Between a kick-off event and a Cross-Canada road show scheduled to visit Halifax, Ottawa, Calgary and Vancouver, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB Canada) has stopped today for a full day conference in Montreal. Even if the conference name has changed (it used to be branded as Interactive to the Max, the concept stays the same: conferences and panels sessions about interactive media advertising.

After a very welcomed but quick networking breakfast, well-known blogger and internet marketing consultant Michelle Blanc first took the stage to present a conference called: Building Your Business By Blogging. Blanc introduces blogs as an editing technology combined with a communicational philosophy. She notes that every company in every industry can blog and surely can gain something out of it. She gives the examples of few companies from Quebec that have experienced important success with blogging such as , , and . Michelle Blanc suggests that any given company should start with an internal blog in order to get use to the practice and once comfortable, they could use the tool to share their knowledge and their expertise beyond the borders of their enterprise. According to Blanc, blogs offer an incredible opportunity to show the world how you master some specific topics related to your industry. If you read French than you can take a look at her slides .

Following Michelle Blanc on the stage was a pannel of experts on the video’s next generation of advertising products. Speakers were Neil Sweeney (StreamTheWorld), Jeff Sundheim (Yahoo! Canada), Mark Coleman (DoubleClick/Google), Chris Johnston (Brightcove) and artist Pierre Côté (Gramsclo). If it wasn’t clear for some before, we’ve understand during the session that there is no single right format for the advertsing video industry. It seems that expectations for video revenu are high and that viewers tolerate ads as they don’t have any other choice to live with them. It also seems obvious that people prefers 7 seconds pre-rolls spots rather than 15s or 30s ones, in fact users tend to remove all video ads when possible. Besides that, video ads are facing other challenges as they will need to improve their solutions for local adverstising as well as they will need to incorporate better SEO in the near future.

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Kudos to the organization of Mixx Canada for making the conference a completely carbon neutral event and also for inviting bloggers (including myself) to cover the day. It’s always great to hear about what people is doing into our industry and I’m always pleased to meet and exchange with such great folks.

‘‘To rise a brand it takes a community, not a campaign’’

was the morning keynote speaker at . Sean started the presentation asking us if we think that brands are more valuable today than it was in the past. I find it funny that even if the crowd was mainly marketers, about half of the audience answered that it wasn’t… For spending most of my career into a corporate environment, one thing I know for sure is that the brand is probably the most valuable asset that a company has (it became obvious after the majors scandals in early 2000 : Nortel, Enron, Anderson,…). Anyway here ’s what i’d like to share from the presentation

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• brand engagement :
• ”people under 25 get the stuff ”
  
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• ”to rise a brand it takes a community, not a campaign”
• from