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View all stories from Feb 20, 2008
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On the MiC with Maria Luisa Francoli Plaza: MPG pegs Canada for growth spurt

by Jesse Kohl

Maria Luisa Francoli Plaza, global CEO for MPG, took on that role about four years ago, but it was only a few months ago that she moved to the US. That move, she says, signifies MPG's overall plan to focus a little more on the North American media landscape. And that means Canada too. Her visit to the Canadian MPG office in Toronto - and steps away from Media Contacts, the shop's digital specialty arm - was the first since she took on the global CEO title. As MPG aims at capturing a bigger slice of the North American media pie, her visits may be a bit more frequent - as she tells us on-the-MiC.

What brings the heightened interest in Canada?

"Canada and the US are very much linked, and the US is a key market for us or anybody. It's close to 50% of the entire advertising budget worldwide, so it's very important. Last September, I moved to the US, and that shows a strong change in our strategy and planning going forward. We want the US to be a much stronger member of our network, and with the US, we want to be much more connected to Canada. We're going to have a much stronger focus on North America."

What is your strategy for growth in Canada? Are you going to be aggressively charging after new clients?

"In terms of building our client roster, we have many international clients. Some of them we already work for in Canada, and some we don't, so this would be one of our key strategies, bringing on clients we work for in the US or clients that we work for on a more global basis. Number two would be working with the agency partners we have here and trying to work with the same clients that they'll be working with in the future. A third strategy is going after local Canadian business."

In the context of the Canadian mediascape, can you give a sense of how MPG and Media Contacts plan to boost presence and share in the industry?

"Well, Media Contacts was probably the first [digital specialty] agency that was started here in Canada. In terms of the network, we are the youngest worldwide, because we started not that long ago in Spain, and we have really become a global player less than 10 years ago. So being young means that we are, in certain key markets, smaller than other agencies. That's bad if you think volume, and some people have the perception that volume is extremely important, and it was some three years ago. That's the negative side - but only in perception, because I don't think that's bad at all.

"The positive side is that because we are younger, we are much more enthusiastic about what we do, much more agile in terms of the way we move and what we can do, and the ability for us to communicate with each other is much stronger. In a smaller group, you get to facilitate communication, and that was part of our strategy position - that we're going to be much more linked to each other, and quicker at developing and sharing experiences.

"In the case of MPG, you could go from here in Toronto to our offices in Chile or Poland and you would find the same principles, the same methodology and the same tools. That means when the Polish guy picks up the phone and calls this office or the Chile office, they speak exactly the same language in terms of what we need to do for our clients and how we go about analyzing a situation."

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