For years, Québec media have been going through a crisis caused by advertising investments’ mass exodus towards global media players.
In a world where digital media buying is constantly becoming more automated, it’s not easy for local media to promote their benefits in comparison to giants like Google and Facebook. This is especially true in the field of digital performance, when we look at the direct conversion metrics of various media sources.
An entire local industry is being confronted with a globalized machine whose whole selling point is hinged on its performance. To navigate this delicate situation, Québec media must increase communication about their benefits and be supported by the local media industry.
It is in this climate that two years ago, the A2C (Association of Creative Communications Agencies) launched an initiative to promote the use of local media for advertising investments. This initiative gave itself the goal of doubling the share of digital budgets allocated to local media by the Québec advertising industry in the next three years.
At the Rinaldi agency, we have been betting on local media for a long, long time.
In the beginning, this happened naturally through direct media buying. Our relationships with different media for face-to-face buying allowed us to build strong partnerships with local players. But for the past few years, we have been buying media programmatically and, like many, progressively privileging digital over “traditional” media.
This has admittedly created a paradigm shift, but not a big one: though there has been a change at the level of technology, our local partners are still going strong. With Subaru, we offer a digital media mix in which local media occupy a 43% share. Our Subaru results have also been exceeding goals for several years:
- Québec is the #1 region for Subaru in Canada;
- The market share for Québec is over one point higher than other provinces;
- In three years, we have increased our lead generation rate by +280%.
Our strategy is simple: conveying a local message thanks to local media. Its implementation is slightly more complex, but that is beyond the scope of this article.
As this demonstrates, it is completely possible to boost digital performance by betting on local media. The key resides in partnerships with local industry players, an asset that local agencies will have to cultivate. With the coming end of third-party cookies, partnerships like these will soon become as valuable as technical know-how: it is through them that the marketing of tomorrow will be tested.
