How Okotoks' Western Wheel Became One of Canada's Best Newspapers

What does it take to keep a small-town newspaper not just alive, but thriving in the digital age? 

Carlin Lutzer dives into that very question with Curtis Armstrong, the new publisher of the Western Wheel, Okotoks' beloved weekly newspaper, and the Cochrane Eagle. 

The duo explore how the Western Wheel has remained one of the top community newspapers in Canada, what it's like to arrive in Okotoks fresh from Ontario, and how the paper is evolving far beyond print. 

From the Western Wheel Cares fundraiser topping $105,000 to cutting-edge digital marketing tools most local businesses have never heard of, this conversation reveals just how deep the roots of great local journalism…and genuine community connection run here in Okotoks.

Listen for:

:23 How Is the Western Wheel Reinventing Itself for the Digital Age?
4:37 What Is Western Wheel Cares and Why Does It Matter to Okotoks?
11:55 Is the Western Wheel Really Left Leaning or Just Reporting the News?
17:09 How Has Bill C 18 Changed Local News on Facebook and Google?
30:08 How Does Geofencing Let Businesses Reach the Right Customers?

Connect with Guest: Curtis Armstrong,  News Publisher and Digital Marketing Leader
Website | LinkedIn | Instagram | Email

Connect with Carlin

Email | Website | LinkedIn | Facebook 

Sheep River Dog Rescue formally know as Moe Dog Rescue.  Passionate about giving Dogs another chance.

Special thanks to Okotoks Nissan for arranging this podcast with Kelly Hrudey.

Transcript

Announcer (00:00)
  Welcome to the Okotoks Podcast, where the only thing bigger than our opinions is the rock outside town. Shout out to our sponsor, Carlin Lutzer Real Estate.

Carlin Lutzer (00:23)
  For decades, the smell of fresh ink and the thud of the paper on the doorstep were part of life in Okotoks. The Western Wheel was not just something you read. It was something you held, flipped through, clipped from, and talked about over coffee. But the world does not stand still. Today, attention lives on screens. News competes with notifications, and the battle is not newspaper versus newspaper anymore. It is newspaper versus everything.

So what happens when a legacy publication like the Western Wheel steps into the digital age? How does a community paper stay relevant when algorithms decide what we see, when engagement often means outrage, and when data follows us everywhere?

Today, I sit down with Curtis Armstrong, the new publisher of the Western Wheel and the Cochrane Eagle, both owned by Great West Media. We talk about the tradition of print. We talk about Western Wheel Cares and the generosity of the community. But then we pivot.

Carlin Lutzer (01:25)
  We dig into how the Western Wheel has evolved beyond the printed copy and into a full scale digital marketing agency. From geofencing to connected TV to targeting audiences based on real data, this is not your grandfather’s newspaper. If you think the Western Wheel is just ink on paper, you are about to see the whole picture. Let us get into it.

Well, Curtis, finally I get to visit with the Western Wheel. I have been planning on this for a while.

Curtis Armstrong (01:57)
  Nice to see you.

Carlin Lutzer (01:59)
  Yes. And you are the new publisher of the Western Wheel and the Cochrane Eagle. Now, for some listeners, they may not know that the Western Wheel and the Cochrane Eagle are owned by the same ownership group.

Curtis Armstrong (02:11)
  That is right. Our ownership group is Great West Media, and we are based out of St. Albert. That is where our printing press and head office are.

Carlin Lutzer (02:18)
  Right, for sure. Yeah. And we visited a few weeks back, and it was a fascinating conversation. In that conversation, I learned so much about the Western Wheel that I did not know before. So I do appreciate your time and appreciate you.

Now, you are new to the area. You moved here, if I am correct, in November.

Curtis Armstrong (02:41)
  That is right. I moved here from Ontario.

Carlin Lutzer (02:44)
  So you got here just in time to experience Light Up Okotoks. Now tell me what you thought about Light Up Okotoks.

Curtis Armstrong (02:52)
  Oh, I thought it was an outstanding event put on by the Town of Okotoks. It just blew me away, the volume of people making their way down the street for the tree lighting and then back for the fireworks. Myself and our former publisher, Sean, overlapped for a couple of weeks when I first got here so he could show me around and let me get a feel for it, for which I was very appreciative.

He and I, and Gail, our office manager, were out front selling 50 50 tickets for our draw in support of the Western Wheel Cares fundraiser that we do every year.

Carlin Lutzer (03:27)
  Yes. And you guys sold a lot of tickets there, did you not?

Curtis Armstrong (03:30)
  We did. We almost sold out. Actually, the deadline for the person to claim the winning ticket was just yesterday. So we have got $6,650 more to put into the 2025 Western Wheel Cares, bringing it to over $105,000 for this year, which would also be an all time record for the Western Wheel Cares fundraiser.

So I am just absolutely overwhelmed by the generosity of the folks in Okotoks and throughout Foothills County in support of the community partners that we support year after year with this fundraiser.

Carlin Lutzer (04:09)
  Yeah, for sure. Well, at least the person will never potentially know that they did not get it. They bought the ticket, no doubt they lost it. And you guys did your due diligence, because I know the rules are so strict in regard to posting and when the prize needs to be claimed. So you guys did your due diligence inside the time frame, and now more money goes back into the community.

That was something I did not know about. Can you talk a little bit about Western Wheel Cares and what that is all about?

Curtis Armstrong (04:37)
  No, absolutely. It was started, I believe, 14 years ago, and it supports seven not for profit and charitable groups serving Okotoks and Foothills County. I do not have the list in front of me at the moment, but off the top of my head, it is Rowan House, Hospice, the Animal Shelter, the Food Bank, Inclusion Foothills, and Foothills Advocacy in Motion. I believe those are the seven.

Carlin Lutzer (05:03)
  Yeah, no, for sure.

Curtis Armstrong (05:04)
  So we did the big novelty cheque presentation after the holidays, and we will have to update the total on there because we were just a few hundred dollars shy of $100,000. And now, with the 50 50 expiring, we get to put that $6,650 back in. So we will be distributing that to our partners in the upcoming days as well.

Carlin Lutzer (05:25)
  That is awesome. I have lived here for 15 years, and that is something I have known about this town, but not to the detail, to the extent that I know about it now. Since starting the podcast, I have realized just how generous of a community we do have and what Okotoks and Foothills County really represent in their giving.

It just blows my mind, the amount of great organizations and the organizations raising money to give to the needy in the community. It is just unbelievable.

Shifting gears a little bit, can you tell us how you are liking Okotoks?

Curtis Armstrong (06:02)
  Oh, I love Okotoks. It is about as big of a town as I would like to live in, but you have also got an international airport that I can be at in 45 minutes on a good traffic day. I actually have not even gone into Calgary since I moved here because everything I have needed has been here. Maybe next time I fly out, or if I am going to a Flames game or a concert or something.

Other than that, everyone here is very, very friendly. I tend to walk along the trails here, and you have a great trail network that is actually very well maintained in the wintertime. It blows me away how commonplace people think the deer are here. For someone who just came here, I would see several every day just walking around. The deer are cool with people, and for the most part, people are cool with them too, I guess, except for eating their gardens and whatnot.

But it is a lovely community, and I have been overwhelmed by the welcome that I have gotten, not only from my team here, but also from the community at large.

Curtis Armstrong (07:04)
  It is a real pleasure.

Carlin Lutzer (07:06)
  Right, absolutely. I think when people first move here, they look at Okotoks simply as a bedroom community to Calgary, and they do not really move here knowing the life that this community does have. For some people, they choose not to really get involved, not to really see what Okotoks does have to offer.

But once you shift that gear into wanting to be part of this community, wanting to grow, wanting to see what is going on, I think your eyes are opened wide to all the great things that this town does have. I think sometimes people even take for granted the Western Wheel that we do have, what a great business this is, and what a great thing it adds, not just to Okotoks, but to the entire Foothills County, because it is a weekly newspaper keeping us in the loop.

Now, you guys are certainly faced with some hurdles, with a lot of competition, so to speak, for people’s reading and social media attention these days.

Curtis Armstrong (08:18)
  Absolutely. Back in the day, in a town like Okotoks, it would be newspaper one competing with newspaper two. That does not really exist anymore. Obviously, we are the only newspaper in Okotoks, but we are really competing for people’s attention across every single medium.

Everyone has one of these, which is essentially a rectangle that has the entirety of human knowledge on it, and the ability to communicate with anybody around the world. So what we really want to focus on editorially is the news and content that kind of make our town tick.

Obviously we cover council and committees and, thankfully, the very little crime there is here compared to other markets I have been in. But we also cover upcoming events. We talked about it before. Something like Light Up Okotoks, wow, what a great way to get initiated into the town and see the whole community come together up and down McRae and Elizabeth. I had a chance to go chat with some of the other businesses and exhibitors who had set up, and the entertainment was great.

We lean in quite heavily to local sports as well, and that is reflected in the pages that come out every Wednesday and on our website every day too. I have the pleasure of working with a really fantastic editorial team who have been doing this for a long time, and many of them have long ties within the community as well.

Curtis Armstrong (09:51)
  It is not always easy work, for sure. Obviously, we are competing with every other means of media and stimuli out there. But when you put together really good content that people are looking for, it is in demand and it shows. I can see the analytics of our website, what stories are hitting with our readership and whatnot, and when I look at the pages of the paper before it goes to press every week, I can say, yeah, this is good. This is really good.

Carlin Lutzer (10:28)
  Yeah. Well, I certainly use you guys. I flip through the newspaper, read through it, and I even find potential guests for the podcast through articles that you guys have written. I feel you guys do a great job.

Now, I interviewed Dick Nichols probably late spring, and Dick is a freelancer for the Western Wheel. Word kind of got out that I was going to interview someone from the Western Wheel, and I started to get comments, not a ton, but a few, saying, “Well, the Western Wheel, they are so left leaning. Make sure when you interview them, you say this and this and this and that.” And I am like, okay, whatever.

But what are your thoughts? Because no doubt you are trying, I am sure, to stay in the middle, but sometimes it is hard. You have opinion pieces, and people do not really see that little part saying that it is an opinion piece from a freelancer or just from a regular reader who writes something into the Western Wheel. How would you respond to that? Where do you stand, Curtis?

Curtis Armstrong (11:55)
  Well, as it pertains to our news coverage, I would say it is pretty straight down the middle, and there is not a lot of editorializing that goes on in the coverage that we do. So if the town or the county has a report come out that has some bad news or whatever, we would not use a descriptor like “the damning report” or “the horrible report” or anything like that.

From the news point of view, it is pretty much unbiased. On the opinion side, well, that is where people begin to take umbrage. To say that something is left leaning or right leaning is really, really subjective. But I would also say that if anyone reads a column in the newspaper by one of our contributors, or a letter writer who has written a letter to the editor, and they would like to voice their counter opinion, they are more than welcome to submit something back to us.

We want to make sure that we are a reflection of the community, but especially when it comes to opinion pieces, they are someone’s opinion. Often those opinions do come from their own values or biases or whatever you want to call them, their perspective. But if somebody reads it and does not think that it squares with them, they are more than welcome to shoot me a line and send me something in to retort, or to support, or whatever they want to do.

Carlin Lutzer (13:15)
  For sure. We are certainly living in a day and age where if you have a different opinion than me, well, you cannot. And if you do, I do not know if we can ever be friends or if we will ever hang out, because our opinions are getting so very, very strong.

So it must be such a struggle. Obviously, you are not writing these things to keep everybody happy. You are writing them to report what is going on. I think social media has changed our mindset so much because that is instinct now. We have an algorithm that, if we go on Instagram, it is feeding us the way we are leaning, whether we are in the centre, left, or right. Those are the kind of thoughts we are getting. But the news, here it is, it is a hard copy. You have got to take it or leave it, and you cannot necessarily get your comments out as quickly as you can on social media.

Curtis Armstrong (14:17)
  Well, absolutely. You mentioned Instagram, but also TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, X, whatever you want to call it. Their algorithms are set to keep feeding you the content that you have been interacting with. So if you are liking a certain style or kind of post, it is going to keep sending that to you.

Understand that their whole business model is engagement. So the longer you are on any of those platforms and the more you keep scrolling, the more ads are delivered, the more time you are on their platform, and the more money they make. It is really as simple as that.

Curtis Armstrong (14:50)
  Many times we can kind of build a bubble around ourselves where competing thoughts do not make their way in, and we do not even know that we are doing it through these platforms. So it is a double edged sword because there are a lot of positives that can come out of social media, but I am not sure whether their net effect on society is positive or negative.

What they realized in the late 2010s was that outrage drives engagement, and it has more stickiness than seeing pictures of your friends’ kids or other content. They figured out not that long ago that the more you rile people up, the more they are going to stay, the more they are going to comment, the more engagement there is on their platforms, and the more money they are going to make. It is really that simple.

Carlin Lutzer (15:49)
  Yeah, no, fair enough. I posted something this last week due to the last podcast we released on Tuesday, and it was the lacrosse comment. I intentionally started a debate saying, “What is better? Who is tougher? Lacrosse players or hockey players?” The guest answered the question, and he is the executive director of Lacrosse Alberta. Of course, he said lacrosse. Well, that certainly started something. I think we are up to 30,000 views, which is big for me, and it is moving along. So you are right, outrage drives engagement, because a lot of people are getting a little heated about it.

Now with Bill C 18, and that of course is the bill passed by our federal government regarding platforms like Google and Meta not being able to post a link, if there is a great article that the Western Wheel has, I can no longer post that and send it on Google or Facebook. How has that affected the Western Wheel, or has it affected it at all?

Curtis Armstrong (17:09)
  Well, you still can post it on Google. Just for clarity’s sake, Bill C 18 compelled Meta and Google to essentially share the wealth with news publishers across Canada. I cannot speak for other media organizations, but the media organization I was with when Bill C 18 was implemented already had a deal with Google and Facebook, and it was moving along quite nicely.

I think the federal government had the best of intentions, but you know what they say about the road to hell being paved with good intentions. Essentially, Facebook just said, “We are not even going to entertain this idea. We are just going to ban all these news media sites from being able to post on our platform,” specifically Facebook and Instagram.

Subsequently, a deal has been worked out with Google through News Media Canada. I was in British Columbia when this came down, in northern BC, in Prince George, and of the millions of page views we got a month, not a whole lot of them proportionately came from Facebook unless we had a story that had a viral component due to the nature of what happened.

Curtis Armstrong (18:29)
  It could be a building blew up in downtown Prince George and we got hundreds of thousands of page views from that story. But many of those page views, when you start getting into the hundreds of thousands, came from outside our traditional trading area. A page view from Calgary or Vancouver or Toronto or London, Ontario, or somewhere else in the United States is not overly valuable, so to speak. We always try to get as much local readership as we can.

It is nice to look at your analytics and go, okay, you had a story that hit 200,000 page views, that is fantastic. But from a monetization point of view, I was much more concerned, and I am much more concerned, about driving traffic directly to our site without having to worry about social media networks that can change their algorithm however they want to, or just completely ban the content.

In the case of Meta, it is not a shadow ban. It is just straight up, you cannot view this content within Canada. So if you were to visit another country and go on Facebook and visit the Western Wheel site, it would still be updated and you would see it, but because you are here in Canada, you cannot see it.

Based on Meta’s approach in other jurisdictions, they just do not want to be in the news game, it does not look like, to me.

Carlin Lutzer (19:48)
  Right. And that is fair enough. That is their decision. Now, has there been any, I thought I heard maybe Mark Carney talking about changing that earlier on. Is that no longer in the cards? Maybe you have not heard anything lately?

Curtis Armstrong (20:02)
  I really do not know what the federal government’s plan is for local media in regard to Bill C 18 or anything else. Quite honestly, as a country, I think we have bigger issues to worry about, in my opinion, that are much more important and time sensitive. It would be nice if they were to look at it again.

A lot of media outlets, and I do not want to paint with a broad brush, but I have been doing this for a long time across the country, leaned really heavily into Facebook, including a lot of radio and television stations. So if you lose 60 or 70 percent of your website traffic once C 18 comes through, that is significant.

Curtis Armstrong (20:42)
  We knew it was coming. It was not like it was a hard surprise in August of 2023 when that came into effect. But what you also see now is that instead of people posting links, they will just take a screenshot of the headline and post it in a group or on their own wall or whatever.

You have also seen a few pseudo news sites creep up, specifically on Instagram. Oftentimes they are gleaning content from other, I would say, more traditional news sources and then just putting it out to their thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram.

So it is a bit of a brave new world. But it is not like I am operating in Calgary. I am operating in Okotoks and Cochrane, in smaller communities. It would be nice to have our content on Facebook and Instagram, but I do not know. I guess we will see. I think the legislation that was passed, in my opinion, was flawed and was not the appropriate measure for the issues facing traditional media outlets in Canada, but that is just my opinion.

Carlin Lutzer (21:56)
  Yeah. No, I think there are certainly a lot of opinions as to why that happened. I certainly have my opinion. I do not know if it is right. Mine might lean more toward a conspiracy theory than anything, so I will not even get into that today.

Curtis, your main office is in St. Albert. I think our listeners would be very interested to know where the newspaper is printed, how many copies are printed each week, and then how many are delivered to homes. I think it would be interesting to hear some of those stats.

Curtis Armstrong (22:36)
  Yeah, for sure. We are printed in St. Albert. Actually, in nearly 20 years of doing this, I had never seen a printing press operate before. So when I first came out to Alberta, I ended up in St. Albert for a week at our head office so I could meet everybody there, get my laptop, have a powwow with the folks there, and put faces to names.

I did get a chance to take a tour of the printing facility, which is probably among the newest and most technologically advanced printers in Canada. It is quite an impressive setup that we have there, and it shows, in my opinion, in the print quality of the Wheel and our other publications as well. It is just really crisp, really clean.

Curtis Armstrong (23:30)
  It is quite the operation to see in action. We print just over 17,000 copies per week, the majority of which are delivered by our hundreds of carriers throughout the town of Okotoks and out in the county, with the remainder going out via Canada Post, plus a few, I do not know, 200 or 300 copies that we have here at our office for pickup. We have them on newsstands and in boxes all throughout Okotoks and Foothills County as well.

But the overwhelming majority of the press run every week is delivered by our carrier force, made up of, I believe, in the neighbourhood of about 150 carriers right now.

Carlin Lutzer (24:08)
  Is that right? Okay. Yeah, I used to deliver newspapers as a kid as well, and it was a great job. I imagine you are always kind of looking for carriers too.

Curtis Armstrong (24:20)
  Absolutely. Yeah. We kind of have an ongoing recruitment campaign going. We are pretty well covered, but kids age out, or they get another job, or whatever it may be. But yeah, if it is something anyone is interested in, they can just give us a shout, for their kids or grandkids or themselves, even if they want to. You get to see the newspaper before anyone else does, so there is something to be smug about there, I suppose.

Carlin Lutzer (24:44)
  Yeah, no, for sure. This is dating me, Curtis, but I was delivering newspapers when the Regina Leader Post switched from black and white to colour. Oh my gosh, did we think we were something.

Curtis Armstrong (24:58)
  A brave new world there, fella.

Carlin Lutzer (25:00)
  I know, right? Yeah, absolutely. So 17,000 copies, and some go through Canada Post. Is that because people living down south or living somewhere different want them, or do you mail them to the more rural parts of Foothills County?

Curtis Armstrong (25:19)
  The north end, on the way up to Calgary, is where the majority of the Canada Post ones would go, where it is a little more rural.

Carlin Lutzer (25:26)
  Yeah. Yep, fair enough.

Curtis Armstrong (25:28)
  So yeah, maybe 10 percent of our press run goes out via Canada Post, but it is mostly those more acreage property areas.

Carlin Lutzer (25:37)
  Yeah, for sure. So I receive my copy of the Western Wheel on Wednesday. What is the cutoff date for the writers to get it to print?

Curtis Armstrong (25:48)
  We go to press around noon on Tuesday afternoon. We are in production right now. Usually Friday afternoon or Monday morning, we receive what is called the dummy, and the dummy is essentially the basic layout of the newspaper with the ads floated out over the pages that are coming up, so that our guys upstairs in the editorial department can page plan. They know, okay, we have got this amount of space on these pages, and here is how we are going to fill it.

We press right around midday on Tuesday, and then it comes here Tuesday evening from St. Albert. Then we start distributing them, in some cases Tuesday evening, but the overwhelming majority go out Wednesday morning.

Carlin Lutzer (26:34)
  Okay. Okay, for sure. Yeah, because the newspaper is so pivotal. What do you feel the Western Wheel has done correctly? Newsprint is dying in some communities, but it seems like, I think you told me, that the Western Wheel is one of the top papers in Canada for its size.

Curtis Armstrong (26:59)
  Yeah. For the community that we serve and the press run that we have, we have won numerous provincial and national awards for our news coverage, the general excellence of the newspaper itself, editorial pages, photography, which is a huge component of what we do as well.

I think what has made the Wheel successful goes back to previous owners and previous publishers, people like Paul Rachert and Sean before me, really being involved in the community with initiatives like Western Wheel Cares. If you look through pretty much any edition of any paper that we have published, the entirety of the news within it is all locally sourced. There is no wire service content in there. It is all Okotoks and Foothills County content for our Okotoks and Foothills County readership.

Curtis Armstrong (27:52)
  I think that if you make something that is a mirror of the communities you are serving, there is going to be a demand for that product from readers throughout the area you serve, and in Cochrane as well. I do not want to exclude Cochrane, but we are having a more Okotoks centric conversation here.

Carlin Lutzer (28:09)
  For sure.

Curtis Armstrong (28:10)
  That, in turn, creates demand from advertisers because they know they are reaching the local audience they are looking for.

Carlin Lutzer (28:18)
  Yes. Certainly, like we talked about the other day, the Western Wheel has found ways to shift gears and stay relevant for the digital age as well. Yes, you have the printed copy, which is so valuable. I do believe that. I do not think it is just because I am old school. I think I like reading a book as opposed to reading on an iPad or whatever. I like the hard copy.

But you guys have also shifted gears to the digital age, and this was something I found completely fascinating that I had no idea the Western Wheel did as well. For business owners looking to advertise, it is not just the print copy. It is the digital marketing you guys are involved in as well.

Curtis Armstrong (29:16)
  Yeah, absolutely. Along with printing our weekly newspaper, and we do Foothills Magazine three times a year, so we are working on that one for the end of April or May right now, we also are a full service digital marketing agency.

To break it down as simply as I can before we drill down a bit further, if something has a screen and an internet connection, we can reach it. Depending on the businesses we deal with and the kind of customers or potential customers they are looking to reach, we come up with holistic marketing solutions to get them from where they are to where they want to get to. We do that using a number of different digital marketing platforms.

I have recently introduced two since coming here, if I can expand on that a little bit, Carlin.

Carlin Lutzer (30:07)
  For sure. Absolutely.

Curtis Armstrong (30:08)
  Sure. Okay. The first one is called Rainbarrel, and it is a digital marketing platform that allows us to essentially drop a pin in the equivalent of a Google map anywhere in North America and set a radius of 10 metres up to 1,000 metres. We can drop as many pins as we want in whatever areas we want and set any time frame we want in the last year.

The platform will tell us, to the best of its ability, how many cell phones were in that area during that time. So it is a really great way, if market share is something you are looking to focus on. Hypothetically, Carlin, you are the owner or manager of one of the grocery stores here. When it comes to grocery marketing, it is really all about market share because it is not like you can market and create new grocery shoppers. You really want to get as many grocery shoppers as possible to come to your store instead of your competitors’.

So if you are, let us say, the manager of Save On Foods, I could drop a pin in Safeway and Walmart and No Frills and Costco and any other grocery store around here, set a time frame of the last three months, and the platform will tell me how many cell phones have been at each of your competitors’ locations in that time. Then we start a marketing campaign on any platform you want to use those custom audiences.

Carlin Lutzer (31:27)
  Yeah.

Curtis Armstrong (31:28)
  That is one that I have used for about five years, in different iterations, right across Canada and actually right across North America. The applications for it are really limitless. I have done a lot of recruitment marketing, specifically here in Alberta, for skilled tradespeople because there is such a high demand for them. I have done a lot of recruitment for post secondary institutions.

Usually post secondary institutions have a pretty good handle on their marketing and what their return on investment is. So they give us audiences they are looking to reach, we capture them, and those audiences can then be activated on any digital marketing platform or any social media network our clients want. All we have to do is push that audience to Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or Snapchat or TikTok. I am somewhat platform agnostic myself when it comes to digital marketing, and I am a big fan of A B testing.

Curtis Armstrong (32:26)
  If we gather an audience set, like the one I did when I first got here, which was the Calgary Roughnecks, with a one month lookback window, I can see on certain days there was a big spike in attendance. If I were to look, I imagine it would correlate with a Flames home game or some other event or concert happening on those days.

Maybe you are a sports bar in Calgary and you want those people who have gone to Flames games since the season started up until now, but you only want to market to those people when they are in the city of Calgary or maybe the surrounding communities as well. It can be as precise as that.

Carlin Lutzer (33:03)
  Yeah, it is crazy. That is not all done through Bluetooth. That is just pinging off a cell phone tower and it knows you were there. Yeah. Okay. It is very cool, but it is also kind of scary, right? It is just like, holy cow.

Curtis Armstrong (33:19)
  It is scary. We do not realize how much data we have given away. Now, this data is all anonymized. I cannot say that if I captured you at Light Up, if I were to drop a pin for when Light Up was back in November here on Elizabeth and McRae Streets, I can only get an aggregate number.

Now, it does provide demographics of gender and age breakdown as well, into cohorts. But you cannot say, “Oh, I can see that your cell phone was here on such and such a day.” It is really a numbers game. For that particular platform, and for those who may have a lesser understanding of digital marketing, almost any campaign you do on any platform starts with a geographic filter. So let us just say Okotoks, and that is based on people who are in Okotoks right now today.

Curtis Armstrong (34:07)
  So if I set up a campaign for company A and I set it just to the geography of Okotoks, how many people are we missing every weekday between 8:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. because they commuted into Calgary?

Carlin Lutzer (34:19)
  Right, right, for sure.

Curtis Armstrong (34:19)
  I thought so as well. So it is a very fine yet very important distinction, marketing to people based on where they are right now versus where they were maybe three months ago.

I have used it for all kinds of things. I had a client this past year based out of the United States, and they do crypto security for your cryptocurrency wallet. There was a huge crypto conference in Las Vegas, so they gave me the date back in May and the address of the convention centre. I dropped a pin on it and got, I think, about 30,000 devices that were there over that three or four day period. But he only wanted to market to people who were in really tech heavy centres in the United States, like San Francisco and the Bay Area, Denver, Dallas, New York, and Miami.

Curtis Armstrong (35:12)
  So it is a very powerful tool when used effectively and properly.

The other one that I just brought on is Amazon’s digital marketing platform. The big advantage for our clients, if they want to leverage the data Amazon has, is this. I believe I used the example of you, Carlin, having opened a vet clinic here in Okotoks and looking for pet owners.

I open Amazon’s platform, I pick Okotoks and maybe High River and any other communities around here, and I build an audience set of anyone who has bought anything related to cat or dog ownership on Amazon’s platform in the last year. So it could be a collar or a vest or dog and cat treats or food or litter, anything related. Then it gives me a number, and we advertise using Amazon’s platform, but also third party placements.

I use the Weather Network app as a good example. Most people have the Weather Network or some weather app on their phone. You open that up to check whether it is going to rain or snow this afternoon, and up pops an ad for your newly opened vet clinic.

Carlin Lutzer (36:27)
  Yeah. No, it is absolutely crazy. There are so many different avenues, and I think people sometimes try to take it upon themselves to market online or whatever, but it is such a wide spectrum when it comes to getting the demographics.

So if somebody comes to you, Curtis, comes to the Western Wheel and they want to advertise, obviously there is the printed material where they can advertise, but that could also lead into digital marketing as well if they choose.

Curtis Armstrong (37:09)
  Absolutely. It depends on what their objectives are and the audiences they are looking to reach. Those are just two out of several platforms that we have. They are just two of the newest ones we have brought on board.

It can also be connected TV. So for those of us who watched the Olympics over the last few weeks, especially streaming it, during those commercial breaks we have the ability to reach those people. That is called connected TV. So anyone who has cut their cable cord or is using an ad supported streaming service can be reached.

Really, it is not about platform or what you are watching. It is about the audience you are looking to reach as an advertiser. In many cases these are an appropriate tool, but in some cases they are not. What I really like to do, and this is probably why I have stayed in this industry as long as I have, is learn about other people’s businesses and organizations, what they are trying to do, and specifically why they do it. I just find it very interesting.

Curtis Armstrong (38:05)
  With the products and services that we have, if there is a match that we feel would be appropriate, then yes, we will absolutely sit down and have a conversation and say, okay, based on what you have told us, Carlin, you are opening a vet clinic. We can do this and this and this. The Amazon example I gave just a moment ago would certainly be something I would include in there because I feel it would be the most appropriate solution for what you are trying to accomplish.

Carlin Lutzer (38:30)
  Right. Yeah. So that was something I was surprised the Western Wheel offered. I had no idea that was part of what you guys do. But it certainly makes sense because it goes hand in hand. Obviously, the advertising and then moving things into the digital age, which is no doubt, Curtis, something keeping the Western Wheel high up as one of the best newspapers in Canada. You guys are not just settling in. You are adapting and evolving with the ever changing technology platforms, which is very hard to keep on top of.

Curtis Armstrong (39:15)
  Well, it is. For me, I actually do have to do a fair amount of industry research as time goes on because even those two platforms I just explained, Rainbarrel and Amazon, change all the time. You have to keep on top of that. Then new entrants come into the market.

I know one of the major email providers now has, and we do not have access to it yet because we are too small a market for it, a platform that uses receipts emailed to your account from e commerce vendors or if you go to Home Depot and choose the email receipt. One of those providers makes that data available on a marketing platform to compete with Amazon.

But Amazon is the biggest retailer, really. It is certainly the biggest e commerce retailer, and I believe it just surpassed Walmart as the biggest retailer overall right now.

Curtis Armstrong (40:10)
  So there are all kinds of new solutions and platforms coming down the pipeline. But for me, like I said before, it is not that I favour one platform over another. I am going to favour my newspaper first and our website. But when it comes to whether someone should do Spotify or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or whatever, we have tools that really allow you to segment audiences.

In this case, we do it based on where those cell phones have been over any period of time in the last year. Usually when a client has a need like that, it is often a market share thing, especially for competitors with physical locations that get a lot of high traffic. But everyone is a little bit different.

The buying cycle for something like an appliance or a durable good is usually two to seven years. So if we have a client who is an appliance store, putting a pin into their competitors may not be the most appropriate solution for them because people have already made that purchase if they have been in their competitor’s location.

Curtis Armstrong (41:28)
  It does not matter after I buy that washer and dryer how many ads you send to me after the purchase. I am not in the market for it anymore. Same with car dealerships. When I was younger, and I will age myself now, these did not exist when I was a child.

When my parents went to buy a vehicle, the buying journey began by going to the dealership or dealerships. If you wanted information about towing capacity or fuel economy or anything else about a vehicle, all that information was essentially proprietary and you had to get it from the dealership and from the catalogues they had for each model.

Nowadays, people usually do 30 to 40 hours of research before they even step into a dealership. When they step into one, they have got a very clear idea of why they are there. In many cases, they have already set up an appointment with someone to say, “Hey, I see you have got this 2024 Ford Explorer with 30,000 kilometres on it. Is it still in stock? Can I come and test drive it?”

They have kind of already made up their mind, and the test drive and meeting with the people is just to finalize the purchase. It is not the beginning. Whereas if you own a restaurant, if you do not get me to come for lunch today, maybe you will get me for dinner tonight or lunch tomorrow, because the buying cycle for that is hours instead of years. So understanding consumer behaviour is also an important part of what we do.

Carlin Lutzer (42:49)
  Right. I think the example you gave me the other day, Curtis, about the restaurant was quite fascinating. Do you remember that example?

Curtis Armstrong (43:01)
  I believe so. I think it had to do with the Rainbarrel platform. So you are opening a restaurant in Okotoks, and essentially every other restaurant is your competitor. I could drop a pin in every other restaurant in Okotoks and do an audience pull from there, then market to those people who have been to your competitors’ restaurants in the last three months, but only when they are in Okotoks.

Curtis Armstrong (43:25)
  So it could have been someone who was passing through or visiting family over the holidays. That audience is not really worth anything to you because they live in Edmonton or Saskatchewan or Vancouver or wherever. So that is probably a good use case for restaurant advertising for that particular platform, in my experience anyway.

You can also play with the platform so that when you pull those audiences, you can deliver ads to those cell phones that have been in those other restaurants, but you can also light up their whole home Wi Fi network. So any other device connected to that network will get ads for your restaurant, as an example.

Carlin Lutzer (44:03)
  Yeah, it is crazy. It is creepy. It is creepy to me, but super cool.

Curtis Armstrong (44:07)
  Creepy, for sure. Probably the creepiest, craziest one we have access to filters people in Canada by their financial information. For example, I could ask the provider how many people in the greater Calgary area have a mortgage coming up for renewal in the next six months. They will give me a number back, and that becomes your custom audience for banks, credit unions, lenders, or realtors.

I can also see how many people have leases or financing terms coming up on their vehicles. So again, if you are an automotive group, dealer, or manufacturer, I could give you data showing that in Calgary and surrounding communities there are 15,000 people who have leases or financing coming up on their vehicles in the next six months.

That is one of those examples where you want to get your message out while people are in the consideration phase because once people either get out of their lease and lease another vehicle, buy it out, give it back, or finish the financing, they have made a decision.

Curtis Armstrong (45:10)
  It does not matter how many car ads you send to them after the fact. They are not in the market anymore once that decision has been made. So if you can have that window of, say, six months or three months or whatever you want it to be, where people are coming up on making a decision, that is pretty invaluable data for marketers.

I can also see how many people have a snowmobile, a motorcycle, a boat, trailer, RV, or ATV. That particular one is the spookiest, maybe that is the word I would use, but it is certainly invaluable data for the right client.

Carlin Lutzer (45:50)
  Yeah, no, it is fascinating. It is mind blowing. We wonder about Big Brother, but we are allowing Big Brother into our lives by the information that we choose to give up through internet searches, through phones, through apps, and all those different things. It is crazy.

Curtis Armstrong (46:18)
  By agreeing to the terms and conditions of having this or a bank account or a credit card or a mortgage or a vehicle lease or financing, the data is anonymized, but it is still data and we have just kind of given it away. Something I heard a long time ago when Facebook first came out was, if the service is free, then you are the product.

Carlin Lutzer (46:42)
  Right. Yeah. Fair enough. Absolutely.

Well, I just want to encourage the listeners. I came to have a coffee with you a few weeks ago, and that hour turned into an hour and 45 minutes very, very quickly. It was a mind blowing conversation. If you are in the market for marketing, printed material, or digital marketing, obviously you can hear Curtis right now. He is an expert in the field. He is not pushy at all. He will just give you the facts and you will walk away knowing more.

Sometimes, for me in real estate, it is a little daunting. It is overwhelming knowing where to put my marketing dollars and how to know I am not just throwing them out there to people who are not in the market for a house but are clicking anyway because my ad caught them, even though they just purchased a house and simply want to see what the prices are doing.

So it is fascinating, all the information that you have, Curtis.

Curtis Armstrong (47:55)
  Well, thank you. It is certainly a lot to take in, but conversations like we are having today and the one we had a couple of weeks ago when you stopped in here, a lot of it is just about educating our clients.

Marketing, especially nowadays, there used to be an adage back in the day before any of this existed that half of my marketing budget is wasted, my problem is I do not know which half. That does not really exist anymore, nor should it.

But you are right, there are myriad ways to spend a lot of money on digital marketing, and that term is doing a lot of heavy lifting and is quite nebulous. It means different things to different people. There are a lot of ways you can blow a lot of money very quickly and have nothing to show for it.

Curtis Armstrong (48:38)
  If anything, on the marketing side, for everything we do for our clients, we are in the results business and we are in the audience business. We want to make sure we are aligning your message with the most relevant audiences in a way that we can measure and improve on, because a lot of the things we do are ongoing marketing. It is not just that store A is having a sale and we are going to blast it out for two weeks before the sale starts.

We are always doing campaigns. I talked about A B testing, and for those who are not familiar with it, A B testing is simply putting two different ad units in front of the same audience and then looking at your campaign two or three weeks in and saying, okay, creative A is really outperforming creative B. So right now we can drop B and introduce a new B, or drop B altogether and put the remaining budget into A because A is performing so well.

You can A B test different audience sets, different platforms, and you can do it very reasonably and modestly. These solutions are not really geared only for huge enterprise businesses. They can be modified and customized for really any sort of business or organization that needs to reach certain audiences with a message.

Carlin Lutzer (49:52)
  Yeah, for sure. Well, Curtis, I do thank you for your time. I welcome you to Okotoks.

Curtis Armstrong (50:18)
  Thank you, Carlin.

Carlin Lutzer (50:18)
  We know that you are going to, well, you already do, love it. As you get to experience a summer, which is fantastic, and as you get to experience the Dawgs games, which I absolutely love.

Curtis Armstrong (50:18)
  I have season tickets to those fellas already.

Carlin Lutzer (50:19)
  Yeah, that is awesome. You are going to enjoy it. I always look forward to the first smack of the ball on the catcher’s glove. You can see the dust, you smell the hot dogs. They get you because the kitchen venting system, as you are walking in, blows right toward the stairs, so you are smelling the popcorn and the hot dogs. It is incredible.

Curtis Armstrong (50:45)
  Well, I had a chance in the first week I was here to get a full behind the scenes tour with Tyler and Val from the Dawgs. We are actually in the process right now of putting out a 20th anniversary commemorative magazine for their 20th anniversary this year.

Carlin Lutzer (51:01)
  Oh, that is awesome.

Curtis Armstrong (51:02)
  It will be at the ballpark for opening day.

Carlin Lutzer (51:04)
  As will I.

Curtis Armstrong (51:04)
  As will I.

Carlin Lutzer (51:05)
  Yeah, that is awesome. Curtis, I look forward to the next conversation, and I have a feeling this is one of many that we will be having you back on for. So thanks for your time today.

Curtis Armstrong (51:18)
  My pleasure, Carlin. Thank you.

Carlin Lutzer (51:29)
  What I appreciate about this conversation is that it started with something familiar, a printed newspaper. Seventeen thousand copies, carriers delivering it, a press printing it. But it did not stay there.

The Western Wheel is no longer just a weekly paper landing on your doorstep. It is a newsroom, yes, but it is also a digital marketing engine. It is analytics. It is geofencing. It is connected TV. It is understanding buying cycles, consumer behaviour, and how to get the right message in front of the right audience at the right time.

That is the shift, from hard copy to hybrid, from ink to algorithms. Whether you are a small business owner in Okotoks trying to figure out where to spend your marketing dollars, or you are simply someone who cares about local journalism surviving in a world of endless scrolling, this conversation matters. Because community still matters, local stories still matter, and the platforms may change, but the mission remains the same.

Carlin Lutzer (52:34)
  Reflect the town, serve the town, and grow the town. Curtis, welcome to Okotoks. I have a feeling this is just the beginning.

If you enjoyed this episode, make sure you subscribe, share it with a local business owner, and as always, support local. We will see you next time on the Okotoks Podcast.

Announcer (52:57)
  That is a wrap on this episode of the Okotoks Podcast. Thanks for tuning in, and thank you to our sponsor, Carlin Lutzer Real Estate.