Hey {{first name | friend}},

When you look up marketing events in Canada, there are likely a million that come up, in multiple different cities across the country. But few manage to capture both the content and the community in the same room, and even fewer make it to ten years still feeling like something worth flying across the country for. SocialWest just did both.

Our team was on the ground this year, claw machine (you had to be there) and all. Here is what went down.

Three days, 800 marketers, and more sessions than anyone could catch. Here are the ones people are still talking about.

The best session of day one came from someone most people in the room had never heard speak at a marketing conference. A musician. Many came in skeptical. Most left calling it the highlight of the day.

Elsewhere, a paid search session had some of the most enthusiastic feedback of the whole conference. The reason: someone finally saying plainly what the platform will never tell you about its own tools. And for anyone whose work touches search, one session left people with somewhere to start rather than just something to worry about.

Over half of all session ratings came back EXCELLENT. The ones that did not were someone else's favourite.

"SocialWest consistently delivers a high quality conference experience with skilled speakers, engaging content, and plenty of opportunities to connect with and learn from one another."

There is a lot more where that came from. The full recap, including more sessions and what people actually took back to their teams, is on the blog.

Most AI agents can run a task. The problem is everything around it: setup, memory, context, cost, and figuring out what actually happened.

SureThing turns useful AI skills into autonomous agents with business context, persistent memory, cost-aware model selection, and a live dashboard. Paste a link, assign the work, and your agent reports back like a human teammate: what it did, what it cost, what needs your decision, and what happens next.

Built for founders, operators, and marketers who want AI to ship work, not become another tool to babysit.

Create Your Agent

Industry news, research, leadership perspectives, and campaign spotlights driving Canadian marketing forward.

At its Upfronts event in Toronto this week, Amazon laid out a programming and advertising slate that was less about product announcements and more about a clear strategic signal: Canada is a serious market and they are treating it that way. The NBA arrives on Prime Video in Canada this October. Seven new and returning Canadian originals were announced. And the pitch to advertisers was simple: a fragmented media landscape is a problem Amazon thinks it can solve.

The old playbook was simple: find the big broadcaster, buy the big game, reach the big audience. That logic is not broken. It is just incomplete in ways that are starting to cost brands real money. Sports fans are now spread across Prime Video, Netflix, YouTube, FAST channels, and linear broadcast, sometimes all in the same household on the same night. The brands navigating the World Cup window well have made one shift: audience first, channel second.

A grill, a national championship crowd, and a brief that landed three days before go-live. The FlexFlame activation ran for six hours in Ottawa and pulled a 67% scan-to-entry conversion on giveaway entries. The speed was not incidental. It was the whole point. Here’s how you can do it too.

Upcoming live webinars, interviews and conversations in the SocialNext Marketing Alliance. Every Wednesday at 10 AM Mountain Time / 12 PM Eastern Time.

REWATCH: Reading the Room: How to Integrate Cultural Awareness into Your Marketing Practice

Culture is everywhere. It is also one of the easiest things for a brand to get wrong. Brand, Content and Cultural Strategist June Findlay spent 46 minutes breaking down what cultural awareness actually looks like in practice, including where most marketers are getting tripped up and how to build a checklist that travels with every campaign.

The marketing job market in Canada is more difficult than ever. To help those on the hunt, here's a snapshot of what's open right now across the country.

Follow us on LinkedIn for job openings across every province and territory in Canada every Friday.

Thanks for reading! We are on the ground in Montreal next week. Reply if you’ll be there too! 🍁

Marketing News Canada