Disruptive digital technologies and major shifts in the media landscape continue to shake up B.C.'s advertising industry.
The latest victim of those factors: the Lotus Awards.
For 25 years, the B.C. advertising industry would honour its members with the glitzy November gala recognizing everything from the best logos created on the West Coast to breakthroughs in social media penetration.
But the annual award ceremony was shelved in July amid sponsorships cuts and the impending dissolution of the Advertising Agency Association of BC (AAABC), the industry group that owns the Lotuses.
“We had a bit of an unusual hiccup where a few of the larger-named agencies decided that, based on their business strategy, they weren't going to enter into the show. And so we lost, I would say, upwards of 20% to 25% of our expected revenue,” AAABC president Dean Elissat told Business in Vancouver.
“And obviously without the AAABC in its existence, there really is no Lotus Awards.”
The Lotus Awards were also on the brink of cancellation in 2011 before the Brand.Live production agency was brought in to secure more sponsorship funding and produce the show.
But Elissat said the AAABC's dissolution makes things different this year.
“The advertising industry today is so segmented and fragmented and much more complex in terms of all the different tools you have to communicate with customers, that the mandate of the AAABC became less valuable,” he said.
“There wasn't as much of a need for us to report the importance of having an agency partner because the type of agencies, and the type of those partnerships, completely changed, and ostensibly the AAABC wasn't really keeping up, and it wasn't serving its member base.”
The whole global ad industry has been in flux in recent years, but the West Coast has been enduring a particularly unique journey, according to Alvin Wasserman.
The president of Vancouver's Wasserman & Partners ad agency noted Vancouver's pre-sale real estate market is probably the most evolved in Canada.
For years it provided significant dollars for local agencies and created a lot of West Coast advertising expertise that captured the attention of clients south of the border.
But after the 2008 U.S. housing market crisis, home and recreational property sales dried up throughout much of North America.
That caused the industry to shrink at the same time cheaper digital advertising was making significant strides.
“Of course, every agency has become digitally adept or else it's not here any more,” Wasserman said. “Either you're digital or you're dead.”
He added this has resulted in boutique digital agencies employing fewer than a dozen people now competing with the traditional multinational agencies.
“And that really has fragmented the market, because as they're crawling their way up, certainly bigger agencies … they've started to take smaller jobs that before they maybe wouldn't have considered.”
As Elissat noted, this fragmentation has stripped away much of the AAABC's mandate.
But the industry association recently extended its charter for another six months in a bid to find another non-profit group to take over the Lotus Awards in 2015.
Elissat, who is also vice-president of client engagement at Engine Digital, said there is a strong chance one of two potential new owners could take over the awards next year.
And after that ownership transfer is complete, the AAABC will be officially dissolved.
“If and when there feels like there's another need for a new association to serve the new type of agencies in this marketplace,” Elissat said, “then that's really going to be up to the ad community to decide and start up anew.”
