Les Speaks at Leading Social Change Conference in Canada's Ad Week 2011

Our President and Creative Director, Les was invited to speak at Canada’s Ad Week 2011 during the Leading Social Change component of the conference. Recognized as an international leader in the field, Les was asked to give a presentation spotlighting social marketing in the United States. The event took place on Tuesday, January 25th, 2011 at the MaRS Discovery District in Toronto.

The conference sought to highlight and celebrate successes in social marketing while also considering some of the challenges. As Les pointed out in his speech, one of the greatest obstacles to creating successful campaigns is the availability of resources. Most social marketing campaigns are publicly funded and therefore must work with limited means. As Les is quoted in Canada’s National Post, “the major impediment to [successful] campaigns is often resources, given that many of them are publicly funded… ‘In the [United States] it is a constant struggle’… social marketing work is frequently "done by amateurs and overly constrained by politicians,” he said. “And in an economic recession, social marketing is the first to go.”

Other presenters at the event included Kevin Finnerty, Executive Director of the Ontario Ministry of Health, Jean-Michel Gilbert, CEO of Proteines, a health strategy and communications agency in France and Belgium, Will Goodhand, a “Juicy Evangelist” at the U.K. based research company BrainJuicer, and Yvette Thornley, Manager of the Communications and Information Branch of the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care. The keynote speaker was Justin Trudeau, a renowned Youth Advocate and current Member of Parliament in Montreal.

Read more about the Leading Social Change conference here:
http://leadingsocialchange.ca/

Read the full National Post article here:
http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/Campaign+brings+home+hard+reali...