More on the Masthead 20 most influential Canadian magazines of all time exercise I posted on a few days ago.

One of the big challenges with a list like this is that it tends to be dominated by the living memory of the current generation. It usually ends up being the top players from mostly last 20 or 30 years, maybe 40. Which is fine because these thing are really about the collective memory of us now, not a true history.

Still the completest in me wanted to take a look further back for candidate magazines that I either dimly remember, have forgotten about or never even knew about.  To do this I’ve returned to my J-school notes and texts-most notably Paul Rutherford’s 1978 history The Making of Canadian Media. I’ve also scanned and the Canadian Encyclopedia online (whose entries on magazines appear to date from 1986, happily the year I entered the industry), and revisited sections of Selling Themselves: The Emergence of Canadian Advertising, Russell Johnston’s excellent 2000 book looking at the rise of modern marketing advertising here, and the mass media industries with it, from about 1890 to the early 1930s.

Some cool stories here, although just how influential they all were is an open question.

• The Nova Scotia Magazine: Don’t know much about it, or how influential really, but I do know it is credited as the first Canadian magazine. This from the Canadian Encyclopedia: “The first Canadian magazine, edited by the Rev William Cochran and printed by John Howe, father of reformer Joseph HOWE, was The Nova Scotia Magazine and Comprehensive Review of Literature, Politics, and News. It commenced publication in 1789, lasted 3 years, and was concerned more with British than colonial affairs.”

• Le Magasin de Québec: Also on this topic of first Canadian magazines, the CE states: “The bilingual Le Magasin de Québec was established by Samuel Neilson in Lower Canada's capital and published from 1792 to 1794. It marked the first attempt at drawing the 2 cultures together through a printed medium.”

Also in CE under the topic of French Magazines:
“Early magazines aimed not simply to inform their readers but to instruct them and entertain them. This vision guided Samuel Neilson when he launched The Quebec Magazine/Le magasin de Québec (1792-94), a 64-page bilingual monthly, containing excerpts from European and American publications, and illustrated by what may have been the first engravings ever published in a magazine.”

• Semeur canadien: The small magazine of ideas challenging a conservative establishment in Quebec didn’t start with Cite Libre. This title took on the Catholic church in mid-19th century Quebec, a foe that makes Duplessis look like a pussycat.

Says the Canadian Encyclopedia: “At this time [mid-1800s] magazines began a battle which was to prove decisive for their future, against the Roman Catholic Church, all-powerful in Québec in the 19th century. One of the first major conflicts occurred in 1851 when Narcisse Cyr revealed abuses committed by church officials in Semeur canadien, a magazine declared to be heretical and dangerous, whose readers were threatened with excommunication by the archbishop of Montréal. The battle escalated in 1864 when Pope Pius IX published his Syllabus, banning certain books. Monseigneur Ignace BOURGET then threw himself into a crusade aimed at preventing the appearance of any new publications in Québec. The Index included about 20 000 titles and more than 8000 authors, causing the eventual disappearance of a number of publications, including Le Canada (1889-1909), which had denounced the Catholic school system and abuses of authority committed by the church. It quickly found its place in The Index and sales plummeted from more than $350 a month to a bare $25 in Dec 1893.”

Whew. The Golden Compas is getting off easy.

• Canadian Illustrated News: Founded by the great grandfather of my J-school dean Peter Deberats –as he told us many, many times-, this Montreal-based title is considered a world pioneer in the use of photoengraving.

The Canadian Encyclopedia: “The technique of photoengraving was pioneered in Canada and used first in the immensely successful Canadian Illustrated News, which began operations in 1869 and gained a large following principally because of its vivid portrayal of scenery and its stirring images of the NORTH-WEST REBELLION. Its French counterpart was the technically more accomplished, but generally less commercially successful, L'Opinion publique illustré.”

• Prairie Farmer or Family Herald or both as a joint entry:
In our largely urban modern Canada, we can’t conceive of the size or clout of the farm community in this country before 1950. Or the farm publishing sector. From about 1890s to the 1930s there was an entire genre of agriculture publishing that rivaled the trade and still nascient consumer magazine segments in size and scope. There were lots of specialized titles, but the biggest were a mix of lifestyle and business, which matched the reality of farm life. In 1921, seven of the top 10 Canadian magazines tiles by circulation were farm related (this from a chart in Russell Johnston’s Selling Themselves, based on from compiled in Lydiatt’s book [Lydiatt was by then the owner of Marketing]).

Prairie Farmer, a weekly owned by the Winnipeg Free Press, was one of the best know. It was kind of a version of Maclean’s combined with trade mag for the western farm set, had a circulation of almost 150,000 in the 1920s. It’s eastern counterpart, the Family Herald, owned by the Montreal Star, boasted an even larger circulation of 217,000 in the same era. These publications, in the words of Paul Rutherford (p.46), featured “an impressive compilation of short reports on farm affairs, a news summary, and assorted delights for a family audience.”
 
• Canadian: The early 20th century version, of which I knew next to nothing until seeing several references to it in Russell Johnston’s Selling Themselves (from which almost all of the following is culled).

Apparently Canadian was an attempt to emulate Harper’s “belle letters” highbrow mag model developed in 1860s south of the border. It was founded in 1893 by Ontario Publishing company, a Toronto book publisher, and was considered a “modest success” until the 1930s. While it never cracked the top 50 in circulation in Canada, it had a loyal elite readership. It peaked in 1919 with a 17,250 monthly circ. A 1924 redesign, which attempted to make it more like the rising “consumer” titles never quite took, and in fact appears to have only ailienated its core readers and hastened its demise.

• Canadian Courier: Again, this is drawn from Russell Johnston who describes Canadian Courier an outright copy of the more street-wise populist U.S. general interest “consumer” magazines like Munsey’s, McClure’s, the Saturday Evening Post etc. flooding into Canada after 1890. It was launched in 1906 by former Canadian editor John A Cooper and by 1919 boasted a 45,000 circulation every two weeks.

Courier was reputedly much more ad friendly than most Canadian titles of the era. Aside from quality paper, larger format and lots of illustration and colour, Courier also adopted the then radical model from the U.S. of actually integrating ads and editorial onto the same page, often in editorial departments that paralleled emerging consumer markets. In 1917, the editor even ran a list of national advertisers and recommended readers patronize them. It was also one of the first Canadian magazines to adopt a flow plan of having open pages up front with turns to the back, stacked with partial ads, that lead readers through the entire book.

Canadian Courier’s arrival may well mark the moment in the magazine business here when the shift from the 19th century almost exclusive focus on readers to a greater attention (although, note, not total attention) to advertiser needs and wants began. It’s a model that’s basically been a given in the business for a century now.

Courier would eventually lose ground in the 1920s to an another magazine that slavishly borrowed American formulas and Canadianized them, Maclean’s.

• Everywoman’s World: Russell Johnston suggests this was probably Canada’s first true “women’s consumer” magazine as we’ve come to know them.

Everywoman’s World was founded in 1913 by Continental Publishing Company. It was the brainchild of Isidor Simonski, who he’d analyzed the results of a campaign to sell a floured essence cooking product to women through existing general interest “consumer” magazines found that no magazine could deliver women exclusively-in fact only boast more than a 50% female readership. So, he figured why not create one that spoke only to women.

It was an almost instant hit. By 1921, Everywoman’s World had the highest per issue circulation of any Canadan magazine with 106,167 (and was apparently the first Canadian title to breach the 100,000 threshold).

• La Revue populaire and/or La Revue moderne: From the Canadian Encyclopedia: “Growing urban concentration and more widespread education meant that traditional magazines no longer met the needs of their readers, who were increasingly drawn from the masses. These readers wanted popularization, variety and light entertainment, as found in American and French magazines. And so La Revue populaire was born (1907-63), whose circulation rose in less than 50 years from 5000 to more than 125 000. Aimed at the whole family, it published short stories, a family column, various pieces of information and, during WWI, news from the Front. But the postwar period was fatal both for it and the austere Canada français (1918-46): faced with ever more competitors, magazines fought for survival by attracting readers with a tempting layout, winning advertisers and, above all, by specializing. La Revue populaire tried to attract a female readership, but they remained faithful to La Revue moderne (1918-1960), one of the first magazines to be run by a woman (Madeleine Huguenin). Very visual, and financed as much by advertising as by sales, this magazine caught the attention of Maclean Hunter Ltd. In October 1960, La Revue moderne merged with a French version of CHATELAINE. Five months later, Châtelaine printed 125 000 copies; the age of modern magazines had definitely come to French Canada.”

• Weekend Magazine (or maybe Canadian or Canadian Weekend): I dimly remember this title from my toddler days, and moreso when it was merged with its rival as Canadian Weekend in the 70s and 80s (an era in which I recall some Roy MacGregor bylines on hockey stories). But in their mid 20th century heyday (say 1925-1965), the rotogravure weekend supplements distributed in major daily newspapers were the country’s mostly widely read magazines. According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, the combined 2.9 million circulation of Weekend Magazine and rival Star Weekly in 1952 topped the combined circ. of the four leading stand alone magazines (presumably Time, Reader’s Digest, Maclean’s and Chatelaine) by 300,000.

Star Weekly, owned, of course, by the Toronto Star and dating from the teens, developed a huge advantage in the late 1940s when the King government banned the import of U.S. pulp magazines and comic books, but left exempt comics distributed with newspapers. Star Weekly was left as exclusive distributor of some of the most popular U.S. comics (call it the forerunner of the Canwest/CTV business model of getting government protection for your infrastructure, but filling it with popular American content and a smidgen of Cancon).

In reaction, the Montreal Star and Montreal Standard newspapers merged their weekend magazines, both also founded at the beginning of the 20th century, into Weekend Magazine in 1951. By the early 1960s Weekend was “the most popular advertising vehicle in the nation” a circulation over 2 million through its carriage in 41 newspapers. As Jack Granatstein’s Canadian Encylcopedia entry puts it, Weekend “offered high-quality colour reproduction to advertisers, good photographs, feature stories and recipes to readers, and a profit-making supplement that boosted circulation for the newspaper publishers.”  A market like that abhors a vacum. So in 1966, the Star combined with the Southam chain to create The Canadian, which resulted in a decade-plus long competition that saw some of the country’s best writers and editors producing excellent magazine journalism.

But both titles were soon fighting a loosing battle. The rise of colour TV in the 60s lead to the diminishing clout of the rotogravures (and of all general interest titles). Weekend merged with Canadian in 1979, morphed into Today in 1980 and then shut down in 1982.

(BTW, in the U.S., Parade magazine is the leading surviving rotogravure. Distributed in 400 newspapers, Parade currently claims to be the country’s most widely read magazine with a circulation of 32 million and a readership of 71 million.)

•Homemakers: It’s not that long ago, but Homemakers was ground breaking in the 1960s and 1970s for its controlled circulation model –now the dominant form for most trade titles- also applied to brother title Quest magazine. This from the Canadian Enclyclopedia, again circa 1986: The term "general-interest magazine" has little relevance in the contemporary market. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the increasing prominence of controlled-circulation magazines. The largest publisher of such magazines is COMAC, which was founded in 1966 and has 8 magazines including Homemaker's / Madame à foyer, Quest (which folded in late 1984) and Western Living. In late 1983 a rival company launched the largest circulation Canadian magazine, Recipes Only, which has a controlled circulation of 2 million readers and is a prime example of the current trend toward publishing for a narrow and specific market. All these magazines endorse doctrines of affluence and have a clear middle- and upper-middle-class consumer bias. They reflect a glistening internationalism rather than a parochial nationalism and, in that sense, are a mirror of contemporary Canadian middle-class aspirations.”

Those last two sentences sums up the big trends in the industry, and culture, for the last 30 years I’d say, perhaps sadly.

And one last pitch from the misty past:

• The Eye Opener: I’ve heard myths about this title, and I’m sure it never had the kind of influence Masthead is looking to celebrate.  Or maybe it does. Either way, Bob Edward’s Calgary Eye Opener, which published apparently rather intermittently from 1902 to 1922, sounds like a lot of fun, and just as dangerous as say Frank.

This from Rutherford (p. 44):  “…This great ‘moral weekly’ was the satirical voice of an unregenerate lowbrow. Bob Edwards was a Scottish-born adventurer who, after assorted travel, settled down to a life of intermittent alcoholism and journalism in Alberta. His eight-page weekly appeared irregularly, depending on his sobriety, sold for five cents on the streets, and eventually on the train of the Canadian Pacific Railway. By 1911, the Eye Opener enjoyed a circulation of some 26,000 copies in Calgary and throughout the prairies, its fame reaching into Great Britain and the United States. What so charmed readers was the Eye Opener’s compilation of news, gossip, scandal, speculation, fantasy, wit, homilies and fun–all enthused with a love of the ordinary person. Edwards used his weekly to survey the low life of the horse races, prize fights, drinking spots, and the like; to ridicule the pretentions of high society, the ‘holier-than-thou’ attitudes of moralists, the greed of big business, the stupidity and corruption of politicians; to champion women’s rights, minimum wage laws, even briefly prohibition. ..The Eye Opener had no particular impact, even if its satire irritated the high and mighty (once, Lord Strathcona of CPR fame, almost sued for libel [as did Alberta premier A.L. Sifton]). The point is the weekly’s very existence spoke well of a Canada already too notorious for its straight-laced morality and pomposity.”

The Canadian Encylcopedia also has a short funny entry on Edwards.

Variations on the Eye Opener have been recreated over the decades (the CBC Calgary’s morning drive show has adapted the moniker, as has a Ryerson U student paper, amoung others).

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 6:10 PM EST

Updated: Thursday, 29 November 2007 7:45 AM EST

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

I’ve been asked by Masthead magazine, Canada’s trade magazine for the magazine industry, to be part of a jury selecting the top 20 most influential Canadian magazines in history…and putting them in rank order. It’s very flattering to be asked…and daunting.

I’m told part of the reason I’ve been invited onto the jury is I’ll likely have a bit more background and insight on trade magazines. We’ll see about that. I’d say its even more daunting to consider which trades might crack this list, but more on that in another post.

You can see all of the comments and nominations at the Masthead discussion board. As Fraser Sutherland noted in a post there, this is a particularly challenging exercise because whereas in the U.S. where there are slew of major magazines that are remembered as having achieved undisputed icon status –he noted Time, Life and Fortune, and I’d add Sport Illustrated, Harper’s, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone to name just a few- we just don’t have that many magazine icons. And frankly, we don’t have the national culture –except maybe in books and music- that even encourages the creation and lauding of giants of that ilk.

Still, it’s a fun and worthy exercise. Part of the reason the Amercians have so many icons, in so many spheres of life, is they do a lot more of this kind of thing.

 
If you forced me right now, here’s what I’d say absolutely needs to be on the Masthead list:

• Chatelaine: Especially for its pioneering feminism of the 1950s and 60s (ahead of the more internationally “famous” U.S. women’s magazines in this regard)… but also frankly for its continued business success (still the biggest ad dollar earner in the industry I believe) and its continued mass impact. No, it hasn’t had the same clout and power in the last couple of decades it once did –but name me a magazine that really does in the Web era-, and it seems to be taking its lead more from competitor Canadian Living’s recipe heavy formula in recent years-but its still got a ton of clout.

• Maclean’s: I’d argue, as many have, that under editor/publisher Ken Whyte Maclean’s is the most consistently interesting and provocative read in mainstream Canadian magazines right now. Is it making any money? Well, that’s been the question for almost four decades now, hasn’t it? And yet not a generation can be named when Maclean’s wasn’t the home to some of each era’s most famous and successful writers and journalists… (even the so-called darkest years of the 1980s had Fotheringham and Amiel, right). And it is the flagship of what was, and probably still is, the most important Canadian magazine publisher for at least the last 70 years.

• Time Canada: A controversial choice, maybe. But really Time’s “Canadian edition” and the symbolism, politics and policies surrounding it (the 1976 Bill C-58 that killed it, the WTO rulings in the 90s that unraveled those laws, and so much more before and after that we’d all like to forget) have probably had a bigger impact on the shape of the Canadian magazine industry than any other single title or company (okay, maybe the old MH, did have more clout). And it did publish weekly with some real Canadian content from 1943 to the mid 70s, landing in hundreds of thousands of Canadian homes each week. I remember reading it at my grandparents. Maybe this could be a joint entry with Reader’s Digest, which had the same grandfathered “Canadian status” in 1965 and actually continued to publish Canadian content after the tax laws changed in 1976.

•Toronto Life: Canada’s first and best city magazine, arguably the best and most successful (both financially and esthetically) home for “serious” literary journalism in the past three decades. And it continues to prove that service journalism doesn’t have to be completely empty headed and routine. It had long been one of the main aspirational places to work for Canadian magazine wonks when I graduated (UWO, journalism MA, 86), and I suspect its still pretty high on that list.   

• Cité Libre: Never personally read it –one I don’t read French, and two it shut down when I was four (1966)-, but I’ve known about the intellectual, political and social clout of this journal since first year poly sci and history classes. Co-founded and edited by future PM Pierre Trudeau in 1950, and it carried pieces during the 50s by both future federalist and separatist leaders like Gérard Pelletier, René Lévesque and Pierre Vallières As such it was the intellectual breading ground of the Quiet revolution and just about everything that followed in Quebec politics and society in the 60s and 70s, and hence really the direction of national politics until arguably to the end of the Chretien regime just a few years ago. That’s pretty influential for a small circ. magazine that only a fraction of the country’s population ever read. A contender for the top spot perhaps.

•Alberta Report: The West’s Cité Libre? Maybe an over-simplification. But Ted Byfield’ right-of-centre, Christian and family values, western alienation vehicle, and it’s many incarnations between 1973, when it began as Edmonton Report, and 2003, when son Link Byfield eventually folded The Report, had a huge influence on the Western Canadian political and social agenda. It certainly incubated the Reform and Alliance parties, which live on in Stephen Harper’s reunited governing Conservative party. And the influence of “Ted’s children” in the mainstream media business is huge today, most notably in Western Report alum Ken Whyte and Mark Stevenson’s runs since the mid-90s at Saturday Night, the launch of the National Post and now Maclean’s.

• Saturday Night: Given its continuous shaky financial picture for the final 40 or so years of existence –and its “suspension” in 2005 by St. Josephs Media due to lack of ad support-, its hard to think of Saturday Night as a financial force. But according to Paul Rutherford’s 1978 survey history of mass media in this country The Making of Canadian Media, Saturday Night magazine was actually the third largest ad vehicle of all North American magazines in 1938.
From its inception in 1887, Saturday Night was always a “high brow” read. With the likes of B.K. Sandwell and Robertson Davies working there in the mid-20th century, it was a mainstream intellectual force. But I’d argue the golden age(s) of Saturday Night would be its most financially uncertain-the Fulford, Fraser, Whyte eras after 1968.
Only Toronto Life arguably rivaled it as the home of the country’s best magazine writers and editors in those 30 or so years. And only the Globe and Mail and the CBC probably had more influence with the national English elites in politics, arts and even business. It was our Atlantic Monthly, New Yorker and Harper’s all in one. And even though it had a proportional readership here bigger than all three of those U.S. titles combined, it still couldn’t make a serious go of it financially.

• Frank: Why the hell not, I say.

Those are the "musts," so far, on my list. More thoughts as they come.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 10:46 AM EST

Updated: Monday, 26 November 2007 11:12 AM EST

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

It was a telling juxtaposition at the Cassies event in Toronto Tuesday night. Guest speaker Bob Garfield got up and predicted the demise of the advertising industry as we know it. Then the main event was awards for 39 mostly traditional ad campaigns that had proven to be effective in generating real business results. The future of marketing does promise to be dramatically different, but it seems the tried and true methods still have some life in them yet.

Bob Garfield is the well-known ad critic for U.S. trade weekly Advertising Age, and less well known here as cohost of the U.S. National Public Radio program "On the Media." And like many observers of the marketing and ad world –myself included-, he believes that the rise of the web, consumer generated content and the like has driven a true shift in the power balance from sellers to consumers. In his view, the 30 second TV spot with massive media buys is done as an effective marketing vehicle. People can and will tune out boring and irrelevant messages better than they ever could before. The old one-way dialogue between marketers and their customers is over, and unless companies start really listening to what customers are saying –and acting on what they hear- they are doomed (although I think he used the f-bomb a couple of times to make the point). Indeed, Garfield’s next book is apparently to be called “Listenonomics.”

Garfield has no time for the argument that the ad agency business is actually sitting pretty in the brave new digital world because its strength over the last 50 years has been the creation of short form entertainment content. I’m paraphrasing here, but Bob’s response was something to the effect of: “Excuse me, but don’t most people consider advertising to be the shit that gets in the way of the content they want.”

He gleefully showed a slide of Sir Martin Sorrell side by side with Peter Sellers’ Dr Strangelove (they do look separated at birth). And he mocked the WPP chair’s famous statement that the web is just a new “media channel” that will some day cease to be new and settle in amongst all the old media channels without truly displacing any of them. “The web isn’t a channel,” Garfield proclaimed. “It is fire. It is the wheel… It changes everything.” And anyway, Garfield added that its notable that notwithstanding what he’s saying, Sorrell has actually been steadily diversifying WPP’s portfolio so that in the not too distant future advertising and media services will account for less than a third of its revenue stream.

So if advertising as we know it is dead, what’s with all those Cassie winners that seem to have been driven primarily by TV spots?

Part of it is just the nature of awards show presentation formats. You need something to put on the screen for the audience, and if you have moving pictures as a part of the marketing mix you use them. So some of the winners are more than the just TV executions shown.

But that said the reality is a lot of the winners at the 14th Cassies did indeed rely primarily on TV to do the job.

Exhibit A would have to be the single 30 second TV spot that DDB Canada did for Clorox’s Brita water filters, which won two gold Cassies. You know the one where the glass of water on a kitchen table rises and falls when you hear the flush of a toilet off screen. Sales rose 57% in the year after the spot started airing, causing Clorox VP general manager Douglas Macfarlane to declare in the case submission: “I have never seen such great result so directly related to the advertising in my 20+ year career.”

The Pepsi campaign from BBDO and the Telus campaign from Taxi, both of which won gold in the sustained success category, were also almost entirely TV dependent (the Telus critters maybe less so). So too was the incredibly bloody gold winning campaign from Montreal's Amalgame for Quebec Road Safety that ran this spring (and appears to have contributed to a 36% reduction in highway fatalities during March and April).

However, I’d suggest that the rush to web-driven marketing programs and things like consumer generated content and customer co-creation is still a really recent phenomenon, and there will be more of them represented in future Cassies.

Regardless, I’d argue that the two other big winners at Cassies 07 support Garfield’s contention that the marketing world is irrevocably moving on from the 30-second spot.

The campaign for the Dermatek Pharmceutiques anti-aging skin product line Reversa from Taxi’s Montreal office, which won a gold and silver -on top of it's gold Cyber Lion at Cannes-, used print ads that directed readers to go to the seemoresideeffects.ca micro site. There, the target consumers, 40-plus “cougars,” could along with learning about the product view up to a dozen humorously lascivious videos featuring hunky young males. Six month sales volume after the campaign broke rose 31%, versus the historical 2%-3% growth rate.

And –no surprise here– the Grand Prix Cassie went to the Dove “Real Beauty” campaign from Ogilvy & Mather, which included the 90 second “Evolution” video that has been widely lauded –by even Bob Garfield I think- as one of the best examples to date of online viral video and buzz exploding into mass consciousness. You’d think there’d be little left to say about the Dove ad. But it seems in addition to more than 10 million YouTube views, $150 million in estimated earned media value in the U.S. alone and gold hardware from just about every major ad award show on the planet, Dove sales in Canada climbed sharply after the “Real Beauty” effort began in late 2004. Sales had seen a respectable 3% growth in 2004, but spiked 18% in 2005 and went up another 12% in 2006.

In his thank you remarks, Unilever Canada VP marketing Geoff Craig directly referred to how the campaign fits into Garfield’s brave new marketing world. He promised that the next phase of Real Beauty would get even more intimate and interactive with consumers and include things like gaming.

But you gotta know companies like Unilever aren't going to be giving up TV completely any time soon. And when pressed, I'm sure even Garfield would admit he exaggerates to make his point (after all, he's still reviewing TV spots every week at Ad Age). He has a bit of a shtick to perform and every good speech –or column- needs to have a bit of drama. A perhaps overstated threat of doom and gloom does make for a better storyline. So yeah, I certainly believe, and the Cassies this year certainly prove, that the old TV spot no doubt will be around for a few more years.

But –and this is a big but- just because TV ads with mass media buys will continue to be proven effective, that doesn’t mean that more targeted ad formats that allow for greater consumer interactivity won’t prove to be even more effective. And more cost effective.

Either way, I suspect ad awards competitions like the Cassies that focus as much if not more on results and effectiveness as on creativity will become even more important in debating and resolving questions like this.

By the way, you can see all of the 2007 Cassie winners cases at the Cassies.ca website.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 9:14 AM EST

Updated: Friday, 9 November 2007 9:47 PM EST

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

Okay, one last take from the CMA Digital conference.

I really enjoyed Ken Schafer’s fun, fast but deceptively substantive slide show during the Pioneers panel, “Ten things I’ve learned in the past 10 years”. Ken is now VP marketing at Tucows, and he truly has been a pioneering leader of the online marketing industry in this country. Among other things he was founder of AIMS, drafted the CMA code of online marketing ethics and created the online marketing social community OneDegree.ca. He’s always been a leader and generous mentor in the Canadian digital space.

Here are Ken’s top ten lessons from the past decade:
1.    Pioneers = Arrows in the back (still, you’ve got to get in early)
2.    We over-estimate (“once we see its possible we assume it is happening soon”)
3.    We under-estimate (Google… who knew the impact?)
4.    Punk rules (online is a DIY culture… just do it)
5.    We’re all in this together (you gotta “give back”… get involved in AIMS, IAB, CMA, OneDegree.ca)
6.    The Internet…it’s people
7.    Be a gardener …not an architect (it’s organic…find the natural paths…move things according to the sunlight)
8.    The future is now (“the future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed” –William Gibson. Try to live there –the future- as much as you can so you see where things are going)
9.    We are not our kids (“I’ve lost my ability to get my arms around the whole” online space… my kids are learning so much faster)
10.Don’t give up (“for every boom, there’s a bust…it’s gonna collapse at some point” again but “maybe not as bad as last time”)

And the three things Ken looks forward to in the coming years:
1.    Web-first marketing (campaigns developed from a web platform first rather than broadcast or print- its starting to happen and will happen a lot more)
2.    Be simple (the KISS rule applies… “the more we simplify, the better off we’ll be”)
3.    Wtf? (there will always be something else coming along that makes you stop and say…)

Re-reading my notes here more than a week later some of it looks kind of vague and elliptical. But I'm sure you get the gist. You can hear the full fleshed out version of Ken’s top 10+ (minus the 56 slides-sorry) here.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 12:40 PM EST

Updated: Wednesday, 14 November 2007 2:28 PM EST

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

Some final thoughts on the CMA Digital Marketing Conference. Yes, it wrapped up almost two weeks ago now, and yes there were as usual at this kind of event a few weak brag-and-boast sales pitches (come on down Facebook and Heavy), but some of the sessions are still reverberating in my mind.

The clear buzz generator of the conference had to be the keynote, titled “Innovation in action,” from RBC‘s Dr. Anita Sands. I didn’t speak to anyone who was not excited by it. I suspect the reason is her refreshing real-world view of and advice on how to drive innovation in environments that are not Google or Cirque du Soliel-i.e. where most of us mortals have to get by day to day.

Dr. Sands knows of what she speaks. As “Vice-President, Head of Innovation & Process Design, Global Technology and Operations” –now there’s a mouthful- at the country’s biggest bank, her mandate is “to ensure that innovation is core to everything at the organization – from new product development to the introduction of new technologies and business processes.” Easier said than done in an organization with 70,000 employees operating in the highly conservative, highly bureaucratic and highly regulated financial services industry.

Dr. Sands is not a marketer. She is, as she matter-of-factly put it, “a rocket scientist.” (No kidding: Her bio says she earned a Ph.D. in Atomic and Molecular Physics from Queen's University of Belfast; and she’s got a host of other science, math and management and public policy credentials too). Frankly at times, her talk made my brain hurt. But it was definitely stimulating and challenging… and in the end pushed a very simple message.

Essentially it was this: the most useful innovations are most often the small and incremental ones. Innovation and invention are often confused. Marginal improvements that add real value to an organization, and ultimately its customers, are more realistic to implement and can mean more to the bottom-line than more ambitious (and costly and risky) totally new and transformational innovations. (OneDegree has posted a short video interview with Dr. Sands taken right after her talk that sums this up nicely.)

One simple example of this “power of small improvements” world-view in action: Heinz‘s move a couple of years ago to turn its catsup bottles upside down. It made the product more useful to the customer and pumped sales volumes up with just a small change to the package that cost next to nothing to implement.

In the case of RBC, Sands says, the bank is trying to drive its “client/customer first” positioning through every aspect of the organization. So when it comes to any innovation, it is looked at through the prism of “how does it add value for the customer.”

For someone who professes not to be a marketer, Sands does speak the language. Communications, customer empowerment, transparency are all among the tools to developing an innovation culture she says.

The biggest key to getting an innovation culture rolling, especially in large organizations, is building cross-functional communications. Sands notes RBC is trying things like wikkis, peer-to-peer intranets, internal blogging and videocasting to get staff in different silos communicating and cross-pollinating ideas. It’s a big job. Sands admits that RBC is still only taking baby steps on most of those fronts. But that fits with the “do-learn-do” model of continuous incremental improvements on the fringes she champions.

Sands argued that getting lots of new ideas isn’t –or shouldn’t be- the challenge. It’s actually implementing them and then measuring their impact that is really hard. RBC has set up an “Innovation Lab” under her direction where every major innovation idea, whether proposed internally or externally, is tested and explored on two fronts: will it work, not just anywhere, but within the RBC environment and; can a real business case be made for implementing. In that sense, she defines the essence of her role, and innovation itself, as the “art and science to connecting what’s possible to what’s valuable to the customer.”

The ultimate benefit of an innovation driven culture, argues Sands, may well be in attracting and retaining talent. A bank, for instance, needs to be able to “execute flawlessly” and you need good people to be able to do that. A culture that empowers and encourages its people to be innovative in all they do is definitely going to have an edge over a closed command and control culture.

Innovation does not happen by accident, Sands said at one point. It is hard slogging. But really I think her evangelical enthusiasm for the almost Sisyphean challenge of instilling innovation into the DNA of a company like RBC was what was most engaging and inspiring about her talk.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 12:02 PM EST

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

The barrel of monkey productions video got me thinking about its ancestor “Truth in Advertising.”

This video was to be shown just once at the Marketing Awards in 2000 (good lord, that long ago!), but the buzz carried it around the global ad scene and ultimately to Hollywood where it was optioned at one point for a sitcom. It was remarkable really. Remember, we’re talking the days before online video and the instant buzz it can create became commonplace. I won’t say it made the careers of director Tim Hamilton and his co-writer David Chiavegato (then at Palmer Jarvis DDB, now at Grip Ltd.) but it certainly solidified their reputations and took them international.

It was near impossible to even see the film for a long time after a second official screening at the Cannes Ad fest in 2001. The producers cut a deal with ACRTA to get some top notch Toronto comic actors at next to nothing based on the promise that the production would only be seen at an ad awards show once and never broadcast.  A couple of copies were apparently passed around clandestinely for a time like some Soviet era samizdat novel.

Then, of course, Youtube happened. It popped up there last year, where the full 12 minute version has been viewed almost 140,000 times and shorter segments almost as many times. (And clearly the actor's rights fees were worked out, as you can also now buy it for $30 on Amazon).

While some of the the current phrases and in jokes from the turn of the century feel a bit dated now, the core premise of "Truth" –that all the people involved in the creation of a hack TV spot cheerfully say out loud their most venal and cynical thoughts about each other and the process– is still fresh. It’s also still shockingly offensive –you’ve been given the extreme parental guidance warning on this now. And it is very, very dark, and very, very funny.

Ironically, "Truth In Advertising" may well be one of the best examples of branded content in action that I’ve ever seen. It worked so well that its target audience, young ad guys and girls, didn’t notice –or mind, if they did- it was really a long form commercial for its producers, Toronto’s Avion Films.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 3:15 PM EDT

Updated: Wednesday, 31 October 2007 3:25 PM EDT

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

My good friend Gary sent along this little film, which takes the desire by clients to get "added value" for money in commercial production to ridiculous extremes - only it may not be that extreme any more.

It certainly sheds a different light on Chris Anderson's case for "free" as the business model of the future (see my Oct. 18 post).

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 1:34 PM EDT

Updated: Monday, 29 October 2007 1:50 PM EDT

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink