NSB Logo Tod Maffin Tod Maffin

Tod Maffin

Speaker

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Digital Marketing and Technology Expert

Tod Maffin is president of engageQ digital, a digital marketing agency that helps such brands as the Grey Cup, Mountain Equipment Coop, Ivanhoé Cambridge, Abbott Pharmaceutical, OK Tire, and more.

Keynote Speeches

The New Bot Economy: How AI Will Change Business Forever

It’s the lifelong dream of all marketers — a channel that is always on, always converting. That’s the promise of the Bot Economy. Little surprise that heavyweights like Facebook, Snapchat, and Google are focused intensely on this space. How do brands compete in this lucrative channel, while still maintaining top-quality one-on-one service with their customers? And how do the top brands — from British Airways to H&M — use bots to drive more sales, with less cost of customer acquisition. In this revealing keynote, Tod Maffin will share insights his agency has learned around deploying bots that can sell your product, help serve your customers better, and gain a wider engaged audience. All without sacrificing what made your brand valuable in the first place. It’s an entertaining and information-packed session that will leave you perfectly positioned for the coming Bot Economy.

 

TOUCH: Five Factors to Growing and Leading a Human Organization 

For better or worse, digital business has fundamentally changed how organizations hire staff, market their services, and connect with stakeholders. The problem is, in an effort to use technology to connect with people more effectively, we have lost the humanity — that critical person-to-person connection — which is the engine of commerce. In a world filled with complicated web forms and digital marketing services, we have lost the “human” element in how we run our organizations. In this keynote presentation, Tod identifies these problems in stark terms, then provides business leaders in all types of organizations — private to public sector, small to enterprise business — with real-world, tested solutions. 

 

Taking Crazy Back: Mental Health in the Workplace

Once the founder and CEO of a multi-million dollar technology firm, Tod’s workload and always-on personality finally caught up with him and over the following years, he was crippled by a devastating depression and addiction — all the while struggling to appear to be productive to employers and colleagues, and happy and healthy to his friends and family.

In this provocative keynote speech, Tod will reveal to your delegates how this always-connected landscape has seduced all of us into endless multitasking and infinite email — all the while pretending that this increasing workload is the best thing for “productivity.” He will outline his own bold strategy for bringing mental health discussion out of the shadows in a way that will challenge your attendees for years to come. Tod’s story is emotional — at once funny and poignant, sad and hopeful. Nearly all audiences give him a standing ovation for his work on the podium. He has spoken for the Canadian Mental Health Association, universities, companies, and many more.

 

SWARM!: Turning Combatants into Advocates When Good Buzz Goes Bad Online 

Now that you’ve got your company’s social media platforms in place and staff trained, how prepared are you for when you’re attacked on those same platforms, either by angry customers, Internet “trolls,” or ill-informed pressure groups? This session can work as a full keynote, an interactive workshop, or intimate session for senior leaders.

Deconstructing Viral: How to Build a Killer Viral Marketing Campaign
Today’s viral campaigns may seem like jackpots in a one-in-a-million lottery, but it turns out they are well within the reach of any marketing team’s grasp. All it takes is knowing the secret ingredients behind some of the world’s most talked-about campaigns. By reverse-engineering each element of a successful viral campaign in your industry, Tod Maffin will show your audience the key markers that can launch a campaign into the viral stratosphere — markers that can be programmed into the smallest budgets.  He will literally “deconstruct” a viral campaign, piece by piece, then show your group how to re-assemble a campaign for their own organization. And, using his methodology, he’ll detail for your attendees each of the six action steps required for launching an impactful and measurable viral campaign You will never look at a viral campaign again the same.

Deconstructing Viral: How to Build a Killer Viral Marketing Campaign

Today’s viral campaigns may seem like jackpots in a one-in-a-million lottery, but it turns out they are well within the reach of any marketing team’s grasp. All it takes is knowing the secret ingredients behind some of the world’s most talked-about campaigns. By reverse-engineering each element of a successful viral campaign in your industry, Tod Maffin will show your audience the key markers that can launch a campaign into the viral stratosphere — markers that can be programmed into the smallest budgets.  He will literally “deconstruct” a viral campaign, piece by piece, then show your group how to re-assemble a campaign for their own organization. And, using his methodology, he’ll detail for your attendees each of the six action steps required for launching an impactful and measurable viral campaign You will never look at a viral campaign again the same.

Audience reviews:

  • Tod's presentation style was engaging, his material was clear and concise and contained detailed information (not just tree-top ideas). He’s obviously been around the public radio block, so to speak, and offered a fantastic balance of eight tips along with real live examples.

    - Assistant Communications Director JLT 2010
  • Tod's presentation was really excellent! His professional and personal messages are powerful, engaging and moving. Tod is truly are a very gifted speaker and a resilient individual.



    - Conference Board of Canada
  • Tod provided a wealth of knowledge, information and entertainment that has fundamentally changed how some broadcasters who watched him at our 2006 WAB conference continued their business operations.

    - Western Association of Broadcasters
 

Speaker Biography

He is co-author of TOUCH: Five Factors to Growing and Leading a Human Organization and two other books.  His insights on the future of business have been covered by major media including the Globe and Mail, USA Today, CBC, the Huffington Post, and more.

His energetic, upbeat, jargon-free and highly entertaining presentation style ensures that audiences are not only captivated and engaged, but entertained and motivated. He has addressed audiences around the world — from Stockholm to Berlin and from Romania to Australia — and is one of very few speakers capable of bringing an audience to their feet in a standing ovation at 7am.

In January 1999, he founded MindfulEye, an artificial intelligence firm that developed the patented Lexant technology to perform syntactic analysis on public opinion comments posted on the Internet and aired in the media, thus providing a “mood monitor” of stocks. MindfulEye went public in 18 months and precipitated a meteoric rise in his popularity as a technology futurist.

Today, thousands of professionals in the international media, technology, and business communities follow Tod’s insights. He continues to report on national technology trends on CBC Radio, is the past host of todradio dot com and Real Life Chronicles, and was one of the world’s first podcasters and web masters.