Rant: Digital Marketing Faux Pas

I'm angry about a lot of stuff this week, none of which I can do much about. So to divert myself, here are the top ten digital marketing trends that make me wonder about companies' hiring standards, or lack thereof.

- Clickbait headlines are bad enough, but clickbait headlines with poor grammar? If I wanted that, I'd just read one of Chetan Bhagat's 'novels'.

- Ads which call out a specific product or price point, then direct you to the homepage. It's like being sent to the grocery store when you place your order at a restaurant.

- When the word 'only' is suffixed to outrageous price points. Rs.900 only for a dupatta? No, please, take a kidney too, it's only fair.

- Completely irrelevant jumping on the bandwagon. B2B businesses that wish people on, say, Father's Day, just because B2C businesses are. Happy Veteran's Day to you, too.

- Hashtag hashtags. Learn how they work before you use them, please. #korangukailapoomaalai #TamizhLols

- 'Mobile sites' that are basically desktop sites with text in font size 5 and awkward image alignment. I wouldn't mind if your company wasn't touted to be a 'cutting-edge' 'tech start-up'. (Aren't they all?)

- Asking for all my details, including location, several times; then emailing me a bunch of offers that are only valid in other regions. Is this some bizarre tie-up with a relocation company that I don't know of?

- Giving away freebies to bloggers who started their blogs purely to receive freebies. I've no idea which restaurant is actually worth eating at anymore. Or which blog is actually worth reading, for that matter.

- No opt-out clauses. Dear big e-comm company, I'd probably not have used your biggest rival as much if you didn't try bullying me into downloading your mobile app all the time. 

-  Remarketing that never stops. Twelve months into seeing the same pregnancy ad, I wonder how long they think the human gestation cycle lasts. You'd think a maternity clinic would know the answer, eh?

Blurb: Making Books (Even More) Fun

23 October, 2012

I went on an awe-inspiring tour of the art work in the Center for Addiction and Mental Health a couple of weeks ago (full details here). Sadly, I spoke about the experience with 3 different people, and then I couldn't find the motivation to blog about it as well. 

To avoid that same mistake, here's an immediate take on last night's Blurb event at Joe Bidali's (no one's heard about this yet!) The meetup description sounded extremely meh-over-trying-salesy - getting together bloggers, affiliates, web marketers (a spammy group as is) to talk about Blurb's affiliate program is almost as hardcore sales as those resorts which call you out to 'free' events so that you go & stay at them afterwards. But in the interest of blog-fodder & getting to meet some people I hadn't seen in a while, I decided to go anyway - and I'm so glad that I did. 

The event was the most beautifully piece of executed salesmanship I've seen in a while. I first heard of Blurb (which lets you create & publish books) when my husband presented me with this lovely creation on my 25th birthday - it's thrilling to see a whole book full of stuff you wrote, and to have it hardbound and presented that awesomely - well. Definitely one of the best gifts I've received.

Let's face it, I completely judge a book by its cover, and also by how it looks on the inside, quite apart from the content of it. Blurb does a great job acing on those two scores - these books make you want to pick them up, regardless of what the content is. 

They're equally good at making their event feel similarly superlative - the first thing I noticed when I walked into Joe Bidali's was coffee table after coffee table lined with similar beautiful looking books for people to pick up and glance through at their own leisure. Next, the seriously generous spread of food, laid out to facilitate conversation around it. This picture on the right makes no sense at all (note the giant leg occupying most of it!), but it reflects the tone of the evening - it felt the complete opposite of salesy, and yet made you want to buy.

They did a short presentation on a couple of projects they'd worked with (my favorite was the story of 28 food bloggers who compiled a cookbook, the proceeds of which went toward Haiti earthquake relief), and just in case anyone needed more convincing, we all got gift certificates to publish a book for free. I'm definitely going to take them up on that offer, they did a stellar job of getting me re-excited about the product. Kudos to a great marketing team!

Writer's Circle: Lillian H Smith Library

24 September, 2011

I'd just gotten back from Panama (read about it here) with a duty-free souvenir that was more painful than Customs, even. The husband and I got home at 1am (hello, 16 degrees in Toronto, happy to see you after 30-degree Panama weather), devoured a packet of banana chips because the airline's idea of a vegetarian meal was three slices of uncooked brinjal and a crusty piece of bread, and then, for some reason, decided to stay awake a while more.

My favorite notebook 

So I finally woke up jet-lagged and bleary-eyed, did three rounds of laundry (the downside to long vacations) and just as I was sitting down with a relieved sigh, my phone insistently reminded me that I'd foolishly committed to attending a mid-day writer's circle the day I got back. I groaned & deliberated but finally decided I'd go, because I was starting work soon and couldn't take a rain-check.


It was a memoir writing group, and while I don't plan to write memoirs just yet, it must be said I have a remarkable way of committing every single tiny detail to memory and being able to wax eloquent about each (just ask my husband about one of our early fights :D) I figured it was as good a writing exercise as any. The rest of the group consisted of seniors, and we essentially picked topics from a box, then wrote about whatever the topic inspired for 15 minutes before reading out what we'd written.


I took along my favorite notebook for inspiration, and soon had two pages of crossed-out scribblings while everyone else had written out three pages of solid text. Never in my life have I felt so tempted to copy :P I managed to string a couple of paragraphs together while the group read out their pieces, and the gasp of appreciation and the chorus of 'aaah's made. my. day. I should totally do this more often.

The Expendables: Completely Expendable Experience

August 27, 2012

Remember last week, when my Meetup group had free tickets to The Expendables 2 premiere (like that movie needed a sequel!)? The theater had solidly overbooked and so we were asked to come back later. We should have listened to all the reviews we heard over the week, and just skipped the movie altogether. But it's hard to say no to free tickets, and so we found ourselves at the Scotiabank Theater, even vaguely excited about finally getting to watch the movie.

You can Photoshop movie posters, but you can't ease away the wrinkles from the cast in every single frame - Bruce Willis' face was the only one still capable of movement. Personally, I found it painful watching yester-year greats try to rehash their signature moves for a forced script that tried to massage everyone's egos... give me their individual classic movies any day. 

Storyline: When Nepal, China, Albania, and Russia are all part of a single story, you stop looking for lines weaving them together. Quick summary: everyone tried to kill everyone else just because they could, and I would have liked it if more people had succeeded. 

Constant gunfire with the occasional explosion made for a pretty consistent soundtrack, occasionally interrupted by man-grunts, which made up the majority of the dialogue. The rest of the dialogue consisted of cliches so trite that Bollywood would turn its back on them. 

As you can see, the movie annoyed me on several levels. If it were a rom-com, I may have been able to dismiss it as mindless entertainment. Yesterday though, when I was watching all the pointless violence and the throw-away references to justified wars, all I could think of was this:

Online Publisher Networks in Canada

July 19, 2012

While I've worked with the Indian and US-based digital markets before, the Canadian space is still new to me. I'm fascinated by the two dichotomies. On the one hand, you've a larger percentage of internet users than any other country in the world. On the other hand, advertisers are still fairly conservative about investing in online strategies.

I've been researching the space online of course, but I find great value in also talking to digital media professionals and getting their take. I love how friendly Canada is... almost everyone's willing to take time out to talk. Yesterday, I'd an informational call with Steve Macfarlane, the VP of Business Development at Suite 66. 

Suite 66 focuses on their publisher network, which includes some high-trafficked local sites such as BlogTo (my personal go-to for all things TO!). While Steve was quick to point out that Suite 66 isn't the biggest agency in the space, they do have an impressive set of long-established loyal clients, and plan to keep growing, a little bit every year. 

He confirmed a few theories I'd developed from my initial reading:

- There are quite a few competitors in the Canadian publisher market, but US still has fiercer competition 

- The majority of agencies in Toronto use 3rd party RTB systems & ad exchanges to allow for economies of scale

- The market's fairly well informed about ad exchanges and how they work 

The publisher side of things isn't my area of expertise, but if anyone's interested: he mentioned that several traffic monitoring agencies were looking to hire. You'll find the listings on the IAB Job Board. 


Next week, I'm talking to Sarah Trimble, Director of Interactive Marketing & Community at Sears. I've rather of gushing to do about Sears' innovative mobile strategy, but I'll reserve it for the post summarizing our conversation!

Exploring the Uniiverse: Stir-Fry Session

July 17, 2012

I'm back after an unexpectedly long, but much needed, hiatus. I spent the last week doing close to nothing, and I think it helped me deal with this. I did make it to Toronto's first TEDx salon for the year, a discussion on collaborative consumption based on this video. 

TEDx Salon, picture from site

I'm not necessarily persuaded by the speaker's conviction that barter-sites will, or should, replace consumption as we know it today. That said, I do use quite a few of these 'new-age' sites frequently, including AirBnB, Netflix, Freecycle, and Meetup... they've shown me Toronto in a way that conventional sites couldn't have, and I enjoy the open, sharing culture of this city.

Yesterday, I attended my first event from Uniiverse, 'the world's local platform for collaborative living.' Catchy, what? :) They've a great collection of listings, some free, some cheap, others justifiedly priced - and they invite you to host your own too. It's a fun way for people to share & showcase their, and other peoples', skills and/or products. 

Picture from site

I've been eyeing it for a while, and finally took the plunge with this stir-fry session. I'm an oil-wuss in my own kitchen, so it was definitely great partnering with someone gutsier. I also fell in love with Walmart's cut cauliflower/broccoli package and definitely need to change my vegetable shopping patterns. So those are my two big takeaways, other than a couple of boxes full of the yummy stuff we stirred up!

We spent an hour cooking up Tofu & Veg Stir Fry and Thai noodles with coriander, and then about ten minutes devouring it. The sad truth of relativity applied to cooking. It was a great meal though, and felt like it hardly took any effort at all to throw together. I'm definitely going to attend more of these in the future. 

A lot of people have been telling me I should host cooking sessions of my own in the free kitchen space at the Uniiverse office. I've to say, I'm tempted. Cooking together is way more fun than cooking alone. Let's see what August brings.

Wild Sound Festival

30 June, 2012

This weekend, I'm trying to see how far I can push myself before starting to feel my age. That's what it feels like in retrospect, at least! Friday evening, we shopped till we dropped, and discussed Ikea's wily plans to make us shop some more. Saturday, during the day, I volunteered at the Pride Festival  and was thrilled to see parents bringing their kids to the event too. What better way to tell a child that they can just be themselves, no judgment? Beautiful. 

And then, last evening, though it felt like my feet and hands were falling off in different directions after all the barricade-moving and heavy labor at Pride, I just had to check out Wild Sound Festival. It's a feedback event where the audience gets to watch, discuss, and then vote on a set of short films, handpicked to ensure we're watching movies from different countries, across different genres, with different budgets. Considering it's free-entry, and first-come-first-seated, the hall filled up remarkably fast with people who were soon talking to each other though many had come there alone.

The evening started off rather darkly, with a man tracing the history of dementia in his family (La Calma, Spain), and it got even more rocky with Netherland's entry, Year Zero OFFF, which was kind of a wordless Doomsday prediction. To end the last act on a cheerful note, we witnessed a soldier's interaction with the inevitability of death in the Canadian movie, The Soldier.

A moderated session followed, where the three movies were discussed by the group who'd come in early enough to secure seats in the main theater (and I was so glad I got a seat there, since I had lots to say!) while the ones in the side theater watched the comments through a live stream. We then went on to watch two slightly longer short films, Ireland's Nowhere in Particular, and an American Film Noir style flick, Vodka 7. While these two films also spoke about life and death, they were definitely perceived to be more optimistic than the first set of films. 

In addition to the five short stories we'd watched, I felt like I watched many more short stories as the personalities of the audience members came shining through in the moderated discussions. From the ex-army man who said he related with The Soldier, to the critique in the front row who bemoaned the Mustang's dent in Nowhere in Particular; you felt like you were getting a little bit of insight into the people watching the movies. There are 2-3 more events like this coming up, so let me know if you're interested and I can tell you when they're happening.

The Ukrainian girl I spoke with during a break mentioned another short film event, Short & Sweet, at No One Writes to the Colonel (Little Italy). It's free-entry Mondays, 8-10pm EST. See you there one of these Mondays? Let me know if anyone's going and I'll make my plans. For now, I'm a bit busy shifting houses and then watching the fireworks at Niagara Falls to celebrate Canada Day and then moving all that lovely Ikea stuff into the new flat and putting it together to make a home. Internet-less times ahead. Perfect time to hit Toronto's Public Library, which I've heard so much about!

#TwitterParty She's Connected

June 26, 2012

The Event

Logo from the site

I've mentioned before, in my first post, that the active Blogger community in Toronto is the prime driver behind my starting this blog up. And Social Media Women (@ShesConnected) is one of my favorite groups to web-stalk because of the warmth and energy of the network they've built. I'm working on building this blog into something I can add to their impressive repertoire of networked blogs, but in the meanwhile, I settled for joining the fun ladies at a #TwitterParty, in anticipation of their upcoming She's Connected conference.

Me at the Event
Did you know that it only takes an hour of frantic tweeting for a topic to trend? Seriously, that was the fastest hour of my life, keeping track of the #sccto hashtag and trying to answer all the questions as they sped by! It was also my first Twitter party, and I intend to attend many more.

From this one, I already got the links to some great blogs which look like reading fodder for the next week. I also have a whole new bunch of followers/people to follow, and we all know there's nothing like some Twitter love to get us through the week. Where else will people hang on to gripping narratives of your opinions on everything under the sun? I love Twitter.

What I loved: The speed of it all had to be seen to be believed. There were twenty new tweets every minute! I also loved the enthusiasm with which everyone recalled last year's conference. Ford's Karaoke booth, in particular, seems to be on the top of most people's memories. And you always know an event's successful when sponsors are happy to come back the next year! (Take a bow, @chickenfarmers)

What I didn't love: Many of the questions the host posed were about last year's conference and it emphasized the sad fact that I wasn't around here last year, boo! Hopefully we'll cover more general topics and talk about what we want to see at this year's conference in the upcoming Twitter Parties. I was also so bummed that the free conference passes I'd been eyeing all week went to others, as part of a lucky draw! Oh well, there's always next month. Because, in conclusion, I will definitely be back!

Overall: Read the last line above :)

Socializing at Windsor Arms' #OysterTuesdays

June 26, 2012

The Event

What does a vegetarian do at #OysterTuesdays? Network, of course. 

I'd heard a lot about Oyster Tuesdays via Christine Korda's lively Twitter feed ($1.25 for lovely fresh oysters in the inimitable old-school ambiance of the Windsor Hotel). And, of course, I'd heard a lot about Windsor Arms being a premier high tea destination in Toronto from all and sundry. When Christine tweeted an invite, with the disclaimer that the hotel had a fantastic vegan selection, created by Douglas McNish, author of Eat Raw, Eat Well... well. I had absolutely no reason not to head over. 

To add to the overall enthusiasm of it all, @SkinnyGirlCKTLS and @louise_philp were guaranteed to be there.

Me at the Event

For all the socializing I seem to do, I'm actually a fairly shy person on the inside. You know. Deep deep down. Somewhere. Shy me was out in full force as I crept into the already full room at Windsor Arms, but she was quickly swept to the wings in the friendly company I encountered.

There were women who'd known each other for ten years and more, there were people attending their first Oyster Tuesday, there were samples of Skinny Girl Cocktail thrown into the mix, and there was instant unwinding and long conversations about everything from travel to the future of mobile advertising.

What I loved: I found it interesting that almost every person in the room had been invited over by Christine. That's good PR for you! It also meant that the group had a certain homogeneous nature that I hadn't seen in any Meetup/event so far. It was interesting meeting people from very similar backgrounds, with very similar interests. It was like walking into conversations you were already a part of. Also, the outdoor seating at the patio was incredible, and I could easily have sat there all week!

What I didn't love: It's great that Windsor Arms has a gourmet vegetarian selection, I'd have loved to see one vegan counterpart complementing the oysters, since $1.25 is a great rate :)

Overall: I'm definitely heading back, not just for the networking at Oyster Tuesdays, but also for the kale salad which Christine says is the best she's ever had. Stay tuned to find out!

My First Meetup: Summer Solstice After Work Mixer

14 June, 2012

The Event

The organizers

Toronto Friends is one of the most active Meetup groups on Meetup.com… their message boards seem full of engaged responses, and there’s always something fun going on. Michael and Christine, two of the veteran organizers on the group, put out a call for a ‘Summer Solstice’ After Work Mixer at Pogue Mahone (777 Bay).

While the group missed the mark on the summer solstice, the event itself was definitely on the mark – timed after work, in a downtown location office goers could easily get to, and – did the organizers say – free appetizers? No wonder there was a crowd! 120 people attended this very successful event and the ratings on the meetup group the next day spoke volumes.

Crowded bar = successful event

Me at the Event

I was curious to check out the vibe among  a group of virtual strangers. While I’ve heard of Meetup, I was aware that a similar website wasn’t ever set up back home because of the rampant dangers of crowd control. Especially given that this particular meetup was at a bar with free appetizers, I was definitely looking forward to seeing the crowd that came out.

I was pleasantly surprised by the depth and range of the group. You see immigrants from all nations in Toronto, of course, but until you gather a random sampling in a room, you don’t quite realize how diverse the groups that coexist in the city are. I met a lot of interesting people from a host of different countries, and I’m looking forward to many more meetup groups, now that my back-of-the-mind concerns about safety have been addressed!

What I loved: The sheer mix of people, the palpable energy in the crowd… and the fact that for relative introverts, there was a quieter area where they sat around on bar stools and interacted with people who came up to them (very helpful when you have a husband who likes to take his time before opening up! :))

What I didn’t love: I met at least 40 people that night, and not one of us had had an appetizer, free or otherwise. I wonder where they went? We could see them, we could smell them, but somehow, we never quite got them on our plates.

Overall: I’m definitely going to be attending more meetups, hopefully some with themes that I’m interested in. Book clubs & digital media professionals, here I come!