Full stories behind our most complete marketing builds, strategy, content, and results.
ESTA is a large-scale entrepreneurial event held at the Palais des congrès de Montréal, gathering over 1,200 attendees across industries. From a marketing standpoint, the challenge wasn't filling seats.
The challenge was this: how do you make an event feel important before it happens?
Most events rely on speaker announcements, static promotion, and last-minute urgency. That approach creates attention, but not momentum.
Traditional event marketing is linear: announce → promote → remind → sell. It lacks narrative, emotional investment, and ongoing engagement. Which leads to low retention, weak audience connection, and heavy reliance on paid ads.
We didn't market ESTA as an event. We built it as a story unfolding in real time.
Instead of "Here's what's happening on April 1st", we positioned: "Something is building… and you should be part of it."
This turned marketing into a continuous content engine, not a campaign with an end date.
The Entrepreneur d'Or segment became the central marketing engine. Not because of the prize, because of how it was structured.
Anyone with a ticket could apply, creating accessibility, volume, and early interest from day one.
Instead of selecting finalists privately, we made it public. Each Top 10 candidate became a content piece, a story, a reason to engage.
Each finalist was introduced through short-form video, positioned through identity and vision, framed as someone stepping into a high-stakes moment. This humanized the competition, built emotional connection, and turned each finalist into a distribution channel, their audiences became part of the event.
A voting phase created urgency, community mobilization, and repeat engagement. Each finalist now had a reason to push their network.
Finalists pitch live in front of 1,200 people. The room decides. The audience is no longer passive, they are judges, participants, stakeholders.
We built a self-reinforcing system where content feeds engagement, engagement feeds distribution, and distribution feeds demand. This wasn't a campaign, it was a system where every element of the event became a marketing asset.
Genovation was built as a high-level entrepreneurial event in Montreal, bringing together proven operators, investors, and the next generation of talent. Hosted at Plaza Centre-Ville, the event featured speakers including Harley Finkelstein (President of Shopify), Phil Fayer (CEO of Nuvei), Jake Karls (Mid-Day Squares), and Chris Arsenault (Inovia Capital).
The ambition wasn't to create another conference. It was to build a room with real proximity to opportunity.
Marketplus Media was brought in to build demand before the event, position Genovation as a high-value room to be in, attract serious high-potential attendees, and turn the event into a long-term brand asset.
Repositioning the audience. We intentionally avoided generic labels like "students". Instead, we framed the audience as the next generation of talent, individuals already moving, building, or about to. This elevated the perceived level of the room, the type of people attending, and the overall brand of the event.
Building desire, not just awareness. Most events push information. We focused on creating pull. We emphasized proximity to high-level operators, rare access to decision-makers, and real conversations, not passive talks.
Content as the driver. Everything revolved around content: speaker-led authority clips, founder vision and build-up, event teasers, and "why you need to be there" angles. Content wasn't support, it was the engine.
The event itself was structured as a content opportunity: keynote moments, audience reactions, networking energy, and high-density interactions. The goal was to turn one night into months of distribution. Instead of ending at the event, we used it to build long-term authority, retain audience attention, and set the foundation for future editions.
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