News Media Canada has produced a new house ad campaign to support the ongoing lobbying effort against Google and Facebook as part of the Levelling the Digital Playing Field program.
Publishers are asked to continue to build awareness of the need for legislation (the Digital Platform Act) to protect local news. This new campaign is scheduled to launch the week of March 22 and ad material is available by clicking here. Over the next few months we will provide News Media Canada members with additional house ad campaigns to coincide with the progress in Parliament.
The publishers of the daily, regional, community, and ethno cultural news publications that account for more than 90 per cent of news media readership in Canada have come together to urge Canada’s parliament to adopt the Australian model. It’s the key recommendation of the report we commissioned: Levelling the Digital Playing Field.
Canada’s Heritage Minister, Steven Guilbeault, has promised action and he’s condemned Facebook’s bully tactics in Australia and elsewhere. And there is support for strong action from every party in House of Commons — the Liberals, Conservatives, the Bloc Québécois, the NDP and the Greens.
The latest events in Australia show that we need to speed up the process to avoid similar vicious threats and bare-knuckle tactics here. The most effective way to fight these power grabs is for democracies to stand together to prevent Google and Facebook from using their global scale and reach to outmaneuver and intimidate national governments.
This new ad campaign, to run from March 22 to mid-April, includes 3 different pieces of creative. Print ready PDF ad material is available in a variety of sizes (2×4, 4×2, 2×7, 5×5, 10×3, 10×7, 10×15) and InDesign files are also available for publishers who prefer to create custom sizes. Publishers are encouraged to support this campaign with house ads or filler ads whenever possible. Material can be downloaded from the Publisher Toolkit here.
