Author Archive - Mark Gascoigne

Everywhere you look, you can see people peering into their bitsy screen and fumbling over Thumbelina-size keys trying to stay connected to work, friends, children, partners… life. We’ve all seen them — stumbling down the sidewalk, steering with their knees or even holding on to a baby carriage while they type away, oblivious to the real world passing them by. Whether e-mailing, texting or SMSing their life away, they have chosen to unplug from the real world while they hook-up with their NBF who LOLs at every benign transmission from you or their 500 other BFFs. [...]

I had to get this down quick because I think we’ve reached a watershed moment. I must plead ignorance, yet again, about the whole city amalgamation since I did not live here when it happened. But all I know is that 10 years into it the only legacy that I see from this myopic spreadsheet vision is Peter Kelly, half-shoveled sidewalks and the no-name HRM. By this measure, even if you’re a PK fan, the experiment has been a colossal failure. [...]

Trampoline Branding is thrilled to announce a number of new additions and staff promotions. [...]

Trident Booksellers on Hollis St. makes the best coffee in the city, the province and quite possibly the country. Period. End of discussion. [...]

Can I be forgiven for not blogging about the ICE Awards last week? I had a bit of an ICE hangover … actually I’d like to re-tract that … I don’t think there is an ICE Hangover, just a regular hangover and a great feeling of pride. Sure, there are a few agencies with sour tastes in their mouths, as some other agencies took home more crystal than usual, but we all know the game. And as a good friend of mine always reminds me, “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.” [...]

We all know how great British ads are, right? So here we are at Ad:Tech London, perhaps the world’s largest conference and exchange of all things in the ‘new media’ space to see how they are tackling the convergence of advertising and technology. Along with the impressive list of conference speakers, there are hundreds of online companies here to present and promote the ‘next big thing’ for the word wide web. What is interesting is that there are two streams of attendees here this week. Free and paid. I know what your saying, I hope you’re smart enough to be going for free because it sure would suck to pay when others are going for free. Well, in fact, we paid, but bear with me — we did the right thing. [...]

Who saw this coming? For the past 10 years, communication experts have heralded a new dawn where the “consumer is King” and companies would lose control of their products and brands to their customers. But like most trends, it took longer to take hold and the reality is not exactly as predicted. [...]

Attended the Marketing Awards and I now get the difference between us and them. When I say ‘us’ and ‘them’, I mean Halifax and Toronto. Here (I’m sitting in a Starbucks off Queen St. W, TO), they are frightened and paranoid. This manifests itself as cranky and critical. [...]

As promised on Monday, here is quick re-cap of Peter Korecki’s presentation at our I’ll Buy That event last Thursday. Earlier in the week, I talked about “recession” being a state of mind. Peter, who is the president of Pierceys Building Supplies, would rather think of it as a re-strategizing period, or maybe a market-evaluation opportunity and definitely a staff re-programming exercise. Peter told us that if we get nothing else out of this time of crises we need to realize that “Everything is negotiable. Everything!”

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