Category Brands


L’Oréal: A Beauty Brand With A Purpose

March 1st, 2023 | darrenmcalmont, Manager, Communications & Content, Association of Canadian Advertisers

Women’s History Month is an opportunity to continue to amplify women’s voices, and to recognize their precious past and current contributions. Taking the time to acknowledge our predecessors and their accomplishments is a highly motivating factor when trying to shape the future.

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Set Your Brand Up for Success During a Recession

September 15th, 2022 | darrenmcalmont, Manager, Communications & Content, Association of Canadian Advertisers

Setting your brand up for success during a recession means going against what’s intuitive and requires you to trust the process. Increasing ad spend when the economy is facing uncertain times is counterintuitive, but the evidence shows that this is the smart thing to do. The success of your brand after a recession depends largely on what you do before and during.

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Why it’s never a good idea to squeeze your agency too hard. (Particularly now.)

November 17th, 2021 | Stephan Argent, Founder and Principal, Listenmore Inc.

Are you a marketer that wants to squeeze more from your agency? Do you feel like they should be doing more? Delivering better results? Turning things around faster?

All sound like good ideas, right?

What’s surprising in our experience is that while most marketers aspire to have their agencies deliver more, better and faster, their approach almost always ends up having the opposite effect. Particularly now.

Hit hard by the great resignation, agencies are already scrambling to retain employees and fill gaps left by those who’ve already left. And if you’re already feeling the effects as a client, stepping up the pressure and asking for more will likely only make a bad situation worse.

“Depending how hard agencies have already been squeezed, marketers could face rate hikes of up to twenty percent.”

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Purpose-led Brands: The Agency Perspective

August 12th, 2021 | Wahn Yoon, President and Chris Dacyshyn, Co-Executive Creative Director, Bleublancrouge Toronto

I recently attended a ‘global digital summit’ for marketers that was an eye-opener. Aside from the usual tech glitches, the artificial environment of having “roundtables” with no tables and trying to meet other professionals without being able to break bread together – there was a theme that ran through the conference that excited and inspired me: Purpose.

All through the three days, the “P” word was used again and again, by agency leaders, senior marketers and consultants. As though they had all caught the bug, as it were, and were spreading it around. Why? Because many at the conference recognized that today, consumers and employees alike (especially those in Gen Y and Z) expect brands to be purposeful. It is now the requirement to remain relevant in this era of social change and heightened consciousness.

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The Ultimate Guide to Persuasion for Marketers

July 15th, 2021 | Andres Lares, Managing Partner, Shapiro Negotiations Institute

Marketing experts understand that influencing is as much art as it is science; what many do not know is that there is a process to persuade others successfully. Whether you are writing persuasive copy or influencing someone internally for more support on a marketing initiative, the four steps outlined in my forthcoming book Persuade will make you more successful.

The process is as follows: Build Credibility, Engage Emotion, Demonstrate Logic, and Facilitate Action. Let’s take a closer look at each step.

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Laws of Growth: Lessons from How Brands Grow

April 21st, 2021 | thinktv,

How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know made waves when it was first released. The now-ubiquitous book by Byron Sharp is based on empirical research covering market share, brand equity, price promotions and advertising. Sharp challenges many traditionally held marketing beliefs – from the value of loyalty and the effectiveness of targeting to the importance of reach.

Sharp’s evidence-based marketing research continues at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science at the University of South Australia, the world’s largest marketing research centre, where he and his team work with some of the biggest international brands, from P&G and Unilever to PepsiCo and McDonald’s…

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