“Economic uncertainty” has been a phrase that has haunted the boardrooms and financial statement of marketing departments and their agency partners for the better part of nine months. Between sky-high inflation and the looming fear of a recession that may or may not arrive, it makes for a very frustrating and confusing time for anyone that has to manage a media budget and respond to the changing spending power of their consumer base.

Media in Canada gathered a group of media agency executives and client-side brand marketers to get their insights on the best way to approach the uncertain times we are currently in. In the first part of our conversation, discussion also touched on other subjects that are top of mind for the industry right now, from which metrics actually matter to proving success to how media can support a brand putting out the right message in a time when consumers are historically stressed.

Present at the table were Tracey Cooke, SVP of marketing and commercialization at Nestle Canada; Adrian Fuoco, VP of marketing at Pizza Pizza; Devon MacDonald, president of Cairns Oneil; Lisa Mazurkewich, head of marketing at Subway Canada; Christine Saunders, CMO of Publicis Groupe Canada and CEO of Starcom Canada; Sarah Thompson, president of Dentsu Media Canada; and Dorothy Zarska, director of marketing channel strategy at Scotiabank.

Moderating the discussion was Josh Kolm, digital editor of strategy and Media in Canada and Mary Maddever, EVP of Canadian media brands and editorial director at Brunico Communications. Also in attendance were Penny Hicks, managing director of client partnerships at The Globe & Mail, Neil Ewen, associate publisher of strategy and Media in Canada, and Lisa Faktor, publisher of strategy and Media in Canada.

The second part of their discussion – covering how economic uncertainty impacts innovation, the importance of local media and emerging channels – will be published next week.

Are the things you are considering during this period of “economic uncertainty” different from recessions and downturns in the past?

Dorothy Zarska, director, marketing channel strategy, Scotiabank: If you aren’t dealing with uncertainty about revenue or budget cuts, you can make commitments to marketing and media spending. Right now, there is uncertainty, so you can’t make those commitments, but it keeps rolling over. [A recession] is never quite landing. So it’s harder to decide, yes, we will move forward with this, when every week or two, you’re having the same conversation about uncertainty and budget. We’re planning and forecasting, but then re-planning and re-forecasting, and it becomes a bit frustrating when you’re thinking, when will we stop forecasting and just do it?

Christine Saunders, CMO, Publicis Groupe Canada, and CEO, Starcom Canada: Re-forecasting is just a fact of life. A recession doesn’t change that, but maybe it does make it more frequent. I would argue that the message is more important in a recession than the investment. The message has to be in tune with people’s mood and not tone deaf.

Sarah Thompson, president, Dentsu Media Canada: I’d agree with that. We did a behavioural economic study of Canadians, and it was based on imagery. The image that Canadians associate with how they are feeling right now is threads pulling away from a rope. And when they were asked about hope, they gravitated towards images that were loving and light. So you need to have a balance between the two. If you remember at the outset of COVID, all the messages were “are you feeling sad and scared right now?” But the anxiety people are feeling right now doesn’t seem to go away, it takes up a lot of space in their heads, so we need to meet them where their own headspace is.

If we are talking about media investment right now, it’s proving the accountability of media investment. I’ve never had so many clients bring back MMM models and expensive things you reiterate on a yearly basis, old ways of doing things. Throw it out. Figure out a good attribution model, what your investment is doing in the moment and your refresh rate. Bring your data to your media agencies or figure out a way to in-house it, whatever you choose. If you’re asking for accountability, actually commit to it, because it’s not an MMM anymore.

Adrian Fuoco, VP of marketing, Pizza Pizza: Depending on how your fund is structured, it can be different. For a bank, you’re reforecasting, but for a model where it’s funded by sales, we’ve set our budget, we’ve got our forecast for sales and that’s what we’re going to be spending for the year, unless something like a pandemic happens. In terms of media, it’s staying the course if things are performing the way you want them to, but where we are putting more thought right now is on the creative.

Lisa Mazurkewich, head of marketing, Subway Canada: One of the differences from the past is that it’s not just recession, it’s inflation. We can’t leverage tools like discounting because that’s not a cost we can pass on to franchisees. So we are putting more of focus on consumer needs, which research tells us is quality without sacrificing value. We know people are looking for those little moments of joy and small luxuries, so how can we be there for them in those moments?

Tracey Cooke, SVP, marketing and commercialization, Nestle Canada: The context of where you appear and how you appear in those moments sounds so old school, but it’s useful in these moments. Especially at a time like this when people are really struggling, more than a media investment, how and where you show up is so important.

Devon MacDonald, president, Cairns Oneil: I think the conservative nature of planning is what’s happening right now. But the learnings from the past few years are not a path forward and they can’t be applied. Yes, there’s opportunity for advantages if you plan ahead and are prudent in your expenditures. I think it’s going to be a big part of corporate culture, we see lots of brands planning quarter to quarter, and then half a quarter, and then a month. I think that approach is going to stick with us for a long time.

For us, we’re saying to the CMO, what information do you need? What do you need to fight the fight, and what does your executive team listen to?

Can you be more specific about the learnings that can’t be applied?

MacDonald: Well there’s one that can and one that can’t. One that can, we’ve all seen the case studies of what happened to brands when they stopped marketing during the pandemic: they had the hardest path to recovery. I don’t know if that’s listened to in boardrooms. But all the other inputs have changed. The context, the MMM, the inflation rate, the causes have all changed. There’s no comparison to what we’ve had before, because of the uncertainty.

And Sarah, what did you mean by optimized into a corner?

Thompson: If we spent as much talking about investment dollars around brand, around consideration and reach vehicles, versus performance and looking at pennies in a dashboard, we would have a longer-term view of what’s going on with a client’s business. And we are seeing this in the conversations with clients, they’re about how do I build back my brand.

We spent a lot of time squeezing as much as we could out of efficiency, and now it’s about capital-b brands and how do I make people feel and have a connection. That’s a lesson learned from COVID, but it’s a balancing act with the short-termism. Because you’re only going to plan out so far, but if we’re thinking about how to increase brand perceptions over two years, it happens over integers. This requires our CMOs to have a very steady hand, even with all these business inputs coming in and this uncertainty. It’s super hard.

So how can the media investment support a brand in getting the right message out?

Thompson: If you’re looking at building attribution models to have the lowest cost, that’s going to be a losing battle. Looking at demand models and new ways of doing things where you can understand that if you put, say, $2 million into this type of message and this type of media and it affects my bottom line like this, that’s where we need to get to. And channels will fall in line.

The assumptions of what we think channels do in media has a hard reset. Where am I chasing eyeballs, where is the most attention on this ad unit. And then there’s sending investment back into Canadian media, which is great for business, but also democracy, for understanding climate change, and our communities.

If you think about a media plan, you’re going from the top down. You’re buying mass reach at the top, optimizing at the bottom and in the middle is some kind of outcome. What we are actually doing is investing community by community and where you can make a difference. We need to get out of this urban centricity and start thinking about Canada in its totality again, because we’ve done ourselves a massive disservice.

MacDonald: What agencies want to know and what will help us is, what is the value of a consumer? If you’re just chasing media cost, there’s a real potential to sacrifice quality and the context of your message. If you’re looking at lifetime customer value, or recurring visits, or long term [banking] deposits, there’s a much richer discussion to have that would help with overall planning. Those models are quite complicated, but they’re essential.

Zarska: There was a time I was trying to boil everything down into one metric. What was the one big KPI I could report on? That’s obviously a terrible idea, and now I’m back at, we have to look at all the KPIs, everything does something different, and no one metric is going to solve all of our problems. Now it’s back to basics, looking at reach and engagement and site traffic. It’s never going to be one ROI number, you’ve got to look at everything.

MacDonald: And the important part of that is, even though there are so many great measurement opportunities in what we do, the things we can’t measure often have just as much of an impact. The CFOs might not like that part, but there are external factors we do not have a scorecard for that are impacting the way people behave.