Humans of Digital spotlights the people shaping Canada’s digital advertising industry, celebrating their expertise, insights, and personal stories.
Meet Melissa Savage
Job Title:
Director, Media
At IAB Canada:
Retail Media Centre of Excellence Lead
Social: 
Company:
My role is to support our businesses and Partners reach Collectors and Canadians with the right message at the right time. While we work to help our Collectors ‘Collect More Moments’, media strategy and execution is essentially for this storytelling and driving value to Canadians everywhere.
What’s one project, campaign, or achievement you’re most proud of in your career so far?
It was incredible to be a part of building out Loblaw Media (now Advance powered by Loblaw) and bringing the first iteration of retail media to Canada. It took a lot of collaboration and work across so many great people, and parts of the company, but was really great to be able to bring something new to the market.
What’s the best piece of professional advice you’ve ever received?
Enabling your teams and empowering your teams is more impactful in leadership than any other management approach. You hired your team for a reason, let them have every opportunity to shine and showcase their experiences.
In your view, what’s the biggest opportunity for our industry right now — and what’s the biggest challenge?
Biggest opportunity and challenge come hand in hand – the only way to scale our networks in Canada will be through collaboration. Everyone has their own unique selling qualities and benefits, being able to use this to patchwork a great Canadian network will be our biggest opportunity to expand and support Canadian media sources.
Which trends, tools, or innovations are you keeping your eye on this year?
The growing category of Data Clean Rooms/Collaboration rooms, and how Canadian privacy restrictions will impact collaboration opportunities like this. How do we continue to scale, while continuing to support Canadian data stewardship expectations.
Getting Human
Coffee, Tea, or Something Stronger?
Coffee
Creative boost go-to?
Here for a mix of genres – but the artist I am always coming back to is a Taylor Swift mix.
If your career were a movie, what would the title be?
Persistence – approaching each new challenge as a learning opportunity.
Complete the sentence – “The future of digital advertising in Canada is…”
…Persistent – approaching each new challenge as a learning opportunity.
Melissa reminds us that progress happens when empowered teams bring bold ideas to a shared Canadian network. From pioneering retail media to championing privacy-first collaboration and data clean rooms, she believes the future belongs to those who build it together with persistence.
Ready to lean in? Read more Humans of Digital stories and join IAB Canada to get involved in our committees, working groups, and cross-industry initiatives.