Sleeping Barber - A Marketing Podcast

Everybody in this industry is arguing about what AI does to an agency. Almost all of it is agencies talking to themselves about their own cost structure. Clients are asking something else entirely.
So Marc and V put the real question to two of the people growing Canada’s agency business while the ground moves under it: if you are not selling hours, what are you selling?
Mélanie Dunn is President of Plus Company Canada and CEO of Cossette. Karine Courtemanche is EVP of Plus Company Canada and President of its media group, Strategy’s 2024 Media Leader of the Year, Chair of the Canadian Media Directors’ Council.
Inside the conversation: why clients now buy a connected system of tools rather than time, and why the shift off billable hours is being stalled by clients, not agencies. The biggest myth in the business, and the KPI guarantee they sold three times out of hundreds of clients. Why your agency’s tech stack is now a reason to hire them. In-housing done for the right and wrong reasons. Rethinking talent when the pyramid is gone and a junior can mentor a senior. And a genuine cry for help on supporting Canadian media, where the gap between an ethical placement and a cheaper one is often marginal.
The through line: agencies are being pushed to stop selling time and start selling judgment, and nobody has solved how you build judgment at scale.
Enjoy the episode!
Our Guests:
Mélanie Dunn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dunnmelanie/
Karine Courtemanche: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karine-courtemanche-64896330/
Chapters:
00:00 The best time to be in this business
00:46 Barbell or pyramid? Setting up the debate
02:43 What is the role of a modern agency?
06:51 What clients actually buy now: a system, not hours
09:25 If you're not selling time, what are you selling?
12:51 The biggest myth: agencies do want outcomes
15:15 Why outcome models stall: predictability and risk
17:45 Attribution as the missing accountability layer
19:16 Choosing an agency on its tools, not just its people
22:05 Three conditions for integration that actually works
23:57 In-housing, for the right reasons
27:08 Why there is no single agency model
29:22 Building operational platforms, not just media tools
31:36 AI, governance, and building the same tool twice
34:19 Rethinking talent when the pyramid is gone
36:44 Hiring now: references, soft skills, hard questions
45:30 Monday takeaways: governance as an enabler
49:13 A cry for help on Canadian media
57:02 Calgary, and the centre of the world

Marketing runs on comfort blankets. The Sharp Cut cuts them up to see what's inside. This week: brand love.
Start with motorcycles. In 2015, the happiest owners in the entire category rode Victory, ahead of Harley. Two years later, Polaris shut Victory down. The happiest customers in the category could not keep the brand alive. That should bother anyone who spent a career being told marketing's job is to make people love you.
So Marc and V take the believers at their word and run three tests on lovemarks, raving fans, and brand love. Are the most loved brands the biggest? Are they growing the fastest? Does the love come first, before the buying? The evidence, from the ACSI to double jeopardy to ten years of Ehrenberg-Bass data, keeps pointing the same way.
Then they own up to it. Marc's Heinz loyalty that is really just shelf placement. V's Golf Town thank-you notes, where every bit of love showed up after the money was already in the books.
The conclusion is not that love is worthless. It protects you, and losing it hurts. It just is not what grows a brand. Plus what to do with all of this on Monday.
Chapters
00:00 What the Sharp Cut is
00:45 Today's comfort blanket: brand love
00:50 Victory vs Harley: the happiest owners, gone in two years
02:36 Where the idea came from
05:43 The money angle, and the JC Penney lovemark
06:28 The case for love, taken seriously
08:33 Three tests for the believers
08:59 Test 1: are the most loved brands the biggest?
10:20 Double jeopardy, and why loyalty is everywhere
12:04 The Apple challenge
12:45 Test 2: do loved brands grow the fastest?
15:12 Test 3: does love come first?
18:17 Confessions: Heinz, Matouk's, and the Golf Town tees
22:04 So is love a moat? The Kroger debate
24:14 Do people even want a relationship with a brand?
26:31 What to do Monday

Marc and V are back with the Barber's Brief: the good, the bad, and the overhyped, with data, a few opinions, and Great Creative getting the last word.

This week:
Your marketing team already got smaller. Nearly half of B2B teams have shrunk because of AI, almost none of it through layoffs (Wynter). Meanwhile most execs who cut roles for AI now regret it (Orgvue) and plenty are quietly rehiring (Robert Half, Klarna). If the cuts and the reversals are both invisible, how would anyone know it worked?
Ads aimed at robots, not people. Brands are now buying ads to influence the AI agents that shop for us. V's take: feed the machine clean facts, sure, but "converts higher, further down the funnel" is the last click song all over again. The agent harvests demand, it doesn't create it.
Tariffs, margins, and pricing power. Lose a market overnight and no ad fixes it. For everyone else it's margin pressure, and brand strength decides how much you can pass on.
Meta is grading your creative on how different it looks, and reporting more clicks for it. The problem: memory is built on consistency.

Plus Ad of the Week: Sydney Sweeney made Novig famous overnight. But did anyone remember the brand?
Coming up: Brand Love and Lovemarks, and the agency model with Cossette.
Enjoy the show!
Chapters:
00:00 Intro: Welcome to the Barber's Brief
00:52 Story 1: AI is quietly shrinking marketing teams
03:17 If the cuts are invisible, how do we know it's working?
05:47 Story 2: ads aimed at AI agents, not people
08:02 The two-audience problem, and last click rebuilt for robots
10:31 Story 3: tariffs, margins, and brand pricing power
12:57 Why the reason for a price increase beats the size
15:25 Story 4: Meta's creative diversification best practices
17:47 More clicks, or Meta's win? Distinctive assets at risk
20:18 Ad of the Week: Novig x Sydney Sweeney, "Just Sports"
22:54 Famous, but not famous for you
24:15 The shortcut, and whether it pays off
27:31 Coming up: Brand Love, and the agency model with Cossette
Links:
AI Cut the Marketing Team. Then Came the Rehires.
https://martech.org/ai-is-powering-the-loss-of-marketing-jobs/
https://www.orgvue.com/news/55-of-businesses-admit-wrong-decisions-in-making-employees-redundant-when-bringing-ai-into-the-workforce/
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/01/employers-who-laid-off-workers-for-ai-are-reversing-their-decisions.html
https://www.cioandleader.com/why-replacing-employees-with-ai-backfired-for-enterprises/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-08/klarna-turns-from-ai-to-real-person-customer-service
Some companies are using ads to influence AI agents
https://www.marketingbrew.com/stories/optimizing-for-ai-agents-time-magazine-wayfair-strategy
Tariffs Are Squeezing Margins. Your Brand Decides How Much You Can Pass On.
https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/news/2026/08/list-of-products-from-the-united-states-subject-to-counter-tariffs-effective-september-8-2026.html
https://www.npr.org/2026/08/22/nx-s1-5941584/us-canada-tariffs
https://www.abfjournal.com/the-middle-market-manufacturing-squeeze-tariffs-supply-chains-the-dealmaker-ecosystem-in-2026/
https://www.kantar.com/inspiration/brands/how-to-make-pricing-work-for-your-brand
https://www.marketingweek.com/creativity-pays-les-binet/
https://ipa.co.uk/knowledge/ipa-blog/new-evidence-shows-stronger-brands-really-can-charge-more
https://asknigelhollis.com/blog/evidence-that-advertising-increases-demand-at-any-given-price.html
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1177/0092070304269953
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10946705251341080 https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/tariffs/2026/09/29/import-ban-on-canadian-goods-in-effect-while-trump-expects-canadians-to-say-sir-we-are-sorry-follow-for-live-updates/
https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/R49349.html
How advertisers are adjusting to Meta’s ad creative diversification best practices
https://www.marketingbrew.com/stories/meta-ad-creative-diversification-best-practices-advertiser-approach
Ad of the Week
Sydney Sweeney Is Famous. Novig Isn't.
Link: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andrew-tindall_ive-tested-the-sydney-sweeney-ad-males-activity-7505989922999164929-_xcY
Full link list for the ad of the week, in order:
https://deadline.com/2026/09/sydney-sweeney-novig-ad-backlash-female-olympians-1237101507/
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/pei-sydney-sweeney-ad-reaction-9.7351851
https://frontofficesports.com/article/novig-ceo-sydney-sweeney-forces-us-into-national-discourse/
https://globalgamblingnews.com/sydney-sweeney-takes-equity-stake-in-novig/
https://contagious.com/io/article/jenni-romaniuk-on-distinctive-assets
https://www.marketingscience.info/brands-need-distinctive-assets
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andrew-tindall_ive-tested-the-sydney-sweeney-ad-males-activity-7505989922999164929-_xcY
https://system1group.com/creative-dividend
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/28/american-eagle-aeo-earnings-q1-2026.html

Fresh off the Omar Roubi interview, Marc and Vassilis sit down for the PostPod to work through what stuck.
The uncomfortable one: when the business is broken, whose job is it to stop advertising? Target Canada ran full advertising cycles, back to school, holiday, the works, while shelves sat empty and the experience fell apart. So the spend did not just fail to help. It amplified a promise the business could not keep. "Expect more, pay less" landed as "expecting more, paying more."
They get into the reflex every marketer knows: use it or lose it, and the maturity it takes to hand budget back and say the problem is upstream. Plus leading versus lagging indicators, why revenue tells you far too late, and how supply chain efficiency and customer sentiment map onto physical and mental availability.
They also sit with the thing that keeps pulling them back: it was not one P, it was the clock. A lease deal and government hiring timelines built a manufactured pressure that eroded the quality of every decision after it. Nordstrom entered around the same time with a slower playbook and lasted longer.
No clean verdict. A much better set of questions.
Enjoy the show!
Chapters
00:00 Doomed from day one
00:38 PostPod: debriefing Target Canada
00:52 A case study that keeps giving
02:40 Going all in, and Nordstrom's different path
04:05 Canada's geography vs three warehouses
05:41 Whose job was it to say "stop advertising"?
07:49 Use it or lose it: should marketing give budget back?
08:14 Shared accountability and deferred blame
10:56 Leading vs lagging indicators
12:08 The promise to the customer
13:49 Mapping mental and physical availability
14:13 The price problem: priced premium, wasn't
16:08 You can't isolate one P: the clock
17:00 Making quality decisions under pressure
19:28 Why extremes are the best teachers

Target is a company people love. More than 1,700 stores, a brand with real pull. Then it came to Canada, lost billions, and walked away inside four years.
This is a story about Big and Little marketing. Little is the advertising. Big is everything else: product, price, place, and how the whole business organizes around the customer. Roger Martin says a promise has to be memorable, valuable, and deliverable. Advertising makes it memorable. Price and place make it valuable. Product makes it deliverable. In Canada, Target's ads were excellent, and the business broke the promise anyway.
CPA Omar Roubi joins Marc and Vassilis to reverse engineer the collapse through the four Ps. Omar teaches this case at the University of Colorado Denver and built a definitive audio case study on it at LumiQ. He also lived it: his wife moved from Texas to help launch the Toronto-area stores.
Inside: the Zellers real estate deal that started the countdown, empty shelves sitting above full back rooms, the imperial vs metric mix-up, three distribution centres across a 6,000 km country, and why the famous $5.4B loss is mostly a writedown, not operating losses.
A case study in why great marketing can't save a broken business.
Our Guest:
Omar Roubi - https://www.linkedin.com/in/omar-roubi-cpa-texas/

Chapters:
00:00 Cold open: one bad decision begets more
00:26 Big marketing vs Little marketing
02:16 Omar Roubi returns
03:14 The personal connection: launching Target in Toronto
06:14 "Too big to fail"
06:36 The accountant's takeaway
09:22 Place: the Zellers real estate deal
12:08 Wrong locations, wrong customer
18:47 The 12-month countdown clock
22:25 Product: empty shelves, full back rooms
25:02 Physical availability and the metric mix-up
32:46 Price: "expect more, pay less" meets three warehouses
41:05 The currency headwind
45:07 The $5.4B loss vs the $200M operating loss
48:27 Little marketing: is ROI the wrong number?
53:01 The apology videos, and brand vs performance
57:04 The one number that signals trouble first
1:00:07 The human cost: 17,600 people

References:
References
CBC News. (2011, January 13). Target buys Zellers leases for $1.8B. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/target-buys-zellers-leases-for-1-8b-1.981132
CBC News. (2012, July 6). Target wins approval to come to Canada. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/target-wins-approval-to-come-to-canada-1.1160485
Castaldo, J. (2016, January 1). The last days of Target. Canadian Business. https://canadianbusiness.com/ideas/the-last-days-of-target-canada/
Kumar, N. (2025, September 2). The experience paradox: Why better satisfaction scores don't always mean growth. Kantar. https://www.kantar.com/north-america/inspiration/experience/the-experience-paradox
LinkedIn B2B Institute & WARC. (2024, August 13). Making a promise to the customer: How to give campaigns a competitive edge. https://business.linkedin.com/advertise/resources/b2b-institute/making-a-promise-to-the-business-customer
Roubi, O. (Host). (2021, August). The rise and fall of Target Canada [Audio podcast]. LumiQ.
Strauss, M. (2013, April 5). Target Canada prices 0.2 per cent higher than Wal-Mart's: Survey. The Globe and Mail.
Strauss, M. (2014, September 22). Target Canada winning price battle with Wal-Mart. The Globe and Mail.
Target Corporation. (2011, January 13). Target Corporation to acquire interest in Canadian real estate from Zellers Inc., a subsidiary of Hudson's Bay Company, for C$1.825 billion [Press release]. https://corporate.target.com/press/release/2011/01/
Target Corporation. (2015a, January 15). Target Corporation announces plans to discontinue Canadian operations [Press release]. https://corporate.target.com/press/release/2015/01/
Target Corporation. (2015b, January 15). Form 8-K. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000027419/000002741915000005/
Zellers Inc., Hudson's Bay Company, Target Corporation, & Target Canada Co. (2011, September 12). Amended and restated transaction agreement [Exhibit 2(a) to Form 10-Q]. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000027419/000110465911066091/