• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, April 20, 2025

Canvas Worldwide has appointed Sarah Potemkin to senior vice president and managing director of performance media. She joined late last year, but the agency officially announced the news this morning.

Potemkin brings with her a love for performance -- and more than 20 years of media agency experience and proven track record of revenue growth in paid media to the world’s second-largest independent media agency.

“We were lucky to persuade Sarah to come to Canvas,” said Paul Woolmington, CEO of Canvas Worldwide -- a venture now solely owned by Innocean Worldwide -- as it approaches its tenth anniversary as an independent agency.

Independent agencies control $67 billion of media spend in North America, according to Forrester Research.

Potemkin fits perfectly, as she combines an analytical mindset and storytelling, Woolmington said, as Canvas crafts a new discipline — Data Storyteller — at the media agency.

“We have liberated this idea of performance and created a specific mindset,” Woolmington said. “It’s about the totality of the work, not just a market segment that some might call a performance agency.”

While Woolmington spearheaded the change, Potemkin was brought in to strengthen this new mindset and expansion of Canvas’s performance media team across digital, linear TV, connected TV (CTV), direct response TV, (DRTV), out-of-home (OOH), audio, and integrated media channels.

Much of Potemkin’s fervor for analytics, dedication and performance comes from her teenage yearsr. “I grew up in the best time and area in the world — in Portland during Grunge — at all the concerts in all my outfits in the front of the mosh pits,” she said. “But I also was a big nerd. Stephen Hawkins’ movie "A Brief History of Time" was my favorite movie.”

Thinking she would graduate college with a degree in premed or writing, Potemkin’s career path took a turn toward advertising drenched in data. “It’s the most creative and nerdy place to be,” Potemkin said.

Potemkin works closely with Canvas Chief Client Officer Kristi Lind and other team leaders to optimize performance media solutions.

Canvas recently signed new business to support Lalo Tequila and Zillow.  It also works with Hyundai, McDonald's, among others.

Artificial intelligence (AI) also will play a major role at the agency to make companies more efficient, but it also builds on the strategic side, optimizing media against deeper metrics.

 There are tools Potemkin wants to use, so she continues to hunt for them. When asked for an example, she said tools in the forecasting space.

"There's a lot of work to be done in the forecasting space and thinking about forecasting coming together with planning," she said.