The Business of Creativity: Mapping the Future of Canada’s Advertising, Branding and Design Sectors
The advertising, branding, and design sectors in Canada are a crucial component of the country’s creative industries, contributing significantly to the economy, cultural innovation, and talent retention. These sectors play a pivotal role in shaping consumer engagement, brand identity, and the broader media and cultural landscape. However, as these industries evolve with technological advancements and shifting employment structures, it is imperative to implement strategies that ensure their sustainability and growth. While the industries face challenges such as automation, changing employment models, and evolving consumer behaviour, they also hold immense potential for innovation and economic impact. By fostering a resilient creative workforce, ensuring fair working conditions, and investing in professional development, Canada can maintain its position as a global leader in the creative industries – attracting new and exciting talent and thriving as a creative community.
To secure a sustainable future for these industries, stakeholders—including policymakers, industry leaders, educators, and creatives—must work collaboratively to build a sustainable ecosystem that supports both emerging and established professionals. In doing so, Canada’s advertising, branding, and design sectors will continue to drive economic and cultural success well into the future.
Learn more: download The Business of Creativity: Mapping the Future of Canada’s Advertising, Branding and Design Sectors Insight Report today.
Gig work in marketing and communications: preparing for growth in calgary’s creative economy.
The goal of this research study was to open a dialogue about how we might create the conditions in which Calgary’s creative economy – and Calgary’s creative industry workers – could continue to thrive in the midst of this nation-wide shift to a gig-based employment model.
To support a thriving gig-based creative economy in the 21st century, we must work to:
- Seed mentorship connections throughout the student, apprentice, and professional stages of creative employment.
- Find new ways to align creative careers with creative experiences.
- Strengthen professional communities to improve surge capacity.
- Initiate new training and learning opportunities into marketing and design curriculums to support a wider variety of creative practice and skill development.
- Establish strong networks of gig workers and finding new ways to integrate them effectively into existing organizational cultures.
Our study showed that creative careers exist on a continuum beyond that described by solopreneurship, entrepreneurship and workplace models. Gig economy creatives were more likely to describe their career journey as being cyclical or fluid than monodirectional. Contrary to expectations, the decision to transition from traditional employment to gig based creative work was seldom guided by a desire for solopreneurship or entrepreneurship opportunities. Instead, gig economy creatives described a career continuum of working in a traditional collective (agency, corporation or partnership), moving toward gig based work (solopreneurship, freelance, contract or piecework) and then experiencing a third phase of evolution where they either rejoined a collective, or formed a new collective through the partnerships they established in their gig-based network.
If we are able to seize these opportunities, Calgary has the chance to become a destination for freelance, gig and remote workers from the creative economy and beyond. By developing an adaptive creative labour force – one that supports the connections creative workers need to other creative professionals, to work that is personally significant, to existing sector specific networks, and to meaningful creative practices – we can help Calgary build a unique enabling capacity for gig workers, creative industries and the wider creative economy.