Events

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.” [...]

Agencies and clients from around Atlantic Canada gathered at Pier 21 on October 28 to recognize the best in Innovation, Creativity and Enterprise.

At a time when we are focused on the notion of collaboration, we are pleased to announce that the Trampoline Branding team brought home three silver awards and three merit awards from this year’s ICE Awards gala. [...]

For the fifth year running, Trampoline Branding committed its time and resources to creating the collateral pieces for the Autism Golf Ball, an amazing annual fundraiser. This year, as Account Manger for the AGB, I was honoured to attend the event this past Saturday night at the Cunard Centre. [...]

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. [...]

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. [...]

I am ashamed to admit that I wasn’t originally planning to attend Bill Clinton’s speaking event yesterday. Having seen him when he spoke here in 2006, I derisively thought I really didn’t need to see him again. How wrong I was. [...]

While many organizations are debating whether or not the recession is affecting us here in the Maritimes, retailers know exactly what the score is. Before last weeks ‘I’ll Buy That’ retail forum we asked many of our retailers how things were faring and here are some of the answers: [...]

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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I’m very happy to report that we held our first (and hopefully annual) I’ll Buy That Retail Forum last Thursday afternoon here in the Brewery. The Labatt Beer Institute was a marvelous host and I like to think that people stuck around for more than a free beer or two at the end. I was thrilled with the turnout as we had over a dozen clients in attendance. They were treated to three excellent speakers who covered a wide range of topics. First, Christine James from the Canadian Retail Council gave us an update on what is going on in her world. Although her presentation touched on a number of issues that were of great interest to the retailers in the audience, it was the current credit card and banking issues that generated the greatest discussion. Christine said she is available to any of you for more information on these or any other issues atlantic@retailcouncil.org. [...]