Marketing News Canada

Recorded live at SocialWest 2026 in Calgary, Azrah Manji-Savin, entrepreneur, speaker, and co-founder of Syzl, joins host Lindsay Smith to unpack why personal branding and in-person networking matter more than ever in an increasingly digital world.Syzl is an online marketplace helping food entrepreneurs access commercial kitchen space, along with the operational and financial support they need to actually grow. Beyond building the platform, Azra is passionate about helping people build authentic professional relationships and stand out without losing sight of who they are.Azrah breaks down why personal brand searches have skyrocketed alongside AI, how to network without it feeling like a performance, what it looks like to build a personal brand guide the same way you'd build one for a client, and why staying consistent online and in person is the thing that actually builds trust.Networking isn't a performance. It's just a conversation you haven't had yet.Edited and produced by TAKT.

Recorded live at SocialWest 2026 in Calgary, Sabaa Quao, venture studio advisor and AI strategist, joins host Lindsay Smith to explore how synthetic data is about to change the way every marketer builds customer models.Sabaa spends his days advising startups at the intersection of AI and fintech, and points to Arima as one of the clearest examples of where this is headed: a synthetic model of society built on 25,000 to 50,000 data points per person, layered on top of a brand's first-party data to fill in the gaps that surveys, forms, and imperfect customer records leave behind.Sabaa breaks down why ecosystems and compounding data models are the two biggest predictors of startup success, how synthetic data stays privacy-first while still getting richer over time, why marketing is behind industries like autonomous driving and fraud detection in adopting it, and what happens when predictive modeling becomes accessible to businesses of every size, not just the ones with a head of data and analytics.Guesswork was never a strategy. Now it doesn't have to be the default either.Edited and Produced by TAKT.

Recorded live at SocialWest 2026 in Calgary, Jessica Lortie, Head of Marketing at Toast, joins host Lindsay Smith to dig into one of the most persistent and underreported gaps in the Canadian tech and marketing industries.Toast is a tech HR firm dedicated to closing gender gaps in the sector, working with organizations to diversify their hiring pipelines and running a community platform that gives women in tech the belonging, sponsorship, and psychological safety that workplaces often fail to provide.Jessica shares the data behind a pay gap that tripled between 2016 and 2024, why masculine-coded job titles are quietly filtering women out before they even apply, how Toast's Champions Program is training men to advocate for women in the workplace, and why community might be the most underrated career acceleration tool available to women in tech right now.The gap is real. The data is clear. And the playbook for closing it is already being written.

Recorded live at SocialWest 2026 in Calgary, Lauren Freund, Campaign Manager at Canva, joins host Lindsay Smith to explore what it actually takes to create content that cuts through in a crowded digital landscape.Canva is one of the world's most widely used design platforms, helping teams of every size create visual content across social media, presentations, video, and more. At Canva Create 2026, the company's latest announcements signaled a clear evolution, from a design platform with AI capabilities to an AI-first creative platform where design is the application.Lauren breaks down her content that connects framework, why the messenger matters as much as the message, how brands can balance digital presence with in-person community building, and why chasing reach and virality is the wrong goal for most marketers.Virality is a byproduct, not a strategy.Edited and produced by Takt.

Recorded live at SocialWest 2026 in Calgary, Charlie Grinnell, co-CEO of Rightmetric, joins host Lindsay Smith to explore why the data brands have been collecting about themselves is only half the story.Rightmetric helps North America's leading consumer brands harness external digital data across social, search, web, app, and ad spend to uncover what Charlie calls outsights: intelligence derived from how people actually behave online rather than what they say in a survey or focus group.Charlie breaks down why traditional segmentation falls short, how AI has turbocharged the ability to count and interpret behavioral signals at scale, and what it looks like when a brand finally sees the full picture of their audience rather than the one they assumed was there.Because there's a big difference between what people say they do and what they actually do.Edited and produced by Takt.