Transcon on the national ad market

Transcontinental CEO François Olivier on the national ad market in Canada right now:

Q2 for us was stable compared to last year. Not great but not bad. That’s what we see going forward. Not a lot of visibility for busy period of the fall but what we’ve seen so far has been very stable.

Would qualify the market as being very volatile. It’s very hard to predict. We’ve seen a slowdown in growth digit properties. This quarter we area up 7 per cent digitally. The average for us is closer to 20 per cent in prior quarters.

It’s a general slowdown. On the web and in the paper you have some months, and some weaker months.

The industry is just more volatile. Decisions are made at the last minute. Budgets are allocated at the last minute.

Advertisers are still trying to find the right mix between web, paper, new marketing services and a lot of these guys are still experimenting with the transition of the media industry. So it’s very hard to predict what’s going to happen.