The 10 companies shortlisted for Media Player of the Year in Marketing’s Nov. 14 issue were at the top of their game in 2011. We’ll be featuring each one online as a lead-up to our January 2012 issue, where you’ll find out which media company will reign supreme.
Rogers Media
In the last 12 months, Rogers has made major hires, completed big brand makeovers, made bold content plays and, most importantly, integrated all those moves to provide better options for advertisers
When talking about his first full year as president of Rogers Media, Keith Pelley uses the word integrated a lot.
“In isolation we are a collection of really good brands: Maclean’s, Chatelaine, Shopping Channel, Sportsnet. As a consolidated horizontally integrated company we are unmatched,” says Pelley, who took over Rogers Media late last summer. It’s clear this belief in integration motivated many of the key achievements at Rogers in the last 12 months. The list is long: a specialty channel acquired, new channels launched—including one dedicated just to Swiss Chalet chicken.
The company acquired new content and created more of its own, content that will be delivered and promoted—and sold to advertisers—across print, TV, online, radio and smartphones. Rogers boosted its Sportsnet brand in a big way and gave it an overhaul to ensure consistency across its many sports plays, including a new magazine.
In digital, the company more than quadrupled its reach after the acquisition of the BV Network in 2010, going from four million unique visitors a month in 2010 to 16.7 million uniques a year later. Rogers completed a deal with NBC to bring the hugely popular iVillage to Canada, made a move into e-commerce with the launch of eBeauty.ca and Thrive.ca, updated a number of websites for traditional brands and launched iPad apps for others.
Structural changes were made to ensure everyone was working from the same integrated playbook and a number of key hires bolstered the executive team: Scott Moore was brought in to lead broadcast, Ken Whyte was promoted to oversee publishing, and Jason Tafler was hired as chief digital officer, while former Pepsi marketer Dale Hooper joined the team to ensure key messaging and customer solutions were being delivered across all parts of the company.
“We’ve been running a 100-metre dash now for 12 months,” says Pelley. And people across the industry have noticed.
“Rogers has had a great year,” says Peter Mears, president of MediaBrands. “They’ve got an impressive new management team, a good solid progressive sales team, with increased share of tuning and an improved schedule.”
“If there is an award for shaking things up, they should probably win,” says Fred Forster, president and CEO of PHD Canada, adding that Rogers’ new integration focus makes eminent sense.
“Even as an outsider, you looked at this thing two years ago and said, ‘Man, this is what they should do,’” he says. With the breadth of its offerings, Rogers probably has the “greatest opportunity” to gain from being more integrated, he says.
The company has already proven the integrated approach will work with strong promotion of the Toronto Blue Jays across many of its properties, including a 19-page insert produced by Maclean’s that sold well with advertisers. The Blue Jays revenues numbers were up and that Maclean’s supplement spawned one of Rogers’ other big sports plays later in the year. “Once Ken [Whyte] saw that he could sell those pages and that there was a need for it, that led to Sportsnet magazine,” says Pelley.
But while integration is Pelley’s main focus, he’s most proud of a new emphasis on great content. “We believe in world-class premium content. And we believe in the creation of content.”
There’s more! Check out the Nov. 14 issue of Marketing for the full profile, and subscribe to find out who will be named the Media Player of the Year for 2011.
