Returning to Work During a Pandemic
The last blog post I wrote was on March 11, 2020. It was about returning to work after a year long maternity leave and I had been back for a week. I missed my work family during my mat leave, and I was really looking forward to returning. 2 days later we were told...
3 Time-Wasters in Digital Campaigns
If you are a brand marketer or work at an agency, time is a limited resource that’s always in demand. If you work on digital campaigns, that’s only amplified, as the abundance of data sources and metrics means you can easily dedicate 20 or 200 hours to the same...
qCPM and Why Not All Impressions Are Equal
If the goal of your digital campaign is an online action, such as a sale, registration or download, there are a lot of great performance indicators that can be used to measure effectiveness across channels, including conversion rates and cost per action. If you can...
5 Times a Media Planner Might Say No and Be Worth a Million Bucks
The NHL is run by an old boys' network where cronyism and lineage are more important than innovation and business results. How else do you explain the same old names being recycled again and again as new roles open up throughout the coaching and management ranks? The...
Google’s Cohort Solution and a Case for Broader Targeting
It’s been over a year since Google announced plans to stop supporting third-party cookies in Chrome and last week they further clarified they wouldn’t simply replace them with another system of individual tracking. Instead, they’re working on a cohort system that...
Facebook caught with its hand in the first party data jar (again)
Facebook is again under fire this week as unsealed documents from a 2018 lawsuit show they were aware that their audience estimating tools were inflating potential reach on their platform. In a nutshell: In early 2018 Facebook estimated that removing duplicate...
Why Digital Media Isn’t Cheap Media
One of the biggest misconceptions about digital media is that it’s a low cost alternative to more traditional advertising options. While years of cheap CPMs on Google and Facebook have conditioned marketers to believe they can run effective campaigns on shoestring...
Cake Pops and Adstock
After nine months of working from home, afternoon coffee runs have become my family’s Polaris during many chaotic days of balancing work needs with those of young children. It’s provided us a daily pause to reset and a boost to make it through the afternoon, and we’ve...
3 Tips for Better A/B Testing
A/B testing multiple creative and tactics is one of the best ways to not only optimize a digital campaign, but also bring back meaningful insights during and after the campaign. The measurable nature of digital makes it the perfect testing grounds to answer marketing...
5 Year Look Back – Facebook Ad Campaigns
We decided to look back on several of our Facebook campaigns focusing specifically on the western Canadian market and share some of the learnings and insights that we work within on a day-to-day basis. The following is a look back over 5 years, where we have analyzed...
DSA Supports Local
In 2018, $0.42 of every advertising dollar in Canada went to Facebook or Google, which equates to 78.2% of all online ad spend. That means there was less than a quarter leftover for other big players like Amazon, Microsoft, Verizon and Twitter to fight over with...
Should Brands Be Hip and Cool (and 45) with Digital Media?
Several years ago, I attended a workshop hosted by a local newspaper publisher. Things were changing, they admitted, but the industry was still strong and, most importantly, continuing to innovate. As evidence, they talked about everyone’s favourite blocky hero, the...