Ads Alfresco rebrands as Bulletin

The rep house wants to reflects the major in roads it has made in connected TV and digital out-of-home.

Toronto-based rep house Ads Alfresco is, as of today, now known as Bulletin.

The reason for the rebranding is simple, says co-founder and CEO Jesse Galal, who works with co-founder and chairman Brian Wyatt (who sold Newad to Bell Media in 2019) and EVP of sales Ben Hemming on the executive team: they’ve moved beyond the initial scope of the company.

“When I started Ads Alfresco, it was just me by myself owning the rights to seven big beautiful billboards in (Toronto’s) Yorkville, right across from Louis Vuitton and Tiffany,” Galal tells MiC. “Fast forward five years later with all sorts of additions of new assets and new people, and we wanted to come up with a brand that fully encompasses what we do.

“A ‘bulletin’ is a public notice being issued from an authoritative, trustworthy source. This is our brand identity – we’re issuing notices on behalf of our clients, with our vendor partners being the trustworthy source.”

Bulletin has expanded to DOOH and in-stream video via connected TV with a number of high profile and exclusive clients: sports streamer DAZN, which has rights to properties include the NFL and Champions League; Atmosphere.tv, offering an inventory of 60-plus channels in North America; Vivendi’s DailyMotion for in-stream video inventory; and the Community Reach Network of 2000 DOOH screens in recreation facilities, sports complexes, lobbies in office, retail and medical buildings.

The former owner of Loudmouth Entertainment, Galal says Bulletin is all about what businesses like DailyMotion offer.

“When you look at the content on the site, it’s all broadcast content,” he explains. “It’s A&E, NHL, NBA, CNN, all these big premium TV brands online. That’s kind of what our criteria is to represent anything: premium video content which is where we want to be in the market. We want to have big, bold content that’s undeniably fantastic, charging high CPMs. That’s our market position.”

Counting on his network of strong agency and brand relationships, Wyatt says the new Bulletin “is one of the fastest growing media companies in Canada” with 2000 DOOH screens in addition to its connected TV inventory.

However, both Wyatt and Galal credit sales team leader Ben Hemming as a crucial hire that substantially contributed to the growth of Bulletin into an eight-figure business and a head count of eight, with an expectation of at least two additional hires by the end of 2023.

“Ben grew Bell’s programmatic division from 500,000 to 30 million in three years,” says Galal. “He’s the engine that makes this whole thing run. That’s when we started making sales across assets that weren’t just billboards. In those two years, we’ve been able to achieve eight figures in sales, and we’re expecting 100% growth this year on top of that. We’re expecting some growth. We have partnerships with every major holding company and we’re doing business with absolutely everybody.”

For his part, Hemming says selling in-stream video while working at Yahoo and Bell made him appreciate “the importance of “quality-good, well-performing video.”

“With Dailymotion and DAZN, we can come to market and be a really solid alternative to a lot of other buys and drive efficiencies and reach for a lot of our clients. It’s been great so far: I’m working with a lot of agencies and brands, really helping them grow and scale their video proposals and campaigns and strategies.”

Galal says that Bulletin is going to be aggressive in its future pursuits.

“There’s subscription fatigue in the connected TV market, as companies like Disney and Netflix are going towards the combo model of both subscription-based and ad-based models,” he explains, pointing to things like Corus representing Pluto TV for Paramount in Canada. “We’re positioning ourselves to be a non-broadcast option for those companies. We want to be a company that can help U.S. broadcasters introduce their products to Canada. We think it makes a whole lot of sense to go with us, an independent who will treat your inventory first, as opposed to the big media companies, who treat their own inventory first.”