“I’ve got two very expensive kids and a very expensive wife, and I’m building a 6,000-square-foot house in the country. But I don’t have any debt. The people who are in trouble are the people who can’t service their debt.”
Those are the, er, candid words of Brian Sutton, president, Cassels Brock Regulatory Consulting, appearing [...]

For the past five years, Red Bull’s been setting up an urban ice track in Old Quebec City for aggressive (read crazy) skaters to brave each year. It’s described as a combination of downhill skiing, hockey and boardercross. They call it the Crashed Ice event, but members of the Mouvement Montreal Français say it’s time [...]

A local all-news radio station here has launched a street marketing campaign that features, among other things, prostitutes carrying signs that say “Should prostitution be legal?  
So what do we think:
a) provocative, attention-grabbing, out of the box thinking?
b) exploitive use of society’s most vulnerable?
c) marketing that exists solely to drive publicity?

I’ll leave it to others to [...]

The UN Climate Change Conference took place last month in Poznań, Poland. The hope for these talks is to build momentum toward a negotiated greenhouse gas reduction target at the Copenhagen conference in December 2009. While a global agreement is essential, there is no reason that concerned corporate leaders can’t take steps now.
The average corporate [...]

Was I the only that found the CBC’s January 22nd news release a little weird? According to the release, the CBC has undertaken its own study to “examine the depth and breadth of its coverage . . . [and] gauge Canadians’ expectations of the public broadcaster’s news services.”
And this is news?
Let’s be clear: I’m all for [...]

News of Steve Jobs’s leave-of-absence from Apple is a blow to the company, but it needn’t have been such a massive challenge. It’s never a good idea to have a single person, no matter how tempting it might be to do so, to embody a company.
Since 1997, Jobs has done a tremendous job of turning [...]

It’s good to know that even in this economy, a smart, creative idea still works like a charm.
Tourism Queensland, with responsibility for promoting the Queensland region of Australia, came up with the brilliant idea of advertising “the best job in the world.”  
The job is caretaker of the islands of the Great Barrier Reef with [...]

An article on the excellent Environmental Leader website, recommended recently by our new Washington, DC, colleague, Frank Walter, caught my eye last week. The article reports research from PGAV Destination Consulting that shows that nearly 75 per cent of 18-34 year olds are more likely to visit attractions that are pursuing environmentally friendly practices.
While I’m [...]

As we head into 2009, sustainability and environmental issues promise to command increasing attention from corporations, interest groups, media and the public. There is an interesting article in Environmental Leader about the number of companies reporting their sustainability practices and its PR impact.
Environmental Leader provides an informative daily free online news summary of key corporate [...]

We have all seen the Dove Evolution clip 100 times. You know the one I’m talking about: it was e-mailed over and over again. Not only was it cleaver, but it really changed the way people think – the way marketing and advertisers think. For example, is a press release, commercial or billboard the only [...]