A healthy, balanced Canadian media ecosystem supports the economy, fosters responsible media, and gives our clients more opportunity to connect with engaged and diverse Canadian audiences.

Local news is good for democracy, diversity, and the economy. It’s good for Canada. Yet advertisers spend only 19% of their digital media budgets on Canadian Media.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, 53 Canadian news media publications closed (48 were community newspapers). Moreover, 3,000+ journalists lost their jobs. Between 2008 and April 1, 2021, 448 news operations closed in 323 communities. More communities are devolving into news deserts, more Canadian media jobs are lost. As a result, trusted local news, journalists’ jobs, and our ability to reach and inform Canadians are all at risk.

Our goal was to increase Canadian share of digital media investment to 25 % by 2025. Based on current forecasts, this could represent an increase of $350m from agencies to Canadian publishers and increase total digital investment in Canadian outlets above $1b.

While media directors gravitate towards large global platforms in the belief that they attract more eyeballs, consumers look at these platforms through a different lens: the lens of trust. The reality is that Canadians tend to put more trust in local media. Local media is trusted because it reports on events and news that is more relevant to its community of listeners, whether at the national or the local level.

It stands to reason that if you trust the platform because it is more relevant and meaningful to the context of your day-to-day life, that trust will likely extend to the brands that choose to advertise on the platform.

Our strategy was to appeal to media directors through their peers, and to create an engagement tool that would motivate others to add their voices to the chorus of support and commitment to local Canadian media. CMDC members represent almost 97% of Canada’s total advertising investment. This means that its members have a critical role to play in educating, providing data, and building a viable media infrastructure that allows Canadian media to thrive.

The overall concept was to create the Canadian Media Manifesto, a ‘cri de coeur’ for media directors everywhere. This would be accompanied by an educational campaign and a pledge to keep Canadian media afloat. The pledge lives on the home page of the CMDC website.

We were also charged with the task of creating a visual identity system for the manifesto. For this we looked to all the screen formats used by various digital devices, from mobiles to laptops to tablets to TV monitors and used them as the building blocks to form the acronym ‘CMM’ (Canadian Media Manifesto). Among the educational assets was a short video which showed the various formats coming together like the pieces of a puzzle to form the structure of the acronym.

To heighten the sense of urgency behind the manifesto, we utilized bold condensed type for titling, coloured it an alarming tone of yellow-green and set it against a black background. The high contrast, inyour-face color and bold type combine to make the message unmissable.

For messaging, this bold colour and typography was combined with photojournalistic style photography. Shapes representing the aspect ratios of traditional media block out portions of imagery, and copy appears to be redacted, representing the loss of information that will occur if we don’t commit to investing in local media.

We created awareness for the campaign through shareable social posts that directed viewers to a landing page explaining the urgency of the cause. The page also featured a video explaining how the loss of investment in Canadian media is directly affecting the industry and the dissemination of accurate, unbiased, and local information. Visitors to the page were encouraged to pledge to support Canadian media by buying local.

To date, almost 600 media directors have pledged to support the campaign and to buy local.

More often than not, measuring the impact of a graphic design solution is nearly impossible, but in this case, design is all there was. The use of bold contrast, in-your-face typography and photojournalistic imagery were all the success of this project had to rely on. And it worked.

If anyone is familiar with digital media formats, it is media directors. They are also very familiar with the visual language of news journalism. So building the design system and its identity out of the different aspect ratios of various screen types was perhaps the biggest technical challenge we had to overcome.