If you’re like us and live in the big city, it’s not something you enjoy. There’s just not much to say in favour of dirty, slushy streets. And then there’s the never-ending greyness…

So what are Torontonians in search of some authentic winter fun to do?  Escape to cottage country!

Explorers’ Edge (officially known as RTO12 by the Ontario Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport) is the region north of Toronto that includes Algonguin Park, the Almaguin Highlands, Muskoka and Parry Sound.   In just a couple of hours, salt-stained urbanites can be in the middle of a true Canadian winter.  And there’s a lot of winter to be enjoyed in Explorers’ Edge – ice-fishing, dog-sledding, skiing, pond hockey, shoeshoeing, or just curling up in front of a fire in a fancy resort – it’s all there waiting for you.

We were fortunate to be tasked with the job of developing an integrated winter ad campaign for Explorers’ Edge.  Our campaign literally transforms the perception that cottage country is just for summer vacations. With a reverential nod to the iconic mid-20th century advertising and travelogues of the1950s, the campaign includes radio, outdoor (pictured above), newspaper, online and Facebook.

In Explorers’ Edge, winter turns up the fun!

It was a job tailor-made for Worldstorm™. We invited recent grads of animation programs to put on their thinking toques and pitch us ideas that went beyond the usual holiday cliches. We received a stocking-full of great ideas, and the winner was one produced by Joseph McCauley, a recent Sheridan College graduate.

We teamed up with our producer-extraordinaire Clare Cashman and the animation wizards at Axyz to produce this magical and festive animated short.

Happy holidays!

That being said, the one item I have been giving a lot of thought to is what your Circles tells Google about you. It’s a key feature of the platform and one that the majority of individuals I’ve talked to rave about. When you add people on G+ you place them into groups that you self-identify. Being able to segment your connections into groups that you name based on your own needs is a great, well, plus of the social network; it helps you t manage who you share with and for what purpose. It also gives Google deep information about you and your social graph.

Which of my connections do I consider “real” friends? Who do I consider influential about business? Which of my connections are also knitting fans? Which ones also like Glee? Who considers me their friend? Is it mutual? Which Circles do I share specific types of content with?

With Google’s algorithms, being able to see not only what I search for, what videos I watch, who I email, what content I post, what content I consume, but also who I connect with, and in what context, gives them powerful insight into who I really am as a person. That kind of information will allow them to target me as a consumer in a much deeper way across all of their properties. I can only imagine how this data will be used in years to come as Google continues to roll-out products and refine their core products.

These are just a few of the fun facts contained in our brief survey social networks in Latin America. Read it here.

There are well-established homegrown social networks in Japan that have interesting qualities. There’s Amoeba, the blogging service; Mixi, Japan’s largest social media site; social gaming sites like Gree; and Mobage Town, Japan’s answer to YouTube. But it’s the growth of the American properties that has breathed new life into social networking amongst Japanese. Facebook, for example, has more than doubled its user-base since last fall to 3.7 million actives, but still well behind Mixi’s 23 million. It’s refusal to permit users to use nicknames or pseudonyms has been a significant hurdle to adoption by the privacy-conscious Japanese.

The Japanese have always been early adopters of new technologies, which might explain why they took to the local soc-nets. The success of the local properties explains in part why properties like Facebook have struggled despite launching a Japanese-language versions. It took business-side deals by these three companies to finally get traction.

Twitter was first to enter a joint venture, with Japanese media incubator Digital Garage. Together, the companies promoted Twitter as a service for “those in the know”, which fuelled consumer adoption as celebrities and other notable figures began to jump on. Interest in Twitter spiked when Twitter became essential for news during the recent earthquake catastrophe and subsequent nuclear accident. Today, the micro-blog has 10 million users, placing it well ahead of Facebook (a rarity worldwide).

Speaking of Facebook, the social behemoth passed on a joint venture and instead opened a small local office on their own. To drive sales growth, they choose to partner with Dentsu, Japan’s largest advertising firm, granting them exclusive rights to sell Facebook’s premium ads. One can only assume that it’s Dentsu behind the recent higher profile of the site (and Mark Zuckerberg in particular), in the press and in books. The blow-out success “The Social Network” also didn’t hurt.

As for YouTube, the local YouTube team has been aggressively making deals for local content, and engaging Japanese users to encourage more and better quality video uploads.

For those of us dealing with cross-Pacific marketing campaigns, the newfound popularity of these sites presents an opportunity.  Local soc-nets have a dark side for us: they are known for curbing marketing that is “unauthorized” (campaigns that aren’t orchestrated locally with the company that owns the social media site) and have long been suspected of manipulating results to make the campaigns they help you execute appear more successful than they actually are (and they share very little useful or verified data). So privacy concerns aside, the openness of the American services with their user-friendly interfaces, policies, data-sharing and API access stands in joyously stark contrast to the local soc-nets.

Net-marketers hoping to reach Japanese consumers now have an unprecedented opportunity. For the first time, they can run multiple-language campaigns that include Japan using readily available tools (like Facebook’s Ad Marketplace), a native speaker and a little bit of cultural insight.

Now if only China would allow Facebook and Twitter!

But something happened to DM in Canada. The hoopla stopped. DM died.

And ten years on, finding ad agency talent in this country who know the basics of DM is next to impossible. It seems the discipline is simply not being taught anymore, even in the shops that were once the standard bearers for it.

Yet when I look at the state of DM in the UK and the US, I see a very different picture…it’s alive and thriving in this digital age. So what happened in Canada? I think there were two concurrent events that ultimately led to the death of direct in this country.

First, Canadian direct marketers killed direct marketing. In late 1998, the Canadian Direct Marketing Association voted to drop the word “direct” from its name. Over 90% of its members voted to do so. The official line was that it was necessary to reflect the changing and broadening mandate of the association. To me it seemed like an effort to get the cool kids from advertising agencies to come to our parties. Whatever the reason, a big and powerful organization that was once singularly focused on direct was no more.

Second, digital came to dominate marketing business at the end of the last century. Young marketers entering the ad business were drawn to it, for obvious reasons. But the people creating the space were not direct marketers, they were technicians and entrepreneurs. Direct marketing was seen by this new breed of online marketer as the oldest of the old school disciplines (i.e., direct mail): who in their right mind would choose that career path?

My Cloud AdAgents colleague Tamera Kremer rightly makes the point that some direct marketers found their skills were required in search engine marketing, especially once Google got traction in the late 90s.  Alas, the SEM sector is small when compared to what DM used to be, and still quite underdeveloped in this country.

The fact was (and still is), direct and digital (including social) go hand in hand. Direct marketers with strong analytical skills are superbly equipped for a career in digital…and sorely needed today. Consider Facebook: advertising on the platform is direct marketing in its purest form, but few marketers know how the confluence of list, offer and creative testing is key to maximizing results on it.

The time has come for a new focus on direct marketing in this country.

And Facebook has only just begun. Over the past twelve months we’ve seen enhancements to Pages and ads that make the platform even more compelling. We’re huge fans (both in the traditional and Facebook sense) and committed users.

But that’s not to say we don’t have a few complaints, particularly with Pages. Herewith, our official Facebook Pages Bitch List, or Six Things We’d Like to See Changed on Facebook Pages.

Page Navigation is buried. Last year, Facebook made changes to Pages that made them more like personal profiles. There were some aspects to those changes we liked (for example, the ability to browse Facebook as the brand). But one change we didn’t enjoy was moving the navigation to the right-hand side, under the pic. And to pour salt on the wound, Facebook eliminated the side bar box.

The result? It’s challenging to promote the third party application tabs where promotions must now live (another change as of May 11, 2011). Users who land on a brand’s Wall can easily miss promotions. Yes, there are things that you can do with the profile picture to call out promotions, but we find that solution awkward, especially if a Page has several apps to promote.

We’d love to see the return of more prominent, and customizable, Page navigation.

The photo strip (usually) looks awful. This point is really about branding on a Facebook Page. We’d appreciate a few more opportunities to brand a Page’s Wall. The photo strip doesn’t provide much opportunity to do that, and it’s impossible to hack it to display a coordinated line-up of pics (the display is now randomized). The use of thumbnails in the strip makes matters worse, as more often than not they look…wrong. And since Facebook also reduced the profile pic size, branding possibilities are further limited.

Please Facebook, allow us to use the profile pic and the space occupied by the photo strip to deliver a coordinated brand message.

No link to brand website. It’s impossible to have a live link to a brand’s website on a Page Wall. No doubt this has something to do with Facebook’s desire to keep traffic inside their walled garden. We’d like one anyway.

You can’t change the landing tab for Fans. If this point were addressed, we probably wouldn’t include the first three items on our Bitch List. It’s impossible to set a default landing tab for Facebook users once they become Fans – they must go to the Wall.  So Fans, the people who are most likely to be interested in your promotions, are the ones most likely to miss them.

No multilingual functionality for Pages. If you do business in more than one language, you have two choices: Bring everyone together on one global Page (and in short order your Page becomes a Tower of Babel). Or set up different Pages by language.

Neither option is perfect. We’d love to see landing page functionality, which allows brands to direct Facebook users to sub-Pages keyed to languages or countries. The Fan count would be global, and the brand gets to market a single Facebook URL.

Marketplace ads. Nothing bothers neophyte Page marketers more than the ads for other companies that appear on their Page. This is not just about competing ads (for example, it’s entirely possible to see a CapitalOne MasterCard ad on the Page of a Visa issuer). It’s also about brand image. For proof of that point, check out the Louis Vuitton Page. I just did, and got ads for something called Tenniscuties.com and an offer of cash for my old air conditioner. Not exactly befitting the LVMH brand.  We’d like to see the ability to squelch these ads added to Page functionality.

Which brings us to the reasonable point that Facebook makes Pages (and access to millions of Facebook users) available for FREE to brands, so quit whining.  To that we say we wouldn’t mind if Facebook charged a modest monthly fee for Pages with premium features like these. The fee could be tied to a Page’s Fan count. We bet it would generate boatloads of revenue for Facebook.

And given Facebook’s astronomical private market cap, every hundred million or so of incremental revenue has got to matter.

But often they work at Cloud Free Agent Espresso Bar, our hi-tech café located on West Queen West in the heart of Toronto’s art and design district. The neighbourhood features some 300 small businesses, many of whom are creative just like us. And since moving into the neighbourhood almost 2 years ago, we’ve become deeply connected to the local community.

That’s why we help the West Queen West Business Improvement Association on a pro bono basis. Our most recent effort helped drive traffic to local businesses in the week leading up to Mother’s Day, 2011.

Our “Queen for a Day” promotion featured the work of free agent Carolyn Nichilo-Verkyl, whose whimsical illustrations draw from her own experience as a mom. The campaign featured a poster that appeared in shops from Bathurst to Gladstone, as well as a take-one with a set of free Queen for a Day “coupons” which moms could redeem for things like a free load of laundry or a post-meal clean-up.

We also created a Facebook tab to support the Queen for a Day contest, in which one lucky mom could win a $500 gift certificate redeemable at any WQW business. We supported the tab with a Facebook Marketplace Ads buy.

The impact on sales at WQW businesses, has not yet been officially tallied, but anecdotal reports from the street are overwhelmingly positive.

Schreyer took Kia’s neutral image and turned it on its nose. Literally. All new models now sport a Tiger Nose, making it immediately identifiable as a Kia. And it’s on Kia’s latest model that the Tiger Nose makes its boldest statement yet — the 2011 Kia Optima.

We were fortunate to be called upon to help Kia Motors Canada tell the story of the Canadian media launch for this car in social media. And what better place to launch a hot, beautifully-designed ride than in a hot city known for beautiful design, Miami’s South Beach.

Cloud AdAgents sent a team of social media content creators — consisting of a writer, photographer and editor — to share the media launch with a wider audience of Kia fans on Facebook and Twitter. The team plotted a storyline for the three day event: During the first day in South Beach, a city known for its unique style, the story of Kia’s commitment to design took centre stage. Day two was spent on the steaming hot Homestead-Miami Speedway, and we focused on performance as journalists got to scream around the track in Turbo versions of the Optima and Sportage. The third and final day was all about interior design and creature comforts, as we ferried a fleet of Optimas from Key West to Miami in a 5 hour drive over the legendary Overseas Highway.

Over the course of the event, we generated over 50 posts to Kia’s social media properties. These posts were first and foremost written to engage Kia’s rapidly growing number of fans, and to get them talking about the new Kia.

That’s why our efforts like these have more to do with the principles of storytelling than advertising.

Cloud AdAgents™ is a digital advertising agency staffed by a core team of full-time account and project managers.  If you’re a digital go-getter who embraces our commitment to an untethered working environment, then tell us about yourself here.