evolving rapidly each day. From the rise in ad-supported TV (AVOD), and the growth in free-ad-supported TV (FAST), to name a few, advertisers and marketers have an opportunity to reach their customers in new and innovative ways. Especially considering that the majority of Canadian internet users (75 percent, according to Roku’s annual Video on Demand (VOD) Evolution study) are now TV streamers, with ad-supported TV streamers increasing exponentially (59 percent watching in the last year compared to 42 per cent in the previous year, according to it the same survey), and 63 percent of TV streamers planning to watch ad-supported TV streaming in the year ahead.

So, what should Canadian advertisers and marketers be thinking about when looking at where to best allocate their ad spend dollars, and how to best deploy creative? Roku’s Christina Summers, Head of Advertising in Canada for Roku, breaks down some key considerations and highlights top trends from Roku’s latest TV streaming study that advertisers need to be considering.

❱ DMN.CA

The rise of the “FlexiVOD” and its role in gaining audience engagement Over half (58 percent) of TV streamers feel as though they have less disposable income than before, which has likely played a big role in the emergence of the “FlexiVOD” - TV streamers who frequently make changes to their streaming services, like switching services to watch their favourite show, cancelling subscriptions, etc. While this trend emerged as a key insight in last year’s study, it has remained prevalent in 2024 as 48 per cent of Canadian streamers have either made changes to their streaming services in the past 12 months or plan to make changes in the year ahead.

For advertisers, this means that having an omnichannel approach to TV streaming investments is more important than ever.

From a creative standpoint, advertisers

should also be exploring and testing different types of ad formats (i.e., interactive video, home screen placements, etc.) and seeing what resonates best with their target audiences. Insights gleaned from this practice are extremely helpful to inform future investments and creative pivots that might need to be made.

What types of ads are resonating best?

According to our study, not only are TV streamers significantly more responsive than non-streamers to ads (70 percent vs.

54 percent), they’re also more likely to visit a brand’s website/online store/app after seeing a TV ad (38 percent), search online for more information on a product (36 per cent), and place items in an online basket to buy later (25 percent), all while still watching TV. For advertisers, this means that the way in which a call-to-action (CTA) is presented can have a big impact on engagement from streamers. The Roku remote, which allows the viewer to take an immediate action following an interactive ad format they’ve viewed, is a great example of this.

Getting the most ROI Measure, measure, measure. The benefit of TV streaming is that it enables advertisers to gain insights at the first-party level that they often can’t glean from other channels.

Not only that, but targeting can be much more specific, which enables greater reach beyond traditional TV broadcasting. Typical ROI of the right targeting and approach often yields as much as 50 percent+ of improved consideration, or almost all (98.5 percent) video completion rates.

TV streaming opens a world of opportunities for advertisers, and those focused on how to best integrate streaming into their holistic strategies are likely to reap its benefits now, and in the future.

CHRISTINA SUMMERS is Head of Advertising in Canada for Roku. To learn more about advertising with Roku, or to download the study, visit: https://advertising.roku.com/ resources/en-ca/guides-reports.

OCTOBER 2023

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4.7

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Retailer A

Toronto CSD by Dissemination Area

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Changing Demographics

Online & Offline Habits

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Deposits by Region: Penetration vs. Wallet Share

Vulnerability Index | Social Vulnerability Unemployment Rate

49.1% Index:188

124 SOCIAL VULNERABILITY INDEX*

Community Involvement

11.7% Index:117

Perceived mental health is fair or poor

People know well enough to ask favour (none)

51.5%

Index:197

Deepen and Maintain

Index

"You cannot be too careful in dealing with people"

14.9%

Strategy: Acquisition

91

Wallet Share

Household Size -1 Person

24.6%

Index:118

Index:235

Deepen Relationships

Develop New Strategies Close relatives (0-2)

Close relatives in same city (0-2)

34.7% Index:156

47.1% Index:110

Close friends (0-2)

33.4% Index:124

Close friends in same city (0-2)

29.9% Index:107

Product Penetration (HHs that Hold Product)

Attitudes, Mindsets, Social

Finances

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