Prohaska Consulting has already been doing business in Canada during its six years of operation but with the hire of Nikki Hawke, CEO Matt Prohaska says he now has the right person to run a permanent office.

“We’ve tripled our sales team in the last 120 days and doubled our marketing team resources in the last 90 days. Nikki is a big part of that. We’ve worked with many clients in Canada and we think there’s an opportunity for us to be helping a lot more. Nikki opening our Toronto office obviously is a key start to that.”

Hawke, an experienced consumer marketing and programmatic executive, was previously director of marketing for the Home Equity Finance division at RBC and CMO at The Exchange Lab.

Consultancies – and the perceived competition between these firms and traditional media agencies – has been a hot topic for several years. In late 2018, MightyHive launched a Canadian outpost, and earlier this year, consulting firm Accenture announced that it would no longer audit media agencies’ pitch activities in order to compete for more programmatic advertising budgets without conflict. For his part, Prohaska says his company is focused more on overall business drivers rather than singular marketing activities.

The consultancy’s three areas of business are marketers, technology providers where it concentrates on the client’s go-to-market efforts, and publishers, which involves helping them deliver better content.

In its work with marketers, Prohaska consultants help the client strengthen their paid, earned and owned media by improving their technology, targets and talent but doesn’t execute programmatic buys unless requested to by the client. The Prohaska consultants will train an employee of the client to work as an in-house consultant and, once their training is complete, leave.

Prohaska says, “We’re passionate about ensuring marketing is done properly so that even though advertisers end up paying higher CPMs, the actual ROI improves because you’re eliminating so much waste.”

Some of the brands and organizations that have worked with Prohaska include IAB Canada, ANA, TVB, Radio Marketing Bureau, Citi, Toyota, Johnson & Johnson, Sanofi, Google, Adobe, ebay, Nasdaq, AT&T, NBCUniversal and Hulu.

Prohaska Consulting has offices in New York, Los Angeles, Nashville, London England with satellite employees who work remotely across markets such as San Francisco, Paris, Sydney, Hong Kong and soon in Johannesburg.