2018 Agenda

Leading retailers and digital marketers are incorporating trending technologies into their offerings and strategy, but too often they’re missing the big picture. Don’t make that mistake. Your customers desire great experiences and stories that actually bring them value. They crave ideas about saving time, easier decision making, and boosting productivity.

Every organization, industry and marketer has data at their finger-tips. Whether it is website analytics, communications and social data or the demographic results that are found in digital advertising – what makes a difference in an organization isn’t just having data but knowing what to do with it.

Join James Rubec, a leading analyst and product manager at Cision and Jon Litwack, director of experience design at Bensimon and Byrne, OneMethod and Narrative in a workshop to learn how to use data to grow your brand, drive revenue and increase loyalty.

-        Learn why communications data is a brand manager’s secret weapon in paid advertising and product development

-        Understand why smart teams deploy the See, Think, Do, Care business framework

-        Leave with a stronger understanding of how to use the data your organization has hidden in silos and in systems your team already uses

This presentation is designed for marketers and entertainment brands who are struggling to understand how to use bots for their business, highlighting what they are, why they’ve become so popular, and how to leverage them for customer service, content delivery, e-commerce, promotions, and branding. It also highlights a case study of TIFFBOT, a movie-loving chatbot built in partnership with the Toronto International Film Festival, offering takeaways for marketers based on its success.

In this session, Eric Abrams, Managing Director of eCommerce and Online at IZEA, will discuss the latest and greatest trends in the world of 'creators'. He'll explore what the current habits and practices are for journalists, celebrities, influence, and what sort of affect they are having on the marketing industry. Join Eric as he explains how brands can look outside their own internal resources to get creators to help build their brand message and scale their content effectively.

In this fireside chat, James Connell, VP Marketing at Roots, and Brad Wing, VP Partnerships at SweetIQ, will discuss the ever changing nature of the consumer journey. They'll dive in to how the worlds of physical retail and digital retail are blending and how to blend these two worlds together to offer a stronger experience for your consumers. They'll also explore ways to use your brand's digital presence to drive more traffic and sales in-store.

In this session, you’ll learn best practices for using Twitter for what it’s best at: promoting your brand while connecting to what’s happening. Join Leanne Gibson, Twitter Canada’s Managing Director, as she shares case studies of smart ways brands have successfully launched new things and promoted themselves on Twitter. You’ll walk away with a ‘playbook’ of tips and techniques on how to build award-winning campaigns and grow your business.

Digital has enabled companies, large and small to innovate quickly, pivot on the fly and compete like never before. Join Oscar Roque, Assistant Vice President of Mobile Platform and Products at Interac Corp., as he shares trends, insights and tools on how to compete for longevity in our increasingly digital world.

How to define and position your ideas for success

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Thinking about how your business can innovate is no longer a “nice to have” situation, it’s now imperative. As technology progresses faster and faster every day, so does your customer. And as they demand more from the companies they interact with, they’re not afraid to quickly change to someone that has found a new and better way to do things.

So, how do you keep up? You empower intrapreneurs inside your company to solve the right problems, have a customer-centric focus on everything they do, and take risks without fear.

Intrapreneurs are the people that are thinking about how to improve and transform your business from the inside out. They already know your business, your customers, and your challenges, and they have ideas to help take you forward. You just need to enable them to do so.

Join the team from Symbility Intersect as they walk intrapreneurs through the core principles needed when thinking about innovation within the enterprise using design thinking methodologies. This 2 hour workshop will empower your employees to think strategically about how they can help your business evolve for tomorrow, today.

Consumer trends and habits are constantly evolving, and we need to stay on top of the latest information to continue to succeed. In this session, Steve Koenig, Senior Director of Market Research at the Consumer Technology Association (the team that brings us CES), will explore some of the latest findings on Canadian Consumers and how they compare to consumers around the world. He'll also explore emerging trends from around the world and how they may affect businesses here at home.

Influencer marketing continues to be an important marketing tool that’s hard to get right. This workshop will start with an overview of a report conducted by #paid and Nielsen that explores the data behind why Influencer Marketing is an important tool for your business. After that, you’ll hear from top influencers and learn what has made some of their best brand campaigns so successful. Finally, you’ll fill out your own influencer briefs and understand the nuances of briefing an influencer for the best possible campaign.

Live Streaming has taken the world by storm and created opportunities for brands to connect with consumers in real-time. In this session, Amber Mac and Christopher Dick of AmberMac Media will provide tips, techniques, and best practices for marketers who want to use live streaming tools such as Facebook Live to build connections with consumers.

In the midst of media reports about an impending “Retail Apocalypse,” and many traditional retailers announcing closures, Liz McConomy, Marketing Director at  SweetIQ, offers marketers a fresh perspective on how to “future-proof” their Omni-Channel and Local strategies with sustainable practices geared towards generating valuable data, increasing in-store traffic and overall revenue. We will look at the key elements necessary for you to support your brands in their evolution in order to achieve success in today’s competitive environment.

Join female leaders from the tech industry for a series of inspiring stories and hear them share the lessons they would teach their younger selves.

Discover how they learned to overcome failure, negative feedback, difficult bosses and disagreements with co-workers. Hear their strategies for negotiating salaries, asking for promotions and knowing when it was time to move on to a new opportunity. This session promises engaging presentations, a lively and enlightening Q&A and the opportunity to rub shoulders with the city’s top women in tech.

Amazon invites creative agencies and brand leaders to participate in an interactive work session to understand who we are and what we do. In this 90-minute workshop, you’ll learn how you can partner with Amazon to build customer-centric brand experiences that bridge offline and online marketing and develop innovative campaigns that traverse the tactile and digital advertising landscape.

Topics covered:

• Search
• Augmented Reality
• Twitch

You’ll learn how these disruptive marketing tools can activate brand messaging that resonates with customers in new, authentic and exciting ways. You’ll also learn how you can work with Amazon’s creative department—from brief to ideation to execution—to launch your next campaign.

Many urban consumers use ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft as their main method of transportation. Portl Media, an innovative Toronto-based startup, saw an opportunity to create a new advertising channel to reach consumers moving around cities in rideshares. Through connected media screens in rideshares, Portl has created a way for consumers to interact with OOH advertisements that give them the option to change their route, potentially creating an extremely measurable new ad channel. In this session, they’ll explain where this advertising space is going, the opportunity for retailers, what this may mean for the future of advertising in autonomous vehicles, and how to create advertising that succeeds on platforms like theirs. 

During this session, Sylvain Ducrocq will present the real challenges faced nowadays by retailers in terms of customer experience and how an integrated omni-channel solution can provide answers and solutions to these problems. Sylvain's presentation will be explore real customers’ case studies to showcase the power of a modern omni-channel strategy.

eSports is a fast growing phenomenon that is selling out sports arenas in cities around the world. eSports fans are highly engaged consumers with lots of disposable income. This presents a great new sponsorship and marketing opportunity for brands to get in front of new consumers. The only catch - they can sniff out inauthenticity from brands from a mile away. In this session, Wim Stocks, CEO of WorldGaming, will discuss ways in which brands can enter the eSports and gaming sponsorship spaces and be successful in driving incremental growth.

This session is an exercise for marketers and business owners to pick apart their businesses’ core value propositions. Alan Smith, Co-Founder of Strategyzer and Co-Author of Value Proposition Design, will walk the you through the VPD models and teach you a new way to think about where the value actually is in your business. This will inform better marketing, better decision making, and better prioritization for growth in brands and businesses.

What lies in store for retailers who seize the power of innovation? 

Join leading professionals Warren Tomlin, National Digital Leader, and Ted Salter, National Leader of Consumer Products and Retail at EY Canada as they discuss how massive advances in technology, from AI to machine learning, and increasing customer demands are causing industry leaders to be more sophisticated in their approach to innovation in their businesses.

In this session we’ll discuss how we got here, provide real examples of what leading companies are doing to leverage the power of emerging tech and discuss how they’re innovating.

In this session, Alan Smithson, CEO of MetaVRse, will give an overview of where the worlds of VR, AR, and MR stand today. He'll explore the differences in what these technologies offer marketers and the ways in which they have been recently become powerful marketing tools. He'll explore case studies of how brands are using these technologies to their advantage and will work with the audience to give live showcases of how you can use VR and AR to start marketing your business now.