Media agency vet Paul Woolmington on the balance of brand/performance with human/tech
By Michael Bürgi • May 23, 2025 •
Paul Woolmington certainly looks the part of an ad agency creative. But in actuality he’s one of the senior media-side executives with decades of experience under his belt, including at holding companies including IPG, WPP, and Stagwell precursor MDC Partners. Woolmington has also channeled that experience into startups.
He co-founded Naked Communications Americas and founded The Media Kitchen before taking over the CEO reins of Canvas Worldwide, one of the largest independent full-funnel media agencies with clients ranging from Zillow Group to Hyundai Group.
Hitting its 10th anniversary this year, Canvas is now comprised of 600 staffers, with a full-funnel offering that has more recently heavied up on data-side and performance chops — but in a way that balances the need for upper-funnel wisdom and lower-funnel insights. Woolmington explained the approach Canvas is taking to maintain and cultivate that balance.
The following conversation has been edited for clarity and space.
What’s working and not working in the coming together of brand and performance?
The problem with our industry is it’s bottom up. The atomization of channels, platforms, technology, techniques, has meant that we just added more and more and more and more. And we’ve had to — the craft skills of each discipline expanded exponentially. Essentially what happened is everyone has the means to justify their existence. In a world of vested interests, who gives you the objective, neutral truth?
And the clients have also expanded exponentially: Performance units, social units, in-house units, AI units, personalization layers. We want to be top down and bottom up, to meet in the messy middle.
It annoys me when people appropriate language to say, “Oh, we’re a performance agency.” Well, aren’t we all in the business of performance? Or “We’re a content agency.” Well, I beg to differ. You are a microcosm of content.
The arrogance of agencies is they long ago left the high ground and really are [about] execution. That’s why it’s bottom up. They make money, and they were their own worst enemies, because they don’t get paid for the intellectual capital — they get paid to manufacture.
So how do you beef up either brand or performance when you’re full funnel? How do you know where to emphasize?
We have to kiss and punch. Kissing and punching means we have to be brilliant in our specialist areas, but we have to train all those specialist areas to understand they are part of the narrative of outcomes. We have a process now, which is called an outcomes road map: a lot of micro outcomes, medium level outcomes and ultimately, there’s the ultimate KPI. The business CEO or CFO’s outcome — not the wishy washy kind.
We’re doubling down on outcomes. It’s a very rigorous outcomes roadmap process powered by tools, powered by audience platforms, powered by all that stuff that everyone talks about. But at the end of the day, every single client is saying, “We are overwhelmed by data. We don’t know who to trust, (including Google, by the way).” What we need are these data storytellers.
What’s a data storyteller?
Data storytellers are a combination of a business lead and an analytics lead, who knows how to talk to the C suite, knows how to talk across an organization, but also understands all the attribution techniques at the bottom — and they don’t have to necessarily be a data scientist. They need to obviously understand, if you take a business objective, how do you translate that into each of the outcomes? How do you be the sherpa on that data storytelling?
We’re overwhelmed by data, but where are the insights in that data, and how do those data points link together to contribute to the ultimate goal? It isn’t a goddamn dashboard. We’ve got all the dashboards in the world. A famous slide that a CEO used in a board presentation was a smashed Ferrari. Everyone claims they have the Ferrari. But there aren’t that many Lewis Hamiltons.
How does the compensation part work with clients?
What I’ve learned over the years about integration — it’s about trust, respect, but it’s also about the greed of money. If you take the money off the table … What are those bonus incentives? I once said to a client, we did a contract of expectations, and I said, Do you know how every one of the people on your team and on the agency team is bonused?
Did they know the answer?
It was mind blowing. Almost everything was in opposition to integrated work and working collaboratively. And yet everyone at the front end said “Collaboration.” When you actually looked at what their bonuses were, it was all about a bonus in your discipline and in your technique. There wasn’t even, like, 50% if you work as a great teammate.
Obviously, people hunt for money, but they also hunt because, you know, they like the people they hunt with, yeah, and by the way, different people have different skills in the hunting technique.
What else do you need to change? And where does the industry go from here that you want to be part of?
In very quick order, the first wave of change was unbundling. The second wave of change was the digital age. The third wave of change was technology. The fourth wave of change is AI. And I think there’s a fifth wave of change. As we’ve shifted towards the platforms, as we shifted to digital, we live in a data age. But I’m doubling down on the Ferrari analogy. That piece of machinery is unbelievable but a driver has to drive it 180 miles an hour. I think it will be a new breed of individuals comfortable living in a data age.
That fifth stage is going to be incredible people. So building a really strong culture where people want to come and work, but they’re going to want to feel restless that they can actually contribute to change in the industry.
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