MiC reached out to some of Canada’s media agency leaders to find out their thoughts on the year behind, and the year ahead. Here, OMD president Lorraine Hughes talks about some of the challenges facing the industry today and how OMD plans to address them.

In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges facing media agencies today?

We need to look for ways to grow and expand our agency businesses by creating opportunities and capabilities in new and emerging areas. We also need to build and expand our immediate talent pool by looking outside of our industry for skill-sets that are complementary and will become more important in the future, like data analysts for example.

What media do you think could most benefit from a reconsideration of valuation? Why?

Unlike new and emerging media platforms we still, as an industry, predominantly use the ‘counting heads’ model as the trading currency for most off-line media today. We need to evolve to a model that better reflects and values engagement. Getting there of course will be a challenge because any new valuation methodology would require an industry standard that was consistently applied and accepted and this of course would have a significant impact on the pricing model.

Where do you see the biggest opportunity for growth in 2011?

We will see significant growth again next year in search/SEO and mobile is also starting to gain a lot of traction. Tracking and analytics capabilities will become a more significant factor over the coming 18 months. Content continues to be a ‘big play’ with more and more branded integrations both on and off-line.

This article originally appeared on Dec. 24, 2010 as part of an overview article called ‘The MiC media agency review: Corner office edition‘. Media in Canada will be running the features profiled in the article all this week.