author-avatar

Susan is a highly experienced marketing executive with over 15 years in a variety of key leadership roles. When she's not building a great business (Vovia), she is off adventuring and travelling the world. You might also run into her on the ski hill or in a hot yoga class.

Other posts by:

The Story Behind Vovia & What’s to Come…

We regularly share updates on our team, our clients, innovations, and trends but we have never really posted about Vovia and our background. It has been a year like no other the world has ever seen, and we’ve used this time to reflect on the many things that we are grateful for and how we got here.

Vovia was founded by Cameron Prockiw back in 2007 as a search marketing company. With website traffic from search engines quickly becoming a key part of digital marketing, Cam saw an opportunity to combine his knowledge of SEO and web development to help clients improve their website experience and online visibility.  As pay-per-click advertising rolled into the digital marketing eco-system, PPC ads became a natural extension of our services. Cam’s philosophy was pretty simple – focusing on the results that matter to clients will lead to better business outcomes, an approach that was drastically different from other agencies who were focused on the number of impressions, clicks, or search rankings.

We added paid social media advertising services in 2009 once Facebook’s platform began offering advanced targeting options like geography and language allowing advertisers of all sizes to reach their audience.

In early 2010, Cam ended up meeting his future partners independently over coffee. A coffee with Heather led to a great discussion and she joined Vovia in 2011 as an Account Director. Her strong strategic background, B2B experience, and client-side experience were well suited to the growth that Vovia was experiencing.

An agency collaboration also led to Cam meeting Susan when she reached out to Vovia for paid search expertise and support on a major account she was managing, as it was in a highly competitive vertical for search. The partnership drove significant success for the client with continued growth over the 3-year partnership and led to a discussion about Susan joining Vovia as President, which happened in 2014.

Our focus on performance and results drove the addition of our analytics practice in 2014 and in 2015 with programmatic media taking off we expanded our services again to add all digital media. Our clients also shared a need for their digital and offline media to work together and we saw an opportunity in the market to extend our philosophy of focusing on performance and results into holistic media planning and buying.

To do this successfully, we brought in Stacey McIntyre to lead media across the agency. Stacey has been a senior media powerhouse for decades now and has worked on many major brands across Canada. We knew Stacey was the right fit for Vovia, because of her ongoing passion around the rapidly changing media landscape.  We also saw that many traditional media planners and buyers were struggling to adapt to digital whereas Stacey welcomed the change and embraced the testing of new platforms and technologies to see if they can drive superior performance.

In 2016, having worked well together for a few years and with a shared passion for innovation, continual improvement, and performance, Cam, Susan, and Heather made it official and formed a partnership.

The last 4 years have brought tremendous growth and success for our clients and our team. Our focus on performance and results resonated with clients, especially as the economy struggled and the need to demonstrate the ROI of their marketing investment became more critical. As more businesses moved to ecommerce, we’ve also seen strong growth in that area and we are able to optimize our campaigns to profit.

In 2019, we took the opportunity to do some research of our own by working with an external consultant to ensure that our focus on performance and results was resonating with clients but also importantly with our team. We were also curious if current or future clients had additional needs that we weren’t aware of. We heard that the continual fragmentation of the media landscape, the increasing number of martech systems, and concerns over data complexity and fraud were a challenge that most organizations were facing.

This work also confirmed that our focus on performance and our passion for results was a key differentiator but also that our clients relied on us to keep them current, demystify the landscape, and help them aggregate their data so that it is useful and allows for timely decision making.

It is clear our future is to be a partner that drives performance but also manages the increasing complexity of the media landscape for our clients. With the rise in marketing technology comes an increase in the volume of data that businesses need to sift through, understand, and connect. But data without insights is meaningless so we view our role as one of “translator”, taking this data, analyzing and dissecting it to understand patterns and use it to drive performance. This led to our new positioning tag “Translating data into performance”. Whether these insights shift how clients serve their customers, evolve their product offering, or adapt their competitive positioning, we are there as a partner to help run campaigns that test and provide insight on what is resonating real-time with the market.

We are updating our brand to reflect this promise and further emphasize that we are a performance agency. We’ve seen the impact the pandemic has had on businesses and we know that a focus on business performance and understanding what consumers are really responding to in real-time is key for success on the road ahead. Be sure to check out our new website.