Brian Gardner, Canada country manager, RadiumOne
RadiumOne has hired Canadian digital media sales veteran Brian Gardner to lead its sales team in Toronto.
Gardner’s career has involved senior sales roles at theScore, Yahoo and the Chronicle Herald. He’s also done some time on the agency side, as a senior planner at M2, and in tech, leading the Canadian sales division of 24/7 Media (later bought by WPP and evolved into Xaxis). For the past year, he’s been a senior account executive at Rocket Fuel, focusing on the Canadian market.
Gardner told Marketing that RadiumOne is looking to expand in the Canadian market as it rapidly reaches maturity in programmatic. He said that in his experience, Canadian advertisers and agencies tend to let the U.S. do the experimenting on the bleeding edge. But once it’s clear that a new technology is here to stay, he said Canadians will get up to speed much more swiftly than their counterparts to the south.
“Whether it’s the decline in the rep business or the increase in programmatic, the U.S. started doing it a lot earlier than we did up here. But once certain marketers said ‘We’re going to make this choice,’ there was a big shift in decision making and spending.”
Now several years into rapid-adoption mode, Canada is looking more and more attractive to U.S. programmatic companies like RadiumOne and it’s not the only one to take interest in the market. Buy-side tech companies like TubeMogul, Vibrant Media and The Rubicon Project (with its new Buyer Cloud offering for advertisers) have all also announced senior Canadian hires and office openings in the past six months.
Gardner said that in such a crowded space, RadiumOne’s main differentiator is the proprietary audience data it’s amassed through free social sharing and link shortening tools it provides to publishers. RadiumOne’s publisher products are used by thousands of websites, which “pay” for the service with data — i.e. by allowing RadiumOne to collect anonymous behavioural data on visitors that pass through the site. Facebook and Google both track off-site behaviour the same way, with publisher-added tools for liking and sharing content.
Because of this relationship with publishers, RadiumOne doesn’t sell or share its data outside of the platform. Gardner says that its refreshed much more regularly than most third-party data, which can be weeks or months old by the time the advertiser buys it. The company also prides itself on its audience amplication algorithm, called ShareGraph, which combines its own data with advertisers’ first party data (aggregated on a proprietary data management platform) in order to find new lookalike audiences that share interests and behaviours with past customers.
In the Canadian market, where there’s a shortage of reliable third party data, RadiumOne could be in a competitive position. But it will all depend on whether that data drives better results. With so many platforms on the market, and growing demands for transparency on pricing and tactics, there’s more pressure than ever on vendors to prove their value to clients.
RadiumOne was founded in 2009, and first opened a Toronto office in 2012. Including Gardner, it now has six Canadian employees.
