Canvas Worldwide’s Paul Woolmington thrives on advertising’s chaos

AI. Fractured attention spans. TikTok is shutting down in the U.S. — no its not. Cookies are going away — or maybe not.

Advertising is chaotic. And Paul Woolmington loves every minute of it. Woolmington has been the CEO of Canvas Worldwide for over a decade, and an agency executive for over three. He spoke with The Current Editor-in-Chief Stephanie Paterik about the future of agencies, the problem of trust in measurement and his personal work-around for industry jargon in the age of AI.

It’s no secret that agencies are under more pressure than ever to provide value. As someone who has been on the agency side for a long time, how do you see their role evolving?

I love the chaos that is around us.

Wait, no one said that before. You love the chaos?

I love chaos because I think great opportunities come for brands, great opportunities come for agencies. And we are a mission-based company. Our charter is “challenge the comfortable.”

The No. 1 priority for clients is outcomes. They’re looking for business results. So there is a macro-outcome, and there are lots of micro-outcomes.

So we are positioning ourselves as the full-funnel performance-mindset agency where we can connect upper, the messy middle and lower funnel.

You mentioned that brands want results. It comes down to results right now. Is that more acute now than it was in the past?

I think it was always the case. It’s just that today the pressure’s on public companies or private companies or emergent technology brands. We have the ability now across every touchpoint to understand outcomes, except here’s the catch:

If you go to Google, Google is going to say the answer is Google. You go to Meta, the answer is Meta. You go to NBC, NBC is going to say it’s NBC.

You go to any supplier, they’re going to say we have the measurement to support and justify our manufacturing plant. So in a world of vested interests, some of them are unintended and some of them are very intentional vested interests, who gives you the objective truth?

We’ve actually developed a discipline, we believe it’s a unique new discipline, and it’s the data storyteller. So it’s how can you tell the story of data throughout all of these siloed disciplines, connect the dots and ultimately point to that ultimate business outcome.

Speaking of the creative and the scientists, do you feel like those two are sitting together at the proverbial lunch table as often as they should?

No, they absolutely aren’t. But they absolutely, in our opinion, have to.

The problem historically was a lot of analytics, and measurement were the back office. They were the end of a presentation. You had your “ahas” and then you showed your measurement framework. You showed obviously your attribution dashboard, whatever it is.

Building a brand in today’s market is incredibly complex. You don’t do it through Meta. And the lowest CPA, your cheapest CPA.

You can see why the industry likes black boxes because it’s simple, right. And you can see why we still hold on to the classic marketing funnel, because it’s tidy. But you’re talking about swirling the paint.

Yes.

Talking about AI because this is fascinating. How are you personally using AI right now?

I kind of hate disciplines that I hide behind acronyms and jargon. I don’t quite like jargon.

So what I’ve done is I’ve created a product called Bullfighter and essentially using AI, I’ve populated all the jargon that myself and my friends hate. If you have any jargon that you hate, let me know.

Journalists tell me I would never use these words. A famous restauranteur, that I know says I hate these words. So I’ve populated it, humanly populated it, but I’ve also used the LLMs to say, tell me what jargon is out there.

I’ve even tested it a little bit on the S&P, and I’ve actually analyzed that CEOs who use flowery language are less likely to perform above the S&P average.

I want to offer to test this on The Current. The first one I would take aim at is the ever-evolving advertising ecosystem.

Oh, my.

That phrase. Can we find another way to say it?

Literally B2B branding is absolutely the worst, and particularly ad tech. It’s just so unmemorable. And I’ve advised a lot of these businesses and I go, “Didn’t you learn anything?”