Media pundits have been adamant that to succeed in the new mediaverse, agencies require new ways of thinking. Curious as to who these new thinkers were, and what they were thinking, strategy and Media in Canada canvassed the industry, asking media shops to single out their top innovative and strategic recruits – one of which Media in Canada will profile in each issue over the coming weeks.

Caroline Moul,
Digital media strategist PHD IQ, Toronto

Age: 24

Background: Moul took the advertising program at Sheridan College and started at PHD four years ago, where one of her first duties was online optimization for the Intel campaign. Last year, about 90% of her time was devoted to working on online campaigns for about half of PHD’s clients. In January, the agency officially formed a specific unit for online and interactive strategies.

Claim to fame: Designed with the strategy ‘How does the Fit fit you?,’ the Honda Canada campaign featured Honda’s Fit model and showed how all the different things that happen in life fit into the Fit – with the car moving across the Yahoo homepage, its trunk opening and all the various channels that sit on the page’s menu bar popping out and going to their usual spots on the page.

What campaign brilliantly connected and engaged its target consumers? ‘The Degree Fashionista Challenge. With both traditional and online media, it did a perfect job of connecting consumers with something that’s of interest to them, giving them information they wanted, entertaining them, connecting with them.’

What would you love to build into a plan? ‘For a launch, I’d love to do a complete domination. Not only take over Yahoo, but do it across the board for a specific demo. For a female demo, for example, anywhere a woman would go, she would see the message.’

Which brand, other than your own clients’, would you most want to work on and why? ‘Coke, and that’s based on my own consumption as well as the fact that they really know how to connect with the marketplace. They do it well and on an ongoing basis on both their online and offline strategies.’

Are opportunities being missed due to caution? ‘While clients are interested in CTRs (click-through rates), they’re not doing the backend metrics with all the other research you get from tracking how your ads are performing once people get to your site. Is there fall-off, can you improve your site – from both a search marketing opportunity to how it’s performing when you get your visitors there? With online, we’ve got an opportunity to really connect with consumers, to customize the message to the site to make it more relevant so when consumer sees it, it becomes part of the content. That often isn’t taken into consideration from a creative standpoint.’

What common industry belief would you love to whack? ‘Because advertisers are so gung ho about reaching the youth market and the 18 to 49 crowd, they can miss a huge market. Even online, we have a hard time reaching (the older demo) because there aren’t a lot of properties designed for them. It’s like the advertiser never evolved when the boomers did. They kind of stayed in the demo they were used to rather than evolving and changing with it.’