Matt McGowan’s appointment as SVP of business solutions at Bell Media comes at a pivotal moment for Canada’s largest media company.
In April, when Matt McGowan joined Bell Media, Canada’s largest media and entertainment company, he came with a track record spanning both startups and corporate orgs.
He helped scale Bitmoji’s global presence during his nearly six years as a GM at Snap, led projects at Google as head of strategy and steered media initiatives at B2B digital publisher Incisive Media.
Now, McGowan is applying that experience to a company he says is “second to Google and ahead of Meta in ad spend” in Canada, with a footprint that stretches across broadcast, streaming, digital, out-of-home, sports and music. Fun fact: Bell Media produced the show Sullivan’s Crossing, which has spent weeks on the top 10 at Netflix, even reaching the number 1 spot at one point.
But as important as Bell Media’s legacy is, McGowan sees the company’s breadth as its real advantage. “We have these massive audiences everywhere,” he said.
In a market where 75%-80% of viewers favor linear TV, unlike in the US, it’s McGowan’s job to bridge Bell Media’s legacy reach with the needs of modern-day digital media. His focus is on accelerating digital growth, while making Bell Media’s offerings more accessible and measurable for advertisers.
Andrew Byrd: Given Bell Media’s broad reach across multiple verticals and platforms, what does your day-to-day look like? 
Matt McGowan: Four months in, I’m still getting to know the full scope of the business and the team, which is spread across the country from Halifax to Vancouver to Edmonton.
Canada’s scale, both geographically and in terms of market dynamics, makes this a complex role. My focus so far has been on listening: understanding team strengths, products and what’s working.
One surprise has been seeing how well Bell has already built the digital side of its business. The infrastructure is strong, with a mix of third-party solutions and proprietary tools, although it hasn’t always been effectively showcased to the market.
AB: How are you approaching Bell Media’s ad tech and advertising business, and are you planning to expand any of your offerings or better integrate existing tools?
MG: Our focus is on making Bell’s inventory easier to buy and measure across the platforms advertisers already use. One challenge is that measurement frameworks vary widely. For example, agencies and advertisers measure linear TV differently from digital, and no single standard governs both.
Bell has built a suite of tools, including the Bell Marketing Platform, which allows advertisers to plan, activate and measure campaigns in a largely self-serve environment. It integrates first-party data from Bell, third-party data and advertiser data. It can activate media through DSPs such as The Trade Desk and Microsoft, with additional platforms currently in testing.
AB: Bell has used its first-party data to partner with platforms like The Trade Desk and use tools like TTD’s Kokai to help unify measurement across linear and streaming. How do these partnerships align with your strategy, and are there others in the works to further streamline access and measurement?
MG: Before I arrived, Bell built its own DSP on top of Microsoft’s platform, with inventory also available on The Trade Desk. The original idea was “If we build it, they will come,” but, in practice, media buyers and planners want simple, familiar ways to reach audiences. Expanding access through The Trade Desk and testing additional platforms makes our inventory easier to buy and supports more unified measurement.
The next step is to integrate Bell’s inventory directly into agency and advertiser platforms, such as Omnicom’s Omni tool, so that buyers can plan, purchase and measure campaigns entirely within their existing systems. This approach streamlines workflows and enables advertisers to make consistent, data-driven decisions across both linear and digital channels.
AB: With linear TV still dominant in Canada, how does Bell approach CTV and streaming?
MG: We segment the market into three groups: traditional linear viewers (approximately 60% to 70% of Canadians), cord-shavers who use both linear and streaming services and fully streaming audiences. Linear TV remains our largest product, offering mass reach, brand safety and scale. Connected TV provides incremental reach—roughly 10%-15% more.
While most ad dollars are still in linear, we’re gradually shifting toward CTV and streaming, which are more measurable and addressable.
AB: How does Bell Media view the digital advertising environment in Canada, especially considering fragmentation and privacy concerns?
MG: The digital market is both fragmented and highly concentrated. While there’s a long tail of smaller publishers, roughly 75%-85% of digital ad spend in Canada flows through two or three major players.
In contrast, linear TV remains a core part of our business, though the audience and ad spend are declining slightly each year. Digital consumption, particularly on mobile devices, continues to grow, necessitating different strategies to compete with digital-native platforms and walled gardens.
This shift also presents new challenges related to privacy, brand safety and attribution. Unlike linear TV, digital requires careful consideration of these factors, and Canada has its own privacy rules that differ from the US. Our opportunity lies in leveraging Bell’s large digital footprint while increasing awareness of our capabilities in the market.
AB: What should someone with experience in US ad markets know about the difference between privacy regulations in the US and Canada?
MG: Canada’s privacy framework, governed by PIPEDA, sits somewhere between US and EU standards. It’s not as strict as GDPR, but stronger than US rules, which tend to be more fragmented.
Canadian regulations also include bilingual requirements for communications and stricter ad standards around alcohol, cannabis, gambling and marketing to children. For example, Quebec’s Consumer Protection Act prohibits marketing to individuals under 13.