View of the Canadian Marketing Calendar via marketingcalendar.ca
Ask Canadian marketers how they hear about industry events and the answer is usually some combination of newsletters, LinkedIn posts and word of mouth. A new free tool from two people who spend much of their time connecting the industry is trying to pull all of that into one place.
The Canadian Marketing Calendar, launched October 29 by Aaron Foley of Marcus & Muse and Heidi McLeod of Lander Career Co., lists media, marketing and adtech events from across the country. Listings can be searched and filtered by city and date, event organizers can submit their own events, and a newsletter keeps subscribers up to date. As of November 4, McLeod says the calendar includes 138 events from 45 organizations, SocialNext conferences among them.
The project started as a spreadsheet. McLeod, a recruiter who regularly encourages people to get out to industry events, tried to build a master list on her own. “The best I could pull together was a basic, shareable Google Sheet that, even with a team of student volunteers, was too much to keep updated,” she said. Foley took that concept and built it into a working tool.
His motivation came from running the Ottawa Ad Club, which showed him how hard it is for events to reach the people they’re meant for. He also wanted to stop treating the industry as a collection of regional scenes. “Whether you’re in a larger Holdco agency in Toronto or a two-person shop in Saskatoon, you deserve to know what’s going on across the country or across the street,” Foley said.
Seeing events side by side also helps the people who run them. When several events are aimed at the same audience, a shared calendar makes those overlaps visible, giving organizers a better chance to avoid competing for the same room on the same day.
The calendar is also built with newer marketers in mind. For students, recent graduates and early-career professionals, events are often where relationships and job leads start, and the tool is meant to make those opportunities easier to find no matter where in Canada someone lives.
