Spotlight

About Spotlight

Spotlight – the Calgary Marketing Association's podcast – shines a light on the creative pulse of Calgary’s marketing scene. Each episode dives into candid conversations with industry leaders, uncovering the bold ideas, trailblazing campaigns, and insider strategies shaping the future of marketing. From dissecting brilliant case studies to revealing the stories behind the success, Spotlight blends celebration and education, delivering actionable insights and fresh inspiration.

Publisher

Calgary Marketing Association

Category

business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

14 Jan 2025

Latest episode

28 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

1 of 41 episodes have a transcript.

1. 

   28 Oct 2026

   Faster Horses and the AI Leadership Gap

   Most teams use AI to do the same old work faster. Dan Temby calls that building faster horses when what you need is a motorcar.In this episode, Derek and Marc speak with Dan Temby, SVP of Technology and Analytics at DAC. They cover what separates AI experimenters from leaders. Dan has spent 19 years at DAC, a media agency that started in the yellow pages 55 years ago. He shares what the company has learned from adopting AI early.What we cover:- How DAC pivoted from yellow pages ads to full-stack media, and why it still matters- Building AI reporting tools, from ChatGPT's code interpreter to agentic workflows- Why "faster horses" thinking is the biggest barrier to AI adoption- "Slop cannons" and "meat proxies": why dense AI output often fails with human audiences- Keeping humans in the loop with accountability, governance and limited agent permissions- Why DAC built AI out of its tools instead of into them- Agentic harnesses and how teams share knowledge across AI users- Why the experimentation phase is over

2. 

   14 Oct 2026

   How Listening got Candidly AI to Product-Market Fit

   Candidly AI co-founders Jackson and Noah McDonough share how they turned a voice AI platform into a hands-on service that helps organizations gather better feedback. They discuss finding product-market fit, reaching hard-to-hear communities, and building trust with enterprise and municipal customers.

3. 

   30 Sept 2026

   Making Sh*t at the Speed of Light: AI, Creative, and the Velocity Trap

   AI can generate 50 ad variations in an hour. But is it producing better work, or just more of it?On this episode of CMA Spotlight, Derek Hovinga and Marc Binkley sit down with Pradeep Balasubramanian, who works in Gen AI and performance automation at ATB Financial. Pradeep works where creative judgment, AI-enabled workflows, and full-funnel measurement meet, and he makes the case for slowing down so AI builds quality instead of volume.We get into why "accuracy before speed" should be every team's first gate, what platforms like Meta Andromeda can and can't see about your business outcomes, and why the creative brief may matter more now than ever. Pradeep also shares how he gets AI to "interview him like a reporter" before generating anything, why compliance is a feature rather than the final boss, and why the same creative should never run on every platform.Follow Pradeep's newsletter: No Easy Answers https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/no-easy-answers-7463297449139331072/

Inside a recent episode

The Brand Advantage - How Distinctiveness and Trust Drive B2B Growth

Published 3 Feb 2026 · Transcript excerpt

[…] We don't have to just leave this up to chance. We get to shape how we build brand for our audience and how we position ourselves in our in our audience's mind. So we're going to talk a little bit about that right now. So I want to introduce a concept called mental availability. You may be familiar. […]

Who has been a guest on Spotlight

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Amanda Thomas
• Afton Brazzoni
• Laila Hobbs
• Heather Isley
• Pedro Porto Allegre

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

31,480,946

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Spotify

5.0 / 5

3 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 54 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

59

Social presence

0

YouTube

93

Engagement

32

Contact Spotlight

Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

Questions about Spotlight