TC Media has entered into a strategic partnership with Glacier Media Group that will see TC represent national online advertising sales for Glacier’s array of digital assets. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Vancouver-based Glacier operates a group of community newspapers, trade publications and professional information services.
In addition to sales representation, the partnership will also see Glacier distribute both e-flyers and other promotional offers from TC Media advertisers across its digital portfolio, which includes the websites of several former Postmedia papers that Glacier acquired last year.
Montreal-based TC Media has promotional offers for between 130,000 and 150,000 products in market at any given time through a combination of internal services. (It recently announced partnerships with organizations including the YPG-owned RedFlagDeals.com and Metroland’s Flyerland.ca.)
From an online sales perspective, Dominique-Sébastian Forest, TC Media’s vice-president of national digital solutions, said the partnership provides his company with a much-needed presence in Western Canada. “It’s a partnership that increases our national footprint and our ability to do different things with a media company that is covering a region where we don’t have a presence,” he said.
The partnership will also enable TC Media to expand the scope of the private online advertising exchange established in the wake of its acquisition of Montreal’s Redux Media. Glacier properties are projected to add up to 150 million impressions per month to the real-time bidding network’s inventory, said Forest.
“[Glacier] is a really large media group that is often overlooked in the rest of Canada,” said Forest. “But in Western Canada, they’re the main guys.”
Forest said that TC is still searching for potential strategic partners as it seeks to grow its business. “We’re very active in acquisition and business development right now,” he said.
Shelley Wilson, Glacier’s vice-president of digital sales, said in a release that partnering is one of the “quickest, most effective” methods of growing a business, and called the partnership with TC a “true marriage of digital strengths between companies to strategically support each other’s long-term vision.”
Glacier Media generated revenues of $76.4 million for the first quarter of 2012, a 25% increase over the corresponding year-earlier period based primarily on its November 2011 acquisition of Postmedia’s British Columbia media assets.
In its quarterly earnings report, the company reported some advertising softness, primarily in urban markets impacted by national advertiser cautiousness. That was mitigated somewhat by Saskatchewan and Manitoba and individual markets in B.C. and Alberta.
