Episodes
September 27, 2021
EP31 - Banks Need to Balance Automation and Human Advice to Win with Maja Neable
In a world where consumers are moving their banking transactions online and leaving branches as remnants of the past, how does one bank differentiate themselves from the other? According to Maja Neable , Chief Marketing Offic...
September 13, 2021
EP30 - BenchSci wants to bring new medicine to patients 50% faster with Simon Smith
For anybody who is not familiar with it, there is a real productivity crisis in the pharmaceutical industry and they have even given it a name, which is Eroom's law , the opposite of Moore's law. Moore's law states that every...
July 25, 2021
EP29 - Maple is Canadian Made Healthcare IP For the Entire World with Dr. Brett Belchetz
The Canadian healthcare system is typically ranked as either the lowest ranked or second lowest ranked performing healthcare system of all developed world nations. Our physicians are great. Our procedures, world class. Then w...
June 21, 2021
EP28 - Twitter is the Conversation Layer of the Internet with Paul Burns
Paul Burns is the Managing Director of Twitter Canada. Did you know that 1 in 5 North Americans use Twitter and 500 Million tweets are sent every single day? It is a platform with scale and is designed to generate conversatio...
May 26, 2021
EP27 - What is a Retail Media Network with Dana Toering of Walmart Canada
Consumers spent $861.12 billion online with U.S. merchants in 2020, up an incredible 44.0% year over year. That’s the highest annual U.S. ecommerce growth in 20 years and It’s also nearly triple the 15.1% jump in 2019. With m...
April 26, 2021
EP26 - The Future of Loyalty is Data with Derrick Fung
What is the future of loyalty? Capturing and rewarding consumers for their time, money and thoughts. When Derrick Fung thinks about Drop as a company, ultimately the big vision is to build both the world's most personalized r...
April 06, 2021
EP25 - Are You Really Listening to Your Customers with Shannon Katschilo of Medallia
Your customers have so many options, so many different ways that they can relay feed back to you. Sometimes they call you, other times they fill in surveys. If you're like me, sometimes you just go to Twitter and shout it out...
March 14, 2021
EP24 - How to stay Relevant on Marketing, Technology and Other Stuff with Jed Schneiderman
Jed Schneiderman is a proven entrepreneur, and executive in the marketing, media and technology space. When I think of Jed, I think of someone who is known for his thought leadership on topics ranging from marketing and tech...
February 15, 2021
EP23 - The Future of Agencies is in Driving Total Customer Experience
Jeff Greenspoon thinks that the future of agencies is really in driving total customer experience. Jeff is currently the President of the dentsu Solutions Group in the Americas and the CEO of Dentsu Canada.
January 17, 2021
EP22 - Solving Some of the Hardest Problems That Don't Really Exist Today
Can lightning strike twice for Andrew Chau? The co-founder of SkipTheDishes is now going for a second hit with Neo Financial, a digital bank built from the ground up to give Canadians the most rewarding spending and saving experience - the way it should be.
December 09, 2020
EP21 - Entrepreneurs Should Take the Offer, Then do it All Over Again
Ghassan Halazon is a serial e-commerce entrepreneur with a decade of scaling some of the country’s most coveted digital brands. Ghassan is the Founder and CEO of Emerge Commerce Inc., an acquirer and operator of niche e-commerce assets with 2 million members across North America. EMERGE has also been recognized as a winner on the Startup 50, and Canada’s Top Growing Companies by the Globe and Mail. As Ghassan says, they ACQUIRE, INTEGRATE and ACCELERATE e-commerce brands from coast to coast.
November 24, 2020
EP20 - The Big Push, Taking Women-led Companies From Seed to Series A and Beyond
At The Big Push, Sharon Zohar and team challenge the traditional accelerator model by tapping into a collective of business and technology executives ready to provide hands-on services and support to create actionable and measurable growth plans to help lift women-led companies to new heights.
October 25, 2020
EP19 - Turning a Pick-Up Culture Into a Delivery Culture
In this episode of Fine Tune, Kevin Edwards, CEO of SkipTheDishes and I discuss topics including the natural shift of consumer behaviour to more self-serve and digital. We also talk about growing a company in a smaller market (Winnipeg) and how culture and trust can go a long way to help success. Did you know that SkipTheDishes has 2,500 employees in a city of 750,000? Neither did I. Listen in as we discuss these and other topics that will make you want to open the app and order food.
September 13, 2020
EP18 - Success Means Being Right Most of the Time With Only 40% of the Information
While considered a success in her career, Alyssa Atkins had ended a long term relationship and witnessed some of the people, women in particular, in her life going through challenges with regards to getting pregnant and having kids. What she was witnessing triggered her thoughts and desire to one day have kids, all while not "in the perfect situation" with the right partner, the right job, the right house... She decided to at least start her own process with a fertility test. And that's where it all fell apart.
August 09, 2020
EP17 - Plumbing in the Cloud
Listen in as Sally Bayer, Vice-President of Marketing for Roto-Rooter, David Suydam, CEO & Founder of Architech, and Stephen Tanaka, GM Microsoft Partners, Microsoft Canada, discuss the state of digital transformation and the project that helped Roto-Rooter become even more capable of maintaining their market position as a leader in their industry.
July 27, 2020
EP16 - The Best Brands Have a Crystallized Point of View
In this episode, Livia Zufferli joins me to discuss this and other important aspects of what makes a brand relevant in the age of digital and performance marketing. Livia brings her experience from both agencies and organizations where she has held such roles as SVP Brand for Rogers Communications and VP, Head of Marketing for Target Canada where she lived the incredibly fast rise and fall of that iconic brand in the Canadian market.
July 07, 2020
EP15 - A Bias Free Disruption of the $50 Billion Executive Search Industry
ExecThread isn't a recruiting firm. It is a platform, a community, a marketplace, trying to do something that's paradigm-shifting in the executive recruiting market by using a unique crowdsourced approach to bring much-needed transparency to the ‘hidden job market’. ExecThread has amassed ~15,000 retained executive searches to-date, and made them available on the platform to their members.
July 04, 2020
EP14 - What do Denny's, Sandman Hotels and The NHL's Dallas Stars have in Common?
Listen in to Manoj Jasra as he shares his stories and opinions as an authority on how to transform organizations like Northland Properties, build internal agency capabilities and redefine the role of the CDO and CMO. Northland Properties Corporation is the force behind such brands as Sandman Hotel Group, The Sutton Place Hotels, Moxie’s Grill & Bar, Chop Steakhouse & Bar, Denny’s Restaurants, the Dallas Stars, and Northland Asset Management Company.
June 24, 2020
EP13 - Canada's Top CDO (That's Digital and Data to you)
In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, digital, data, UX, and technology solutions could not be more critical to an organization’s overall strategy, growth, and success. As an executive leader, Shawn Mandel transforms organizations and drives positive, lasting change to position those organizations as both industry and market leaders.
June 14, 2020
EP12 - Live Your Customer's Story with Tony Chapman
Tony Chapman won a multi-million dollar agency pitch with 40 pictures and a monologue. I was there to witness it, and ever since, have marveled at this marketing guru who is also one of Canada’s leading communication experts and one of the youngest members inducted into the Marketing Hall of Legends (2008).
June 05, 2020
EP11 - Spotify on a Watch, and How to Build a Business With Spotify
Ivan Pehar is the Country Manager for Spotify Canada. In this episode I talk with Ivan about the Spotify platform, and how it has become such an important and influential player in Canada's digital media and content landscape. It is not just for music creators and music lovers, rather it is a place for all kinds of audio content both for those who want to consume it, as well as for those that want to build a business with Spotify using audio as a key tactic.
May 24, 2020
EP10 - Transitioning from a Shopping Cart to a Shopping Cart
Lauren Steinberg runs digital product for Loblaws. They are in the middle of a massive transformation, helping millions of customers transition from using a shopping cart in their stores, to using a different kind of shopping cart from their homes, work or anywhere on their phone. Yes, we are talking about migrating from those metal and plastic shopping carts used in physical stores, to the digital carts on the different e-commerce websites for each of the brands. How big of a transformation? Well they hit $1 Billion in e-commerce revenue, in 2019, doubling from their 2018 results.
May 18, 2020
EP9 - Starting a New Job in a Pandemic
Remote work and remote onboarding are the current norm and it just might be that way for the long term. In this episode I talk about my own experience starting my new job in March, and also speak to two others who went through their own remote onboarding experiences. Len Ball and Dean Guest have some great insights and recommendations on succeeding through a remote job start.
May 09, 2020
EP8 - Will we Ever Step Foot in a Gym Again?
Jonathan Fagg of Goodlife Fitness and I discuss the convergence of digital and physical in the new world of fitness, and how the definition of a customer is changing and will include members that might never step foot inside one of their studios. This digital only customer is a new phenomenon for GoodLife, but not for companies like Peloton and newer entrants like Tonal.