Dentsu has launched Merkury Local, a tool that provides the agency’s planners with a full look at Canadians at the local level.

The tool is based on the country’s postal codes or FSAs (forward sortation areas) and then layers additional data about a community and its residents, such as local media, points of interest and foot traffic. The tool is expected to help with audience segmentation, understanding the audience profile at the community level and helping with discovery of new segments of an audience that a brand hadn’t considered before.

Merkury Local was built by Dentsu Media Canada in partnership with market analytics firm Polaris Intelligence. Pilot projects with clients are now starting.

Sarah Thompson, president of Dentsu Media Canada, says there were three factors at play that led to Merkury Local’s development.

“One, we have a great foundation of Canada’s FSA. The second is that we really truly need to start looking at a layered data approach to address cookies. And the third is that Canada as a country is changing. Work needs to evolve [when it comes to] how we think about audience insights, segmentation and finding new ways of thinking about those opportunities.”

Thompson has been a strong proponent of local news and reinvesting in local media in Canada, being part of the task force that helped the CMDC create its “Canadian Media Manifesto.” She also recently presented a Dentsu research study on local media in Canada to the CMDC, showing that trust and attention to media go together. Among the findings was that 48% of Canadians trust local news but only 8% trust social media news. Radio is the most trusted of all media formats in populations of all sizes. When participants were asked about their sources of local news and current affairs, radio garnered scores of 53% when it comes to trust and 48% for attention, TV received scores of 48% and 43%, and newspapers 46% and 40%.

But the effectiveness of local media to reach consumers is just one part of why planning at the local level should be a priority, says Thompson. It is also tied to the changing landscape of Canada: 1.5 million immigrants are expected to arrive by 2025, while the pandemic, new ways of working and affordability has led to mass migration out of big cities. This has made taking a more diversified and less urban-centric approach to research and insights more important.

“When places like Moncton are one of the fastest growing cities in Canada, we are not getting a holistic view on what Canada looks like,” Thompson says. “Our country is not the same as it was a decade ago, or two years ago. And it’s going to change every minute of every month, for the next few years and onward. We all need to get to know Canada again, and get to know Windsor, London and Saskatoon, which is a booming location. All of these places, the smaller mid-tier cities are all growing and we don’t talk about them enough. What is it like to buy out-of-home in some of these communities? What are the newspapers that they’re reading?”