WFA Global Marketer Week to be held in Toronto in 2017

The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) has announced that it will hold its next annual Global Marketer Week in Canada from 25 to 28 April 2017, in collaboration with the Association of Canadian Advertisers (ACA).

The venue is a first return to North America for Global Marketer Week in five years, when it was held in New York City. The same event was also held in Toronto in 2007.

North America still accounts for more marketing spend than any other region, accounting for roughly a third of global ad spend according to WARC.com, and remains a hub for cutting-edge marketing approaches, new technologies and is very often a bellwether for rapidly-changing consumer behaviors.

The event will also offer a chance to celebrate the history of the ACA, one of the world's oldest advertiser associations, founded in 1914 by eleven of Canada's biggest brands at a meeting held at the Toronto Boardroom of Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company then officially incorporated as an association in 1917.

The founding members of the ACA were Best Foods, Cadbury Beverages, Esso Petroleum, Ford, General Motors, Gillette, Goodyear, Kodak, Lever Brothers, Nabisco Brands and the Royal Bank. Many of these companies remain ACA members as well as members of the WFA, which the ACA itself joined in 1959. WFA was founded in 1953.

The showpiece event will be the WFA/ACA co-hosted Global Marketer Conference, which will bring together some of the global industry's leading lights to share strategies for growth in a fast-changing, digital age.

The week will also include a number of side events for both public affairs and marketing professionals designed to highlight how marketers must integrate public affairs priorities into their overall marketing strategies in order to align with fast-changing consumer communities, while seeking to inspire marketers with fresh and innovative examples of great brand marketing strategies and executions across a wide range of categories, media channels and regions.

Global Marketer Week is celebrated in a different city each year. The 2016 event was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and prior to that in Marrakech, Sydney, Brussels, New York, Beijing, Istanbul, Sao Paulo/Rio de Janiero and Mumbai.

"It feels timely and appropriate to return to North America and to Canada specifically given this marks a special moment in both ACA's and Canada's history. Since our last visit a decade ago, Global Marketer Week has travelled to every other continent. Yet perhaps nowhere is the impact of technology on consumer behavior seen more vividly than in North America. We greatly look forward to taking the marketer community back to Toronto," said Stephan Loerke, Chief Executive Officer of the WFA.

"We are delighted to welcome the world's largest client-side marketer event back to Toronto and Montreal in 2017. Preparations are underway to showcase best in class marketing, thought leadership and innovation from Canada and around the world," said ACA President and CEO Ron Lund.