Industry News: MediaTonik takes on Journal Accès and Le Nord ad sales

Meanwhile, Optable powers Unity's newly launched Audience Hub and EA rolls out a revamped tourism data suite.

MediaTonik has secured rights to manage programmatic ad sales for Nordy Media’s Quebec newspapers Journal Accès (pictured) and Le Nord.

The publishers said MediaTonik will help them expand local audience reach and optimize backlinking products to enhance client presence and SEO in the region.

The newspapers have been produced independently for 25 years, delivering targeted coverage of local news, environmental issues, economic developments, cultural events and sports of interest to the communities of Pays-d’en-Haut and Grand Saint-Jérôme. Their websites have more than 117,000 unique visitors per month combined.

Journal Accès and Le Nord are the latest additions to MediaTonik’s portfolio, following the company’s recent appointment as programmatic advertising sales representative for Médialo, a media and marketing agency with a network of local newspapers. The partnership will strengthen Médialo’s digital presence in Quebec and enable targeted ad campaigns within its print and digital properties.

Unity selects Optable to power new audience hub

Optable, an identity management and data collaboration platform, has partnered with Unity to power its newly launched Audience Hub.

Unity’s Audience Hub enables marketers to create custom audiences of gamers. Unity is a game engine and real-time 3D platform for crafting immersive video games and interactive 2D and 3D experiences across multiple platforms.

Under the partnership, Optable and Unity collaborated to create an audience mesh that combines player data with insights from top providers like Experian, enabling high-intent audience targeting.

“We created the Audience Hub to help brand marketers unlock the full potential of Unity’s [3 billion] gamers in a scalable and privacy-first way,” Unity COO Alex Blum said in a news release. “Our collaboration with Optable is a key step in our mission to build a more connected and effective ecosystem for advertisers across the gaming landscape and beyond.”

The collaboration comes after Optable raised $20 million in January in a funding round led by Telus Global Ventures with backing from major investors such as Hearst Ventures and Deloitte Ventures. With the new funding, the company aims to expand its platform and strengthen its partnerships in the U.S., while boosting its services in Canada (where it is headquartered), to help media owners securely manage audience data.

Environics Analytics reveals enhanced tourism data suite

Environics Analytics (EA) has rolled out a revamped behavioural dataset tailored to the tourism sector, aiming to provide industry stakeholders with deeper insights and more precise targeting capabilities.

VisitorView’s latest model offers granular insights into visitor behaviour across more than 4,000 Canadian destinations, revealing key trends such as origin markets, peak visitation months, high-traffic areas and average length of stay.

The tool now uses anonymous cellular network data to detect overnight stays and new “season” dimensions to analyze travel trends in summer and winter. The update also expands the list of geographic segments that can be targeted, such as local areas, metropolitan regions and custom destinations, in addition to provinces and tourism regions.

The data can then be paired with Prizm and other indicators from EA’s suite of data to achieve an understanding of visitors’ demographics.

In Canada, VisitorView defines “visitors” as individuals who travel more than 40 km from their home – an industry standard definition.