(First published May 22/01)

Daintry Springer says her strongest feature is that she's a 'connector'.

Using her 'connecting' skills has helped increase membership in IAB Canada 50% from 80 members to 120 members in slightly over a year since she took on her contract position

Connecting is also her weakest feature, she admits. It has helped bring attendance at some IAB Canada-sponsored meetings to almost unmanageable numbers. In some cases, the gatherings, referred to as Town Hall meetings, have had to be divided in two sessions. In others, she has coped - barely.

"What was I thinking?" she asks. "I can't entertain 100 people in what these meetings are supposed to do. I'm glad that we have so many people interested in being educated, but we're going to have to rethink how to handle them. The aim was 30 to 40 people each time. Can we cut them down and run them more often? I don't think so. As the administrative resource, it would probably kill me. But we have to find a solution."

Such ruminations occur often during a conversation with Springer. An admitted workaholic, she hates dropping a single detail.

"I'm very detail-oriented," she admits. "I bring it on myself. I must close the loop. It makes it hard to drop balls. I've been on the other end of dropped balls, and it's not nice."

An 'Epiphany'

Springer is in the second year of her renewed contract to hold the position in IAB Canada: a mix of Web publishers, advertisers, agencies, Internet advertising sales networks, and various affiliates and associates. IAB Canada acts as a national advocate for marketing and advertising on the Internet, and is committed to developing and introducing structure and standards to that rapidly growing industry.

Prior to IAB Canada, Springer was manager of media enterprises for two years with the Royal Bank Financial Group, where she had sole responsibility for Internet advertising.

The lack of advertisers' understanding of the benefits of Internet advertising influenced her to move to the Internet side.

"One day I had an epiphany," she says. "I was privy to meetings prior to the Olympics where huge, multi-million dollar buys for television advertising were being decided. Later, there was an insignificant amount dedicated to Internet advertising.

"I couldn't get senior management to understand the need. They wanted awareness. I told them to give me $2 million for the Internet and I'd give them awareness, but the amount finally given was minuscule. I saw that I had to go from working in the system to working with the system. I wasn't educating from in the system.

"Within IAB Canada , I can give more value from an industry perspective, because employees will listen more to a third person. I had gone to IAB Canada to help get my advertisers to use the Internet more, but at that time they couldn't give me justification. They needed help, so I got hired."

While her job requires some technical knowledge, it's more a case of keeping up to date and knowing a general concept rather than the details of how to program or put something together. For example, it's important to know about bandwidth being a factor in the Internet connection, but not the engineering details involved. At one point in her career, Springer was a trainer on Excel, Word and Power Point, so she doesn't find the basic technology explanations too difficult.

Case Studies to go Online

IAB Canada is a resource, and its members contribute to the knowledge. Recently, they've been asked to submit case studies to help build a file on Best Practices, what works well. It's part of getting advertisers to understand the effectiveness of online advertising.

"My true love is finding complex subjects and simplifying them, packaging the information concisely and presenting it," she says. "We're getting the case studies, the successes, and we'll get such material up on our Web site (http://www.iabcanada.com) in July."

It's just one aspect of many in IAB Canada's promise to guide and shape the Internet industry. Another is the aforementioned Town Hall meetings. These are meetings on various topics, where a group of people interested or potentially interested in some issue involving Internet advertising get together with a format that initially involves about a 10-minute presentation of pros and cons to facilitate discussion. The group then takes about 40 minutes with questions and discussion, followed by a period where it breaks up into smaller groups with each trying to come up with recommendations with which IAB Canada can deal. Such a format helps everyone get involved. Ten meetings are held annually in Toronto. Such meetings will also begin in Vancouver next fall, and soon in Montreal, likely in the fall as well.

Montreal Meeting Planned

An initial open house, in conjunction with the Bureau de la publicité sur Internet au Québec, is planned in Montreal for June 14/01. IAB Canada is looking at ways for the two groups to work together more closely. (Former BPIQ president Patrick Pierra sits on the current IAB Canada Board of Directors.) While the two groups have many similar aims, the financial structure is one of several differences to be considered.

BPIQ membership is included in the membership of Alliance numériQC, and is, for individuals, as low as $250 (or even $100 for associate members). Corporate memberships range up to $5,000. Alliance numériQC was formed in Fall, 2000, by combining the Forum des Inforoutes et du Multimédia (FIM), the Association des producteurs en multimédia du Québec (APMQ) and the Centre d’expertise et de services en applications multimédias (CESAM).

IAB Canada is strictly corporate. There are no individual memberships and no plans for any. It would be a drain on resources, says Springer.

IAB Canada fees are being revamped to offer more benefits. There are currently four categories of members: 1) publishers, with fees ranging from $2,000 to $7,000, based on page views per month; 2) advertisers and agencies $500 to $1,000, depending on the amount of advertising placed online; 3) affiliates and associates, about $500; and advertising sales networks, ranging from $1,000 to $3,000, again depending on page views. Those fees were set after the original founding members put in hefty seed money to get operations off the ground.

A new fee structure is expected to be put forward this summer, possibly using a silver, gold and platinum structure, with varying benefits, although that idea is not yet finalized.

Benefits of membership include, among others: access to research; access to the Board of Directors and other executives for assistance, information and guidance; help in making client presentations; display of members' material at trade shows; and highlighting of new members in media kits.

Research and Education a Double Focus

"We need more money," says Springer. "We're a less-than-$300,000 organization and are underfunded. IAB Canada is non-profit, and its two main goals, research and education, cost money.

Luckily, the dot.com downturn hasn't resulted in much loss of membership, other than Canoe, which no longer exists, and AOL Canada, which Springer feels may be a temporary situation. (It wants more value, she says.)

The organization plans to continue to have its mixed membership, as opposed to IAB in the U.S., that represents only publishers and recently changed its name from Internet Advertising Bureau to Interactive Advertising Bureau. That definitely won't happen in Canada, adds Springer.

"In the U.S., the focus is on trying to get more dollars into advertising and e-commerce," she says. "We want that, too, but are focussed on research and education to bring it about, and are more interested in the marketing and advertising picture. Maybe we'll get involved in e-commerce eventually. It's a natural extension. But we must represent all. Otherwise, it's impossible to capture the essence of the industry. You can't have online advertising with just publishers, because then you have no money. And you won't get the advertisers unless you educate the agencies."

However, IAB Canada recently approved the same Internet advertising formats as IAB (see Filing Cabinet from PubZone's home page for a list). And its Board of Directors is currently considering the online advertising contracts' standardization and related items as recommended by IAB.

"Contracts are currently all different and, consequently, frustrating," says Springer. "But we represent a broader perspective of constituents than does IAB, so can't be myopic. Before approval, we have to make sure what is recommended is good for the whole."

To make sure everyone is represented, IAB Canada operates with seven councils, each driven by one or several Board of Directors as mentors with the assistance of several volunteers. The mentors provide structure and guidance while the volunteers execute the needs and report to the mentors who report in turn to the Board as a whole.

Client: IAB Canada

Keeping track of all these as the central source and spokesperson is Springer who says that "the desire to create something keeps me going." Assisting her as consultants when required are Joanne Ingrassia for public relations and Stacey Larter for project marketing and communications.

IAB Canada is actually a client of Black Sharp, a company owned by Springer.

"Black Sharp? Because I'm black and I'm sharp," she says, laughing. She and a brother in Hamilton are the progeny of a black father from New Brunswick and a white mother from Montreal. "With that background, I have no excuse why I don't speak French - yet," she adds.

Black Sharp is a small business with several clients, dealing in three sectors: management consulting and event planning, both mainly dealing with small retailers, and sponsorship marketing.

"It may look like there's not a lot of synergy between them, but they are three things I like to do," she says. Now 36, "I'm still deciding what I want to be when I grow up."

Handling more than one position has never been a problem for Springer. She has always had a small side business while she held various positions, initially in advertising at Procter & Gamble and in media sales with Thomson Newspapers, prior to moving to the Royal Bank.

Nevertheless, she and her husband (another workaholic who works with a network solutions provider) take time to do some mountain biking, usually at Algonquin or the Caledon Rail Trail. As well, they are voracious readers, living in an old Victorian home in the High Park area of Toronto, where Springer's office is in the attic.

"And Sunday is my craft day," she says. "I recently made curtains for my solarium out of denim, and my husband wants to know why we have blue jeans on the window."

Future Goals

With a heavy schedule, the two don't travel much, but enjoy time with their respective families. They also do some volunteer work, such as at a local food bank at Christmastime. "I'd eventually like to do more volunteer work, behind the scenes, perhaps with children, but don't have a lot of time right now" says Springer.

"As for career goals, my options are open. I do like to nurture small businesses, so I'll build Black Sharp a little bigger to offer its services to small businesses. And I love working with IAB Canada, because I can help a lot of people. I don't have one person to be loyal to; I have a whole industry.

Industry Progress

"What I like is that we're seeing more growth in the industry as advertisers understand where we're going. The technology is improving. The packaging is getting better. IAB Canada has an arrangement with University of British Columbia to be part of the UBC Internet Marketing Certificate Program. (The course, which involves about six months of online learning, is a certificate program which benefits professionals who work in marketing, communications, product or new business development and who want to expand their career options by combining their interest in the Internet with their background in marketing.)

"We're going to work harder on promoting this kind of initiative," she says. "If we could replicate something like this at major universities across the rest of Canada, we'd have our heads around the education bit. Right now, the education we're doing with professional seminars is still the tip of the iceberg.

"On the research side, two major surveys are undertaken annually. A revenue survey of publishers to determine how much money is currently going into online advertising in Canada is currently underway through PricewaterhouseCoopers. We also want to learn more about international trends. We have very little trackable research or information on trends and the general state of the industry. We're seeing movement towards portal deals and sponsored content. We hope to have an effectiveness survey next fall.

"So the focus now is on research and education. Without research , you can't effectively plan an advertising campaign and without education, there's no point in knowing the research. IAB Canada needs more members so that we can provide financially for these to benefit the members and the industry as a whole."

First of all, though, without losing the intimacy of the smaller groups, Springer is looking for the solution to hold and satisfy the ever-growing attendance by those wanting to learn more at Town Hall meetings. She's not complaining.