Dentsu Canada’s 2026 Media Strategy: A Blueprint for Solving Business Challenges

In an industry often obsessed with the latest ad tech or platform algorithm, Dentsu Canada is taking a radically different approach. Under the leadership of Christine Saunders, President of Media, the agency is steering its entire practice toward a singular, powerful focus: solving business problems, not just media ones. This isn’t a subtle shift in tactics; it’s a foundational rewrite of the media agency playbook, designed to future-proof both Dentsu and its clients for 2026 and beyond.

The core philosophy is deceptively simple yet profoundly challenging. Instead of starting conversations with reach, frequency, or even channel selection, Dentsu’s teams are trained to begin with the client’s most pressing commercial hurdles. Are they launching a new product into a saturated market? Struggling with customer retention? Needing to enter a new demographic? By anchoring their strategy in these fundamental issues, media planning transforms from a service into a critical business consultancy.

Why a Business-First Media Strategy is Non-Negotiable for 2026

The drive toward this model is a direct response to a converging set of market pressures. Consumer attention is fragmented across countless touchpoints, traditional measurement is breaking down, and economic uncertainty demands absolute accountability for every marketing dollar spent. In this environment, a media plan detached from core business outcomes is not just inefficient—it’s a liability.

Christine Saunders articulates this vision with clarity: “Our goal is to move beyond being executors of media buys to becoming architects of growth. This means our people need to be fluent in the language of the C-suite—ROI, market share, lifetime value—not just CPMs and GRPs.” This shift requires a new breed of media professional and a reimagined agency structure.

The Three Pillars of Dentsu’s Business-Led Transformation

To operationalize this ambitious vision, Dentsu Canada is building its future on three interconnected pillars:

1. Talent Re-skilling and Horizontal Collaboration

The most significant investment is in people. Dentsu is aggressively upskilling its media teams in business acumen, data analytics, and consultative selling. But perhaps more crucially, they are breaking down silos.

• Integrated Strategy Tables: Media experts now routinely sit with creatives, CX specialists, and data scientists from day one of a client engagement.
• Outcome-Owners, Not Channel Managers: Staff are increasingly measured and rewarded on business KPIs they influence, rather than just their specific channel performance.
• Client-First Language: Internal training emphasizes framing ideas around client pain points, not agency capabilities.

2. Data and Technology as Connective Tissue

A business-problem approach is impossible without robust data. Dentsu is leveraging its global tech stack and partnerships to connect media exposure to real business results. This goes beyond last-click attribution.

The focus is on building closed-loop systems that track how awareness campaigns influence retail footfall, how digital video drives consideration and reduces customer service calls, or how targeted content improves subscription renewal rates. The technology isn’t the hero; it’s the essential proof mechanism that demonstrates media’s direct contribution to the P&L.

3. Agile, Solution-Agnostic Planning

When you start with a business problem, the solution is never predetermined. The team must be agile enough to build a bespoke plan that may look radically different from a traditional media flowchart.

• For a client struggling with market penetration, the answer might be a hyper-local OOH and community partnership strategy, not a national TV buy.
• For a brand facing a reputational challenge, the strategy could pivot to strategic podcast sponsorships and earned media partnerships over broad-scale display advertising.
• The plan is liberated from channel biases and legacy commitments, free to assemble the right mix of paid, owned, and earned touchpoints.

The Tangible Benefits for Brands

What does this mean for a CMO or CEO partnering with Dentsu? The promised benefits are substantial and directly tied to boardroom priorities:

Enhanced Accountability and ROI: Every dollar in the media budget is explicitly tied to a business objective, making investment justification clearer and ROI measurement more direct.
Deeper, More Strategic Partnerships: The relationship evolves from vendor-client to strategic ally, with the agency acting as an extension of the internal growth team.
Future-Proofed Marketing Efforts: By focusing on evergreen business challenges rather than ephemeral platform trends, strategies become more resilient and adaptable to market shifts.
Holistic Customer Understanding: This approach forces a 360-degree view of the customer journey, revealing how media truly influences behavior beyond the final conversion.

Navigating the Challenges Ahead

This transition is not without its hurdles. It requires clients to be willing partners, sharing deeper business data and engaging in more strategic, sometimes slower, initial planning. Internally, it demands a cultural overhaul where success is shared, and failure is analyzed as a cross-disciplinary team.

Furthermore, the industry’s legacy remuneration models, often tied to media spend volume, can misalign with a business-outcome focus. Dentsu is actively exploring value-based and performance-linked pricing structures to ensure complete alignment with client success.

The 2026 Horizon: Media as a Growth Engine

Dentsu Canada’s strategy, championed by Christine Saunders, is a bold bet on the future of the agency model. It’s a recognition that in a complex, data-rich world, the greatest value an agency can provide is not cheaper inventory or clever targeting, but sharper business intelligence and provable growth.

As we look toward 2026, the agencies that will thrive are those that can seamlessly translate media execution into commercial success. By starting every conversation at the root of the problem—the business problem—Dentsu Canada is not just planning media campaigns; it is engineering business solutions. For brands looking to navigate the next era of marketing, this shift from media planner to growth architect may be the most important partnership they cultivate.