How auditing and switching media agencies cut Canadian TV costs by 66% while growing bookings

Our client is a multi-market online travel brand with revenues exceeding €250M that sells guided trips and tours. Canada is one of its most important growth markets, and television is a significant part of how it builds awareness there.

Television was also one of the largest lines in the Canadian budget, and it was running through an incumbent agency at a high cost per point. Two problems followed. The budget bought less reach than it should have, and the business could not confirm the spend was driving incremental results. Linear TV does not allow user-level A/B testing, so a large annual investment continued largely on trust.

Our job was to bring the same scrutiny to television that the business applied to its performance channels: audit what the incumbent was actually delivering, test whether the market offered better value, and put measurement in place so that any change could be judged on results rather than assertion.

Auditing the incumbent

We started by auditing the existing Canadian TV contract and the media it bought. The analysis focused on what the budget was actually delivering: cost per point, gross rating points, reach and frequency, and how the rates compared with what the market should bear for a buyer of this size.

The audit found that the incumbent buy was expensive for the reach it delivered. Cost per point sat well above what a competitive, zero-based approach could achieve. That gap was the opportunity: the same money could deliver materially more reach, or the same reach could be delivered for far less.

A competitive review, then a switch

Rather than renegotiate with the incumbent alone, we ran a competitive review: a shortlist of media buying agencies, the Canadian TV brief put to each of them, and their proposed delivery and rates compared against the audited baseline. The winner — an independent buyer working on a zero-based model — offered the strongest terms, with every placement in its plan justified on its own merit rather than rolled over from the prior year. We appointed it for the Canadian TV buy and managed the transition, including procurement and contracts.

The switch reset the cost base. Cost per point fell by roughly two thirds against the incumbent. Deployed against the actual plan, the budget delivered 46% more gross rating points than the prior year while spending materially less in absolute terms; on a like-for-like basis, matching the previous year's reach at the new cost per point represented a saving of close to a million euros. Reach and frequency targets were maintained or improved throughout — the efficiency came from the audit and the competitive process, not from trading down to cheaper inventory.

Proving growth, not just savings

A cheaper buy is only valuable if it still drives the business. Because TV cannot be randomised at the user level, we built a geolift causal measurement layer around the campaign: regions not exposed to the campaign served as a control, the relationship between exposed and unexposed regions was modelled from pre-campaign history, and the effect was read as the difference between actual results and the modelled baseline. We tracked sessions, simulations — a purchase-intent signal, where a user configures a trip — and checkouts.

The measurement confirmed the switch grew the business at the same time as it cut cost. The model attributed an 11% lift in sessions, a 20% lift in simulations, and a 23% lift in checkouts over the campaign, all at 99.9% confidence. The lift was strongest in the metrics closest to a booking, and it sustained into the new year, with simulations and checkouts holding above 22% incremental. The cost reduction did not come at the expense of performance — performance improved.

The cost base reset. The audit and agency switch cut Canadian TV cost per point by around two thirds, with cumulative media savings in the region of €900K. The client's own modelling put the value of the execution change at more than €2M per quarter in revenue. The saving created room to extend the campaign or redirect budget to other markets without losing presence in Canada.

Growth alongside the saving, not against it. The geolift measurement showed double-digit incremental lifts in sessions, purchase intent, and checkouts at high confidence over the same period. The cheaper buy also delivered 46% more gross rating points than the year before.

A durable measurement standard for television. Future TV investment can now be sized on evidence rather than assumption, and the same approach is being extended to other markets.

For this project we audited the incumbent Canadian TV buy, ran the competitive agency review, managed the transition to the new agency — including procurement and contracts — and built the geolift measurement layer that proved the change delivered growth.

Albert Abello and Joost Brok lead the engagement, covering media strategy, the agency review, and the measurement framework.