Speakers
Laurene Cihosky  |  Daniel Dejan  |  Joe Duncan  |  Wendy Mesley  |  Colin Smith  |  Bob Wagner  |  Anthony Watanabe

Laurene Cihosky
Senior Vice-President, Direct Marketing, Advertising & Publishing Business
Canada Post Corporation

As the leader of Canada Post’s fastest growing line of business, Laurene Cihosky champions the enduring power of direct mail as a business-builder for marketers in Canada.

Laurene is a career direct marketer, with 20 years of hands-on experience helping marketers acquire and retain customers, build CRM methodologies and determine their channel choices. She has held executive roles in Canada’s best-in-class direct marketing advertising agencies Blitz Direct, Data & Promotion, MacLaren McCann Direct and Vickers & Benson Direct, where she developed industry-leading programs for marketers like Bell Canada, Bank of Montreal, General Motors of Canada, Rogers (Cantel) and Shoppers Drug Mart.

At Canada Post, Laurene has P&L responsibility with a mandate to grow the use of direct mail by demonstrating the value of direct marketing to organizations of all sizes, improving the results marketers achieve when using direct mail, making direct mail easier to use and working with industry partners to offer broader direct marketing services. To fulfill these goals, she has built a team of exceptional direct marketing practitioners from both marketing organizations and ad agencies. In 2008, they will focus on facilitating more creative flexibility for direct mail, developing new products and services to support acquisition marketing and encouraging best practices in mailing “green”.

Laurene is an in-demand speaker and advocate for direct marketing and direct mail. She is the 2007 recipient of the Direct Marketer of the Year Award from the Direct Marketing Association of Toronto. Since 1974, this award has recognized individuals who have made a significant contribution to the direct marketing industry.

Laurene holds a Commerce degree from the University of Toronto, with a Major in Economics and a Minor in Statistics, and is the proud mother of two.

Daniel Dejan
Sappi Fine Paper

Daniel Dejan is the National Print & Creative Specialist for Sappi Fine Paper. In this position Mr. Dejan provides value-added marketing, sales and technical consultation as well as internal (in-house) and external (end-user customer) training and education for the print, paper and creative communities. In his ten-year tenure with Sappi Mr. Dejan has held the positions of National Creative Sales Manager, Regional Specification Manager for the Great Lakes, Midwest, and Southern regions.

Mr. Dejan has extensive experience as an award-winning graphic designer, art/creative director, production manager and print buyer. A dedicated graphics arts educator, author and consultant with many years of national and international experience; over the past twenty years he has applied his expertise by providing key-note speeches, seminars and workshops for numerous chapters of the AIGA, Printing Industries of America, IDEAlliance and the SPECTRUM Conference - which he co-chaired in 2007, IPA, Print Production Clubs, Art Directors Club, Print Oasis as well as paper merchants, printers and corporations throughout the graphic arts community.

Mr. Dejan has written numerous articles for graphic arts trade publications such as IPA Journal, Paper Specs, Communication Arts, Pre-, Production and Publishing Executive, Signature, Magazine Design and Production magazines and has been contributing editor for Step-By-Step Graphics Magazine since its premier issue. He was the technical consultant and authored numerous chapters and the glossary for the Designer’s Guide to Print Production.

He has also judged many graphic design and print competitions as well as conducted workshops, lectures, and delivered key-note speeches for design and production groups throughout the United States. Mr. Dejan has sat on numerous Board of Directors including ADEPT (Association for the Development of Electronic Publishing Techniques)/National and the Gilbert Paper’s Design Advisory Council.

Joe Duncan
Leo Burnett USA

Joe Duncan is Vice President, Director of Print Innovation & Technology at Leo Burnett USA. He started his career in print working for a commercial printing firm in Milwaukee that produced annual reports. He moved to Chicago in the mid 1980’s working both in production and sales at Madden Communications and Sells Printing, until he joined Burnett in 2001. Active in industry organizations, he has chaired the Spectrum conference for Idealliance in 2005, was honored with a Luminaire from the P3 in 2006, and was inducted into the Publishing Executive Hall of Fame at last years Graph Expo.

Wendy Mesley
Host of CBC's Marketplace

The Truth is Out There -- You Just Have to Know Where to Look

Wendy Mesley is one of Canada's most respected broadcast journalists -- fiery, quick on her feet and recognized from coast to coast. A two-time Gemini winner, and currently the co-host of Marketplace, she is one of the best television interviewers -- tenacious, witty and well-informed -- that this country has ever produced. She delves deep into the heart of issues, demands, and gets, honesty from her subjects, and uncovers stories that would otherwise be left un-reported to the public. Since 1981, at the CBC, she has been a local reporter in Quebec, a parliamentary correspondent in Ottawa, a National Affairs correspondent, the host of The Sunday Report, and the co-host of the newsmagazines Disclosure and Undercurrents. She is also a regular alternate anchor on The National.

In her keynotes, Wendy Mesley explores the world of the daily headlines, showing you how to separate fact from fiction in an age when news is massaged by the newsmakers, their PR people and even by the media itself. Nothing in our media saturated world is as it seems, but if you know where to look and what to look for, you can find the most interesting news by reading between the lines. Mesley shows you how, with an informative look at Canada's newsmakers, and their fascinating and often hilarious efforts to look good, even when they've been bad.

Colin Smith
Senior Solutions Architect

As senior solutions architect with more than nine years of experience at Adobe, Colin is an ambassador and instructor of Adobe’s solutions, sharing his expertise and passion for technology with knowledge workers and creative professionals across Canada.

Mr. Smith is a certified Adobe expert in Acrobat, Creative Suite and Production Studio. He is a frequent speaker at Adobe’s customer seminars, providing tutorials for business communicators, graphic designers, print professionals and video and audio producers and editors. He is also a much sought after media spokesperson for Adobe and appears regularly on television and radio stations in major cities in Canada, including CP24 in Toronto, A-Channel in Ottawa and CKNW in Vancouver.

Mr. Smith also works closely with law enforcement agencies to leverage Acrobat and other Adobe technologies to fight crime.

An avid music composer, video producer and photographer, Colin expresses his artistic voice through multiple media: music recordings, web sites and digital photography and video.

Bob Wagner
Vice President, Xerox Creative Services Business and Worldwide Xerox Premier Partners Program

When Xerox Corporation began targeting the graphic communications marketplace in 1999, for a soon-to-be-released advanced generation of digital color presses – the Xerox iGen3 Digital Production Press – Bob Wagner became the company’s digital printing evangelist for creatives. In his role as vice president of Xerox’s Creative Services Business, the former Young & Rubicam Advertising executive has exposed tens of thousands of designers and print production pros to the power of digital print as a medium for doing great work for their clients.

Building the program from scratch, he developed relationships with such bellwether industry leaders as Adobe, Pantone and Parsons: The New School of Design. With them, he led the Xerox effort to create design guides and other resources to support creative efforts with digital printing. These include such wellreceived works as: The Art & Science of Digital Printing: The Parsons Guide to Getting it Right; PANTONE digital chips; A Formal Investigation into the Urban Legends of Digital Color Printing; the knowledge base at xerox.com/creative; and Xerox’s sustained support of such world-class industry initiatives as the Adobe Design Achievement Awards.

Design resources in hand, Wagner hit the road from his home in suburban Rochester, N.Y. to speak to creatives at industry events, trade shows and company locations. Among the results of these advocacy programs and education campaigns: perennial recognition of Xerox Corp. as a Graphic Design USA “Designer Friendly Company,” and the tremendous growth and acceptance of digital printing in the design community. In January 2008, Wagner was named by Graphic Design USA magazine as one of its “People to Watch in 2008.”

Today, Wagner also leads the Xerox Graphic Arts Premier Partners, a global network of more than 700 vanguard digital print services providers who offer their services to designers and other savvy print buyers at www.xerox.com/xpp.

Prior to his current role at Xerox, Wagner ran integrated marketing communications and corporate human resources communications functions for the company, and he led the public relations campaign to announce the landmark Xerox DocuTech Publishing Series.

Wagner is an adjunct faculty member of the Rochester (N.Y.) Institute of Technology (RIT), where he teaches a course in multimedia strategies at the School of Print Media. Wagner holds an MBA in marketing from RIT and a BA in communications from Seton Hall University (N.J.). He resides in Rochester with his wife, Kathy, an artist and art teacher, and his daughter, Julia Rose, 16.

Anthony M. Watanabe, Ph.D.
President & CEO, The Innovolve Group

Through a series of business ventures, Dr. Watanabe has been helping leading organizations successfully adopt sustainability thinking. Every day, he encounters leaders who are hungry to embrace sustainability, but struggle to make it relevant to their organizations. In response, Anthony founded the Innovolve Group consultancy and built it into a hub of ideas, people and innovation designed to both move the market and market the movement of sustainability.

On a daily basis, Anthony’s obsession is mobilizing a team of talented Innovolvers to help clients achieve excellence. Anthony recently served as a judge for the inaugural Sustainable Packaging Leadership Awards and is a mentor to emerging green businesses through Green Enterprise Toronto.

With feature articles and interviews in both mainstream and trade media, Dr. Watanabe is a highly sought after expert on sustainability as it relates to business.

He is also an accomplished speaker having delivered presentations on sustainability to business, government and civil society organizations in Canada, the United States and Europe.