Advertising Quality: Q&A with Julia Casale from Casale Media

Casale Media got started during the major Toronto blackout of 2003 and now has offices across the continent. What was it like being a Canadian startup in those days?

We’re a Canadian company and when we started we thought, “Hey great, we’re going to build the business here in Canada.” But of course at the time Canada really wasn’t ready for us, so we actually had to build our business in the U.S. It’s only within the last couple of years that we have been able to return to Canada.

Obviously, it’s taken quite a while for the Canadian market to catch up to what’s been going on in the U.S. However, when Canada does catch up change happens very rapidly. We’re very sophisticated in terms of our use of digital media; consumption is very high if you compare it to our neighbors across the border.

We have a very rich source of amazing and innovative digital content. However, we’re still trying to see the marketing side catch up to that. Typically, we’ve seen the more conservative nature of Canada kind of hold us back slightly, although this is evolving everyday.

How do you approach digital advertising in a way that creates, as you put it, a “measurable and sustainable brand impact”?

Our mantra from day one has been “quality driven.” For us, the success of a campaign is more than just using technology or algorithms to make a decision about where to place an ad at any point in time. We’re looking for something that can deliver sustainable long-term results.

To create that formula you need quality content, number one. You need to place your campaign in an environment that’s going to complement your brand. You need to place campaigns in environments that have audiences, and you need to capture them in the right frame of mind.

It’s really difficult to control how users interact with advertisements. They have much more control. Does that push you into the content side of things, or does it mean simply tweaking the traditional approaches?

We think one of the biggest problems is that there has been so much emphasis on algorithms and data that many advertisers have lost sight of how vital creative is.

Sometimes we get bogged down in the measurability, the data, and the technology and we neglect the content side of this media channel. And that can certainly be a barrier.

Repurposing existing assets without taking into consideration the interactive nature of this environment can also limit the potential of advertising online. It’s all about extending your efforts and reinterpreting them within the context of this new interactive environment.

Users expect to be engaged. The online experience is a lot more personal and intrusive; you’re so much closer to the individual and that intensifies even more when we start talking about mobile, so you really need to factor that into your creative plan.

Any examples of successfully-deployed content?

This year we rolled out our video offering, which takes a standard display space and enables an advertiser to repurpose and reuse existing video assets and extend them through other digital capabilities.

They can knit in video, social media integration, contact forms and other interactive functionality and make it all enabled from a typical banner display.

By being able to leverage that additional functionality you can do so much more with the same space for virtually the same cost.

Are clients coming on board with this approach or have you been spending more time educating in the hopes that they will eventually adopt?

It has been much more about education, but once advertisers are willing to take that leap of faith and test it out, we generally find that they become strong adopters.

Still, it’s very difficult to get somebody to that point. There are just so many different concerns in the channel relative to other media that we have a lot of hurdles to overcome.

Casale Media pioneered the concept of brand safe in 2008. What does it mean, and how conscious are your clients about being ‘brand safe’?

We have been extremely conscious of quality and its impact on brands from day one. In the early days we heard so many horror stories from marketers about their brands showing up in these bad places and it was just absolutely shocking to us. So we coined this term ‘brand safe,’ which has become a pretty well known and well-used term within the industry.

Not everybody will unanimously say that brand safety is important. Some marketers will say that it’s more about cost, as long as they’re getting results. But if we’re looking at some of the more household brand names, I would say that the importance of brand safety is widespread.

You say that Casale Media is not about creating extremely powerful ad networks. How does this fit into your business model, especially given how quickly the industry is growing and the number of acquisitions that are happening?

When we started we were originally known as an ad network, but our business has evolved considerably since then.

Being small and independent allows us to be very nimble and quick on our feet. It’s been a huge advantage operating this way because the industry changes literally overnight.

Since we are a technology company, we have the luxury of being able to react immediately to changes in marketplace conditions or new requirements from clients or from publishers.

The process tends to be slower for companies that partner or have acquired companies, so for us being independent tends to be an advantage.