Strategy magazine's 'The Marketers' Anthem,' created by Open in Canada in January 2014, is a film campaign celebrating the country's marketing professionals
How Strategy Magazine Turned Marketer Worship Into a Film
The Marketers' Anthem is a Iabcanada.clapboard.com/blog/producing/development/film-pre-production-steps">film campaign created by Open, a Toronto-based agency, for Strategy magazine in January 2014, produced to celebrate Canada's marketing community and coincide with the publication's annual Marketer of the Year issue.
Strategy magazine is a Canadian business publication covering marketing, advertising, and media, first launched in 1989 by Brunico Communications, according to Marsdd. It occupies a distinct position in the Canadian media industry as the trade record of choice for the country's advertising and marketing professionals. The Marketer of the Year franchise is among its most visible editorial events, and in 2014 the magazine chose to mark the occasion not with a print spread or a digital feature alone, but with a short film — a deliberate escalation in format that signalled how seriously the publication regarded its audience. The campaign contains a single media asset, a film running approximately 90 seconds, uploaded to YouTube on December 13, 2013, by the OpenACreative channel, ahead of the official January 2014 publication date in Canada, according to Site-Cbc Radio-Canada Ca.
The campaign's stated purpose, according to Clapboard's editorial record, was to function simultaneously as a celebration and a wake-up call for the Canadian media and entertainment sector. That dual ambition — affirmation and provocation delivered through the same creative vehicle — is the structural tension that gives The Marketers' Anthem its rhetorical weight. Rather than producing a conventional trade advertisement, Open constructed something closer to a rallying cry: a piece of content that treats its audience of marketing professionals as protagonists rather than consumers. In the United States and globally, brand films directed at industry peers had become an emerging format by 2014, but in Canada the approach remained relatively rare in the trade press context, making this media campaign a genuinely distinctive artefact of its moment. The Clapboard Score for The Marketers' Anthem is 73 out of 100, reflecting a campaign that executes its creative concept with confidence while operating in a niche context that naturally limits its broader reach.
Strategy magazine serves a specific and self-aware audience: the Canadian marketing and advertising community. Open's strategic insight was that this audience, professionally fluent in the mechanics of persuasion, would be unmoved by conventional trade advertising and would respond instead to a piece of content that acknowledged their expertise and reflected their own values back at them. The Marketers' Anthem operates on that premise, functioning as peer recognition rather than vendor communication.
The broader context in Canada's media industry in 2014 reinforced the urgency of the campaign's wake-up call dimension. According to Dentsu's global advertising expenditure data, digital advertising was projected to reach approximately 29.2% of global advertising spending in 2014, up from 26.7% in 2013 and 14.6% in 2008, a trajectory that was reshaping how Canadian marketers allocated budgets and planned media. Television remained the largest advertising medium globally, holding approximately 37.7% of total advertising share in 2013, according to Dentsu's expenditure forecasts, but the structural shift toward digital was already compressing traditional media economics across North America. In Canada specifically, IAB Canada has documented the sustained growth of digital ad investment throughout this period, with the country's digital advertising market expanding year on year as brands redirected spend away from legacy formats.
Against this backdrop, Strategy magazine's decision to create a film campaign was strategically coherent. The publication competes for the attention and loyalty of senior marketing decision-makers alongside titles such as Marketing magazine, which at the time maintained a parallel trade presence in Canada, and international publications including Ad Age, which commands significant readership among Canadian agency professionals. By producing original film content tied to its most prestigious editorial franchise, Strategy differentiated its brand on creative ambition rather than editorial volume. Open's strategic framing — celebrating marketers as passionate, skilled professionals navigating genuine disruption — gave the campaign a motivational register that trade advertising in Canada rarely attempts.
The Marketers' Anthem is built around a montage structure. Open's creative team assembled a film that layers imagery, rhythm, and language to construct a portrait of the Canadian marketer as a driven, culturally engaged professional — the kind of execution that demands precise editorial control to avoid tipping from celebration into self-congratulation.
The creative team at Open brought specific roles to the production. Martin Beauvais served as partner creative and Christian Mathieu as partner strategy, according to Clapboard's credits documentation, establishing a dual-leadership model that aligned creative ambition with strategic discipline from the outset. Jessica Carter served as art director and Kate Thorneloe as copywriter, according to Clapboard, with the written voice of the film carrying the anthem's argumentative weight — the copy must do the rhetorical work that the montage format opens up but cannot complete alone. Anne Ngo led the project, and Ryan Hunt edited the film, according to Clapboard. The editor's role in a montage-driven piece is particularly consequential: Hunt's cutting pace and sequencing decisions directly determine whether the film achieves the emotional accumulation the concept requires.
Production credits for the wider production — including cinematography, music composition, and sound design — are not publicly documented beyond what Clapboard's archive records. The film's approximately 90-second runtime is a deliberate choice for the format: long enough to build a genuine emotional arc, short enough to sustain attention among an audience that professionally dissects exactly this kind of content. The montage approach is well-suited to a campaign celebrating a community rather than a single product, allowing the film to aggregate impressions and associations rather than advance a linear argument. For a media campaign operating in Canada's trade publishing space, where production resources are typically constrained relative to consumer advertising budgets, the reliance on editing craft over production spectacle is both a practical and an aesthetically appropriate decision.
No verified performance data for The Marketers' Anthem is publicly available. No published business results, sales lift, market-share change, or return-on-investment figures have been documented for the campaign, and no verified entries or wins appear in the records of Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or WARC Awards, according to Clapboard's research.
Structural analysis offers a meaningful alternative frame. The campaign's effectiveness is best understood against the specificity of its objective: to reach and resonate with a defined professional community in Canada rather than to shift mass-market behaviour. By that measure, several structural elements work in its favour. The montage format generates shareability within a peer group that is already platform-native and content-literate. The film's publication timing — uploaded in December 2013 ahead of the January 2014 Marketer of the Year issue — positioned it as editorial event content, giving it a natural distribution moment within Strategy magazine's own channels and the broader Canadian advertising industry conversation.
The choice to make a film at all, in a trade publishing context where static and text formats dominated, demonstrated category-level creative leadership for Strategy magazine. Open's decision to treat the audience as protagonists rather than targets is strategically durable: it builds loyalty among exactly the decision-makers who influence media spend, agency selection, and trade publication readership in Canada. The Clapboard Score of 73 out of 100 reflects a campaign that is creatively purposeful and structurally sound, tempered by the inherent ceiling of niche trade-facing work. The long-term asset for Strategy magazine is associative: the publication is positioned as a champion of the very community it covers, a relationship that compounds in value over multiple editorial cycles.
The Marketers' Anthem is a short film campaign created by Open for Strategy magazine in Canada in January 2014. It was produced to mark the publication's annual Marketer of the Year issue and functions as both a celebration of Canadian marketing professionals and a creative statement about the industry's vitality and direction.
Open, a Toronto-based creative agency, produced The Marketers' Anthem for Strategy magazine. The agency team included partner creative Martin Beauvais, partner strategy Christian Mathieu, art director Jessica Carter, copywriter Kate Thorneloe, project lead Anne Ngo, and film editor Ryan Hunt, according to Clapboard's credits documentation.
The Marketers' Anthem was published in Canada in January 2014. The film was uploaded to YouTube on December 13, 2013, ahead of the official publication date, timed to coincide with Strategy magazine's Marketer of the Year editorial franchise and maximise reach within Canada's advertising and marketing community.
The Marketers' Anthem uses a film montage format running approximately 90 seconds. The single-asset campaign relies on editing rhythm and copywriting to build emotional momentum, a structure well-suited to celebrating a professional community rather than advancing a single product argument, as Clapboard's editorial analysis notes.
No verified awards data for The Marketers' Anthem has been found. According to Clapboard's research, no confirmed entries or wins appear in the records of Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, the Clio Awards, the Webby Awards, or WARC Awards for this campaign from Open and Strategy magazine.
The Marketers' Anthem receives a Clapboard Score of 73 out of 100. The score reflects a campaign that executes its creative concept with confidence and structural clarity, while the niche trade-facing context and absence of verified performance data place a natural ceiling on its overall rating within Clapboard's evaluation framework.
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