Labatt Breweries of Canada took Best of Show at the 9th annual Sponsorship Marketing Awards (SMAs), winning for a fan-based sponsorship program involving Budweiser and the Winnipeg Jets that exceeded business objectives. The SMAs, presented April 25th at the Sponsorship Marketing Council of Canada’s annual conference in Toronto, recognize companies that maximize their investments in sponsorship marketing by developing innovative strategies that drive results. Other big winners were BMO and Scotiabank, which each won two awards. Click here for the media release.

By Mark Farmer, ACA

Posted May 1st, 2009

The medium you are reading is, in fact, a blog: do not be alarmed. Please stay calm and seated.

Despite the fact that we send Directions out every month via e-mail (using Campaign Monitor, my personal all-time favourite newsletter service), the landing pages for the stories are in fact WordPress blog entries (WordPress being my all-time favourite blogging engine). Hosting the stories in a blog allows commenting, content management, easier sharing, syndication and more. Pound for pound, blogging remains one of the best outreach mechanisms in the communications toolkit.

The Society for New Communications Research in California put together these best practices for blogging from the best & brightest in the industry. Enjoy a few of their words of wisdom: (more…)

By Mark Farmer, ACA

Posted January 28th, 2009

An interesting phenomenon sometimes occurs when you let a campaign do its own thing: spectacular success.

In Boston for the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) symposium in November, I got a peek at a study produced by the society in cooperation with Deloitte and Beeline Labs, the 2008 Tribalization of Business Study. It looks at how organizations are using online communities, and how some of those communities are translating into big profits. (more…)