TORONTO – The pitch Rogers Digital Media is making to advertisers, agencies and other marketers is audience intelligence, says Rogers Media’s chief digital officer Jason Tafler.
With over 1,000 digital media assets owned and under its management (from the digital presences of Maclean’s and Flare to the company’s popular iVillage and nascent R Deals plus many others the company manages such as NBA.com, Cosmopolitan.com, and HarpersBazaar.com – with more to come), Rogers Digital Media now reaches more than 17 million Canadians per month and has seen a more than 100% increase in visitors in the year Tafler has been on board as CDO.
(Tafler, right, was born in Toronto but came to Rogers from PointRoll, a U.S.-based provider of digital advertising solutions owned by newspaper publisher Gannett's digital marketing services group, and directed over $1 billion of online ad spending per year.)
Marry those digital assets to the traditional media the parent company owns (Citytv, OMNI, Sportsnet, radio, print magazines) as well as Rogers Cable and Wireless – and RDM has a rather compelling story to sell to advertisers. “We have a very unique opportunity in Canada to differentiate and to bridge the gap between both those high quality owned-and-operated assets and the depth of the audiences, the experiences and the content we have, but also to provide marketers with a more seamless way to achieve their objectives through scale and an extended reach through our ad network,” said Tafler in an interview this week with Cartt.ca. “This is really all about coming out to the market and saying that we’re the best place to go if you want to connect with these key audiences and bridge the gap between the depth and the scale. You no longer have to sacrifice one for the other,” said Tafler in a recent interview.
Brands can now have a one stop shop for both broad – and targeted marketing beyond the silos of one or two media or one or two web sites. “There’s been a big shift of dollars away from traditional media companies to these aggregators who provide reach and scale, like Google, or MSN, or Olive Media, for instance,” said Tafler. “So our message is we are the best place to go if you want to integrate a marketing campaign across TV, radio, print, digital .If you want… a really high and effective experience on Chatelaine and other women’s sites we have, you can do all that. But then, you don’t have to go 10 other places or multiple other places to get the reach as well.”
So give us a for instance? How will this work in the marketplace? “Let’s say a big retailer is launching a new line of clothing. They have a couple of objectives, to have a really high-impact, create buzz, create engagement. In that case, we have a whole custom marketing solutions group that would work with them and their agency on creative ideas – a highly integrated program across Citytv, Breakfast Television; some of our radio stations, CHFI, KISS 92.5; our magazines like Flare or Lulu; and then some of our pure-play digital properties as well,” explains Tafler.
With the size and reach of the myriad assets now managed by Rogers Digital Media, “We’re now number one in terms of reaching women; number one in men; very big growth in sports, news and business, entertainment,” Tafler explained. “Marketers, as you know, are under a lot of pressure. It’s a fragmented, complex world right now that you’re under pressure for cost savings.
“We’re going to help them run more effective campaigns… but also drive efficiencies by working with us in a seamless way… all underpinned by the notion of audience intelligence. I spent a lot of time in the U.S. with leading Fortune 500 marketers and agencies, and we have a very unique opportunity to pull together all of the various types of data… we have data on what content people are consuming; how they’re engaging very deeply across all of our sites.”
All that data and the new ways for buyers and agencies to invest and actually see a return on more of their investment is dizzying for everyone as they struggle to get used to the new normal of targeted, integrated multiplatform campaigns but “it’s a win for users, too, because they get more relevant, personalized content and advertising,” believes Tafler.
That means more cross-brand and cross-platform editorial content as well. Take the new Sportsnet for example. “The Sportsnet rebranding and re-launching across five platforms, and the launch of Sportsnet Magazine – it’s the first time with the leadership team at Rogers we’ve launched something and looked at content with the Sportsnet brand in the middle and said, ‘Here’s how a story or an idea plays out across all these platforms’,” Tafler explained.
“The digital folks, the magazine folks, and the TV and radio folks all spent a lot more time sitting together, collaborating, and figuring out how this all works, and we’re starting to see a lot of success there. On the news side as well… some of our digital news editors are actually integrated into the newsrooms and share content across all the different sites and platforms (radio, online, CityNews, Citytv).”
Rogers Digital Media is also working closely with the company’s wireless division. “Part of our plans with R Deals, for instance (which already has 50,000 subscribers in just three months), was not just launching another daily deals site. It was to use our intelligence to provide more relevant, personalized offers; but (also) to work closely with the wireless group to drive mobile innovation for our coupons and offers,” says the CDO. “So a Rogers customer… can get certain personalized offers on their phone through SMS or on MMS and then they could, in short order, have it added to their Rogers bill and certainly there could be special discounts and exclusive offers for Rogers customers. So there is a lot of tie-in and collaboration happening right now.”
And for those who remember that Rogers has asked for a banking license, that is the final piece of the integrated marketing puzzle – getting the consumer to buy, using their smart phone from which they have just received a coupon, for example, as a digital wallet or digital credit card to make that purchase.
“A lot of that would be potentially tied to you get offer, or an ad, or a promotion on your phone and have you actually go to the point of sale and use either a credit card or integration to track that,” said Tafler.
“And so part of this whole audience intelligence play is trying to be very smart about how we tie advertising to the marketer’s objective, whether it’s online sales, off-line sales, brand impact, and be smart about how we start to measure that in collaboration with the advertiser and the agency across the platform, which is not easy to do, and it’s a challenge all marketers are facing right now.”
