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Why Independent Agencies Are Having a Renaissance – with CMO Kristina Canada
00:21:17
Net Conversion CMO Kristina Canada on why independent agencies are having a renaissance — and how her team is using CTV, AI skepticism, and radical transparency to take on the holdcos.
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- [00:00]
A
We historically have really seen some of the bigger agencies, the Holdcos, as being our competition. And now it's like we're like having a bit of a renaissance right now as an independent agency.
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B
Tell me about that. Cause it seems like you're right. I'm not gonna say you don't wanna work at Holdco now. They're tremendous companies, but it's a lot of change. Huge merger obviously going on. Just a lot of pressure on those models. Reinvention.
- [00:25]
A
Yeah. I think certainly the holding companies can offer scale, but independent agencies, because we're, because we really lean into agility, transparency, lack of conflicting interest. Our team of analysts doesn't have these revenue thresholds that they're trying to hit from a specific channel. It's really about doing what's best for their clients without having a lot of that overhead or rigid structures that you find in some of those larger organizations.
- [00:52]
C
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- [01:16]
B
course today at goaddressable.substack.com this week on Next in Media, I spoke with Christina Canada, CMO of netconversion, a Florida based marketing and analytics company. Neck Conversion is one of those many upstart agencies with a performance heritage that exists outside the big holding media company landscape. So I want to ask her about her company's perspective on the market and
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C
how they view more traditional media vehicles
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B
like TV and out of home. Christina and I also talked about what it's like to implement more AI powered media and creative tools without having much bureaucracy in the way and the lines
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C
her team won't cross when it comes
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B
to giving up human oversight. Lots of interesting perspective here. So let's get started. Hi everybody. Welcome to Next to Media. I'm Mike Shields. My guest this week is Christina Canada. She's the CMO at netconversion. Hey Christina, how are you? Thanks for being.
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A
I'm good. How are you doing today?
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B
I'm good. I'm excited to talk to you. We had met, I don't know, about six months ago. You guys have a super interesting company, but I think probably not everybody's going to know you. Give us the origin story. What's netconversion. Tell us a little about you guys.
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A
Yeah, so netconversion, yes, it's true. We are not as widely known because we've been an independent agency for 19 years. We are a marketing and analytics agency that really specializes in using data to drive what we call measurable outcomes. And why we emphasize those measurable outcomes is because our philosophy is that any media agency can make media KPIs look good. But for us, if we're not driving measurable impacts to our clients total business, then we're losing the war kind of thing. So we're very much focused on performance. While you do position ourselves as performance first. But by no means does that mean that everything that we do is bottom of the funnel. Old school performance mentality. We're really implying that we have a very heavy reliance on KPIs and understanding what each channel is doing within our customers media mix and flow to drive those business outcomes that I mentioned.
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B
I believe your dog has just made an appearance on the podcast.
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A
Yeah, that's Pepper.
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B
Oh, hi Pepper.
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A
She's going to be famous.
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B
Absolutely. Watch out. But so you are based in Orlando. Right. Which I think people might be unexpected. If you're thinking in terms of the Madison Avenue center. Tell us how that came about.
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A
Yeah, so we have our two co founders. We're working in travel and hospitality 19 plus years ago.
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B
Right.
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A
And they were both executives, one being responsible for analytics and the other one being responsible for marketing and paid media efforts. And they noticed this giant gap in the industry where all of the agencies that they had partnered with were not able to adequately show them, you spend this dollar and it does X for your business. And so both of them, being very performance minded, really found this white space at the time that didn't necessarily necessarily
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B
exist, especially 19 years ago. That was probably harder. Right?
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A
Exactly. So, yeah, they were both based in Orlando and so that's how we started. But we have evolved and grown a lot over the years, obviously. We now have three offices, one in Charlotte, North Carolina and one I'm so excited to mention we just opened last month in Chicago, which is one of my favorite markets. So we are super excited to make our footprint in that market, which is such a media heavy market.
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B
And then you made an acquisition, I guess about a year or so ago. Tell us about that. I think it speaks to what you're talking about pushing beyond just your performance roots.
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A
Yeah, absolutely. Just a little over a year ago, we acquired an agency called Elevate the Outcome. And really that was a strategic effort. So that we can continue to broaden our service offerings again with that mindful focus on performance and really continuing to deepen our expertise in these sort of high growth areas. That high growth area that we really leaned into was CTV and OT channels. So elevate the outcome. They were experts within that space, so we acquired them and now we've integrated those capabilities and complimenting our core services of paid media and analytics. So we really now again just continuing to own that full funnel of media performance really has allowed us to provide sort of end to end, holistic, measurable solutions for our clients.
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B
So you started in a place where a lot of bigger traditional media agencies are trying to go with. They're very upper funnel oriented, trying to figure out how to turn themselves into more performance orientated. Either way of working or especially in television, do you think there's an advantage in going the other way or starting from where you were and trying to go up the funnel?
- [05:36]
A
Yeah, I think it's because as marketing has evolved, technology's evolved, the ability to track and measure these channels and understand the impact that that spend is having on your business. It's what CFOs want to see from their CMOs. And ultimately because we started from a place that we were very kind of bottom of the funnel because again 19 years ago those were really the only channels that you could track and measure. But as technologies evolved, we're evolving alongside of it. It's been a very interesting road where we historically have really seen some of the bigger agencies, the Holdcos, as being our competition. And now it's like we are like having a bit of a renaissance right now as an independent agency.
- [06:20]
B
Tell me about that because it seems like you're right there. I'm not gonna say you don't wanna work at Holdco now. They're tremendous companies, but it' change. Huge merger obviously going on. Just a lot of pressure on those models. Reinvention. What is it like to be an indie agency in this moment right now?
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A
Yeah, I think certainly the holding companies can offer scale, but independent agencies, as I said, we're feeling almost this renaissance that's happening right now because we're smaller, because we really lean into agility, transparency, lack of conflicting interest. Our team of analysts doesn't have these revenue thresholds that they're trying to hit from a specific, specific channel. It's really about doing what's best for the client. Why we're really showing up a lot more in these rooms alongside these larger hold cos. Clients are really looking for partners who could pivot quickly offer sort of unbiased, data driven advice as it relates to how they're going to move their business without having a lot of that overhead or rigid structures that you find in some of those larger organizations. So being independent really continues to allow us to be truly client centric.
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B
It seems like the big agencies are trying to figure out, should we fundamentally change our business model, the way we charge for things, does it allow you to test things or try different models out quicker? When you are independent, you have clients and maybe are more of that mindset.
- [07:38]
A
Yeah, again, for us it's really about being focused on the client first. So being very client centric allows us to really be adaptable to what their business requires. I know it's cliche to say this, we want to be an extension of their team, but truly adding that value that they're seeing the impact on their business. As I mentioned.
- [07:56]
B
Okay, coming back to what you mentioned, everybody's trying to figure out how to make should CTV be a performant channel? How do we do that? Do we need to bring a different set of number metrics to the business, different mindset? Given your vantage point, the way you built your company, what perspective do you bring there?
- [08:12]
A
Yeah, so I think bringing that performance mindset to ctv, we talked about this with the acquisition of elevate the outcome. We're not just looking for reach Now. Reach is an important aspect, I think, of our marketing strategy, but we're looking at the attribution and business impact that reach is having. Last year we pulled some of our own data, we conducted our own independent research panel. We were aiming to understand consumer habits, like what's happening right now with everything that's happening within our economy, et cetera. How is that impacting customers right now or consumers? So as we were following the data, our research was showing us that consumers have increased their video streaming by 43% in just the last six months. So that's nearly two times the growth of a channel like social media. So this isn't a trend, it's about moving the needle. So as I said, we want to make these investments and channels that are having that high demand. This is it. We treat CTV as bridging that gap between brand building and performance because we can track it, because we can measure it and understand when someone saw our CTV ad, are they making it through to the website? How do we then start optimizing to reach more of those individuals? So applying that same rigor to measurement as we do with a channel like
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C
Search, for example, can you go too
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B
Far like going if you treat it the same way that you treat social, social, it may not work for everything.
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A
Correct. Yeah. And I think when you start to put too much of that direct response KPI on a specific channel, you can lose the impact that it's supposed to be having on your total funnel. I know we've all said funnels dead. Ultimately my br brain still thinks about you have to fill it up with interest and demand and then capture that demand. So if all you're doing is trying to optimize towards something that's capturing demand, you're missing out on creating that demand. So again, performance being so important, but you need to understand the KPI that you're trying to hold that channel accountable for. So we have some client partners that we work with that we break CTV out into maybe two kind of core functions. One where we know that this particular audience is going to be about demand capture, but then this particular audience is going to be about that creation of demand and building awareness. Yeah.
- [10:22]
C
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- [11:20]
B
all right, I gotta ask you, of course we have to talk about AI and so many aspects of our industry there's transformation happening. A lot of agencies are either wrestling with how comfortable are they working with other big platforms like Meta and Google in particular that promise they can do everything for you versus building your own proprietary systems, using them with some restraint. Where are you on that? Let the platforms do the performing thing that they say they can do.
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A
Yeah. This is funny to me because if you ask any of our Google partners that we've had over the last 19 years. They'll all tell you that we have been amazing skeptics at allowing the machines to kind of take over and do the work. In fact, our chief analytics officer Brett Hughes, I've seen him across the table with people from Google arguing that we're not going to just drop everything until pmax and trust it's going to do well.
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B
Why not? What are you talking about?
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A
And really where that comes from is that we've always believed netconversion has always made investments into things like automation to help us move quickly and do the work that an individual can't get done. It's always been about man plus machines. So we've been making these investments before things like AI were cool. We've been investing in automation to automate some of the boring things so we can focus on more valuable things from the consumer perspective. Again, as we go back to looking at our research, we've seen AI adoption jump from 45% to 64% again in just six months. So fast. It's imperative as marketers and I think we're all saying the same thing these days, but we have to adopt AI powered campaigns that can help us move at the speed of this evolving consumer behavior. So we're leveraging platforms like Performance Max Advantage plus for their processing power, but we make sure that we keep that human elements in there for oversight. So we're letting AI optimize the tactics, but we're really keeping our hands firmly on the strategic wheel, if you will, to make sure that we are hitting those business outcomes and obviously maintaining some integrity with that proprietary data that we're tasked with.
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B
Now what about your staffers day to day? Like I think it might be different. Again, if we're talking about a big holding company, there's, I think some of them are building their own proprietary tools on top of ChatGPT or whatever. Others are trying to train the staff. Some staff loves it, some staff doesn't. Where are you in terms of everybody needs to do everything in AI versus use it sparingly? Like where are you in that continuum?
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A
Yeah, so I mentioned we've been using things like automation for the past 19 years. Actually I think it's been 17 years now. We do have our own technology, our proprietary technology, it's called Conversionomics. It is an ETL tool but ultimately it was built because we wanted our analysts to be able to spend their valuable time focusing on insights and the things that matter for driving our customers business. That has always been our mantra. So again, really our point of view on this is it needs to be human led but intelligence driven. So we're leveraging something like AI. We encourage our teams to use it, but as a co pilot for helping to increase productivity, spark creativity. We've really woven this into our best practices. And so as we're hiring analysts, it's part of our training program. It's the best way to lean on this as a co pilot. I'm excited to this year where we have built our own chatbot that lives within our conversionomics tool. So now it makes it even easier for at our analysts fingertips to have the insights that they need. How much money did my client spend in XYZ Channel last month? And the answer's there. It will again enable us to move just faster and provide additional value for our clients. So I want to emphasize we use AI as a tool but not as a replacement for critical thinking.
- [14:58]
B
On that note, are you to even further the whole agentic phenomenon? There's again there's some school of thought that agents will be the data analysts, they will do all this kind of quarterbacking of these campaigns for you and then others are like hold on a second, that's crazy. That's just, that's letting go of too much control. Are you, where are you in that camp and is it too early to even have those conversations?
- [15:18]
A
I think we see and feel it. The investments that we're making today are with our chat bot that I just mentioned and having that technology at our analyst fingertips. Our messaging internally has been everyone gets an intern. We really want everyone to be able to utilize this tool as something that's going to help them continue to improve the impact we're having on our client's business. But there's nothing that can replace that strategic thinking. And for us, as I mentioned, when we want to be very client centric, it's about building those relationships. And you can't possibly be successful in something like that when you're building that business model by relying on solely on, on tools like this that replace that analyst work.
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B
What do you think? There was a lot of hesitancy on the bigger LLMs in terms of having paid advertising offerings. OpenAI seems like they're getting really aggressive. How much are you guys playing in that space yet? And then how much are your clients asking about quote unquote, paid advertising through AI versus helping them with the new version of SEO to make sure they show up?
- [16:19]
A
Yeah, so Netconversion has offered SEO services for about the last 10 years or so and really we leaned into that as Understanding that balance between what we're doing in the paid space with the organic space. And it's a good thing we made that investment when we did because as you're referencing, those things are merging and it's like the customer's looking for you in the easiest way possible. So how are we going to show up and be there as a reliable source for them? Some of the guidance that we're giving our clients now is really to be focused on moving from sort of keyword matching to more of that intent matching. We need to make sure. I know Google has always valued something like authority, but really with all of the nuanced content and being able to answer complex questions, a lot of the conversations that we're having with our partners is around just improving their content on their websites.
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B
So are the tactics radically different? Sort of interrupt you? Does stuff translate or is it. Does it feel like you can connect some dots?
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A
I think you can connect some dots because I think the thing that I want to make sure it doesn't get overlooked like the old school SEO tactics are still very much relevant and those tactics are still really important. It's almost like not losing sight of those, let's call them the OG SEO tactics. But now how do we continue to optimize and expand on that? So really it's about helping our clients optimize, leveraging more into their structured data so that they are able to become that authoritative content that the customers are looking for, that the AI models are looking for that will serve up as it relates to advertising within these platforms. Our clients are very curious of this. Right now we are working alongside our partners at Universal who are participating in a pilot program right now with ChatGPT. From what we're seeing so far, CPMs are really expensive. This isn't really seen as a performance channel right now. I would consider this to be almost beta stage at this point, but it's giving us the opportunity to at least sink our toes into what the data is showing. And then how do we expand on that and make those firm recommendations across our client base where it makes sense.
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B
Let me ask you about another hot buttonish topic in the industry lately. And that's like this. The idea of principle based media buying, just whether media agencies should be in that business or not. You guys probably have a different perspective given your background and size, but where do you fall in that debate?
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A
Yeah, I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, but you know, I'm sure you rip. RIP for a trade desk. I know they're I know they're rebuilding but no, we love this. Our focus has always been on transparency. Our stance has always been and it's probably not a surprise, I keep saying things like very client centric, very much focused on performance. In order to get that way there has to be a level of transparency. So our stance has always been firmly on the side of value efficiency and performance for our clients. And that's not lip service. We think that our role as partners for our clients is to be that objective advisor. When an agency's out there pre buying media, it starts to create a bit of a conflict of interest. It's no longer about you're being incentivized by improving your clients business, being their agent.
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B
Right.
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A
You're being incentivized by offloading this media that your agency has bought and whether or not it's the right fit for your clients. We prefer that model where our incentives are aligned with our clients performance and that just helps us ensure that we are putting that best media recommendation forward and that's going to drive the best results for their business.
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B
Speaking of media recommendations, give us something maybe that might surprise people. Is there a media platform or social media platform that's undervalued right now, especially from your performance point of view?
- [19:47]
A
Yeah, I actually I saw your article the other day about using YouTube before events and I think that is incredibly interesting. Not to steal your idea but I think it's, it's amazing to think about how we can take a channel like YouTube that has so much intent, that is just streaming through there every single day and extending some live programming there. It's incredible. So I would say that would be one. The other one that I think is really undervalued more from like a marketing and advertising perspective is Reddit. I think there's again another one of those where it's high intent, it's very community driven. There's so much engagement that's going on but it requires I think a very nuanced approach for how you're going to engage with customers within the platform.
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B
It's not a cookie cutter kind of thing.
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A
Exactly. You can't do your standard interruptive advertising. It just doesn't work in that channel. In order to reach these hyper targeted audiences within the platform we can still show up as performance minded brands and you're going to get strong performance but you have to be able to really speak to the needs of, of that respective audience which is very different from any other channel.
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B
Interesting. Christina, awesome conversation. Thanks so much for your time and Congrats on the expansion.
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A
Likewise. Thank you so much.
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B
Thanks again to my guest this week, Christina Canada of Net Conversion and my partners at Sabio and Goaddressable. If you like this week's episode, please take a moment to rate and leave a review. We have lots more to bring you, so please hit that subscribe button. We'll see you next time for more on what's Next in media. Thanks for listening.