Both the Toronto Star and La Presse made big moves in digital media this month, with the Star staking its digital future on its new iPad app and La Presse deciding it already has enough of a digital future to stop printing its weekday editions. A footnote to these announcements was that the two companies plan to dissolve their joint venture, Olive Media, and shutter the international ad network that once sold Canadian ads for CNN, Le Monde and The New York Times.
Olive will close its doors at the end of this year. La Presse will absorb the 12 staff at Olive’s Montreal sales office, while the Star will review Olive’s 70-employee Toronto operation and determine what to bring under its Star Metro Media sales division. Some layoffs will result, but according to the Star it’s too early to say how many.
Simon Jennings, president of sales for La Presse, said the decision became necessary as La Presse’s weekday print edition shuts down and its digital properties take centre stage. “We became basically a digital company, with all of our focus switching over to our digital product suite,” he told Marketing. “It’s important to have all of the assets in house.”
La Presse plans to continue to offer the programmatic, private exchange and deal ID sales options that Olive previously handled. Jennings said the specifics have yet to be worked out, but they will depend a lot on conversations with clients about what they want to see offered. “Our main focus is going to be on making sure that the customer service and support on the post-sale that Olive offered, and the level of creativity on the pre-sale, is continued,” he said.
Star Media Group director of community relations and communications Bob Hepburn expressed similar reasoning behind the move. “We wanted to make this move to consolidate and reposition our digital advertising businesses,” he said. “We feel this move will better serve our advertisers by providing them better, enhanced opportunities to cross-sell or bundle media properties.”
The Star is also working out the specifics of what services it plans to continue to offer, he said.
One thing that is already clear — the Olive Elite+ ad network, which represents several major international publishers like CNN, will be sunsetted, and Canadian sales of the properties represented will be transitioned back to their parent companies. It’s likely some of them will be snapped up by other ad networks like the Globe Alliance before long.
Hepburn said while this is the end of this particular joint venture, the Star and La Presse continue to cooperate on other business ventures. The development of Star Touch was heavily informed by La Presse‘s La Presse+ tablet app, and uses much of the same underlying technology.
Olive was launched by Torstar in 2006 as an early digital ad network, representing international publishers in Canada.
