Each year, Caldwell Partners International chooses 40 Canadians who were under 40 in the past year to honour for their outstanding achievements. Click here to learn more about the program, and find more winners in the list below.
Duke McKenzie has spent the past decade championing Internet advertising, initially as senior sales manager at AOL Canada and later as co-founder and president of UpTrend Media Inc., a Toronto company that helped advertisers reach their target audiences through the company’s constantly expanding networks of online sites.
From a company that had $600,000 in sales and no employees in its first year, UpTrend boasted revenue last year of over $15-million and a workforce of about 25 employees. Last October, Uptrend became Mediative after it was acquired by the Yellow Pages Group.
Mr. McKenzie is now senior vice-president of sales for Mediative Ad Network, which represents such high-traffic online publishers as Martha Stewart, CFL, Autos.ca and Walmart.
Given his role in shaping Internet advertising into what it has become today – a multibillion global industry – it’s not surprising to hear Mr. McKenzie compare online advertising to a preteen ready to become a teenager.
“Digital advertising has been like the precocious preteen growing up really fast in the Wild West,” he says. “That was great, but now we’re moving into a new age where digital advertising is going to be bigger than print, and I want to help usher in that new era and guide the preteen as it becomes a teenager.”
Mr. McKenzie had this in mind when he and his partners sold UpTrend Media to the Yellow Pages Group. Now that companies are pouring serious dollars into digital media, Mr. McKenzie says it’s time to start measuring how well the channel really performs – something the industry as a whole has not yet been able to do.
“We need to figure out things like how many [advertising] impressions companies should buy, or what’s the best way to measure response to online advertising – click-through or something else,” says Mr. McKenzie. “Fortunately, through the Yellow Pages Group, we have access to one of the largest sources of consumer data, which can help us measure how the medium performs.”
Mr. McKenzie is also pushing ad agencies to create better advertising for digital media.
“I once asked a media buyer why he never put his dollar into digital advertising and he said, ‘A banner ad never made me cry,’” says Mr. McKenzie. “Well, I think it’s time to improve the creative for digital advertising, because users are demanding it and we have to catch up with how users are interacting with the medium.”
More winners:
