The only constant in today’s media biz is change. That’s why MiC and strategy reached out to industry leaders for the seventh straight year to get the goods on their up-and-coming staffers who are putting the latest innovations into action.

From in-home, app-powered hockey goal alarms to campaigns looking to dive into deeper metrics, this year’s Next Media Star nominees are working hard to better the industry.

Read about the contenders this week on MiC and in the May issue of strategy and keep your eyes peeled for the winner, chosen by the strategy Media Agency of the Year jury and announced at the Agency of the Year awards gala this November.

Moving beyond click-through rates to meaningful metrics and creating digital ads people actually want to see is what drives Jacquie Albrecht, digital specialist at Jungle Media in Vancouver.

The digital maven recently put both goals into action with a two-stage campaign for the BC Honda Dealers Association, promoting the 2013 Honda Accord.

Creative by Dare Vancouver and Elvis Communications looked like an ordinary big-box or leader-board ad until users clicked on it and saw an image of the car’s window fill the screen, roll down and expose the interior of the Accord. From the user’s point of view it looked like they were peering into the car and seeing all of its features. Offers from local dealers were provided when the user clicked and the window rolled back up.

A big part of what made this campaign different was that Albrecht worked with publishers like Postmedia and The Weather Network to integrate coding into the back-end of their sites so it would look like the site is a window when the ad was fully open. Albrecht says it was the first time the publishers allowed access to their back-end site frames.

“Regional advertisers often are unable to create experiences like this because suppliers are not always interested in spending the time required to set it up knowing the restrictions that come with avails and budget,” she says.

She also worked with the Association to implement view-through tracking of the ads, so they would be able to tell whether or not someone visited the website after seeing the ad, even if they didn’t click the ad itself. Albrecht says this level of tracking required working with Honda Canada at the national level to ensure they had all the necessary tagging done, and goes beyond analytics available at the brand level in Canada.

“This is an important step for our success metrics, as year-over-year the number of people clicking on ads is dropping,” she says.
Albrecht says users spent an average of two-and-a-half minutes with the window down, interacting with the different features of the car. Of the over one million people who looked at the ad, more than 2,000 expanded it to see the inside of the Accord. The ad targeted the 2.5 million people who live in the Vancouver area, so Albrecht is happy with that reach.

Since starting at Jungle in 2011, she’s made it her personal goal to expand their digital metrics so the shop has a foundation to show off results of innovative work.

“I spent a large amount of time lobbying internally and to clients on the importance of proper tracking,” she says. “My role is to push us forward into the digital era without falling behind or getting caught up in dying metrics (click-through rates, for example). It’s more than media tactic innovation over here, it’s ensuring we have a smooth shift as digital continues to evolve so that we are always ready to jump at the next new opportunity before the rest of the market can.”

Albrecht came into her online-focused role after learning the traditional media ropes at DSA Media Network. Not content with only sharing her digital knowledge with her team at work, Albrecht was recently a guest lecturer at Simon Fraser University.