Modern Marketing: Where Storytelling Meets Community – Soco Ballroom

As Creative Strategy Director at TikTok Canada’s Creative Lab team, Jeff partners with brands and agencies, igniting their creative prowess to fuel business success and leave a lasting cultural impact on the platform. Before TikTok, Jeff worked agency side at companies including J.Walter Thompson, FCB, & John St, creating internationally acclaimed award winning work for prestigious clients such as BMW, HSBC, BMO, Tim Hortons, and Mazda. 

Kathy serves as Vice President of Marketing, Ecommerce and Visual Presentation for Penningtons – an iconic leader in the plus size women’s apparel market. Currently, she is leading the brand’s exciting transformation while spearheading all strategy initiatives for the marketing, visual, and e-commerce group. For over 20 years, Kathy has led retail marketing teams driving strategy, creative and brand initiatives for prominent brands such as La Senza, Laura Canada, RW&CO. and Matt&Nat. Her innate ability to passionately create stories that engage and connect the customer journey to the brand is what she does best.

Jake Karls is the co-founder and Chief Rainmaker at Mid-Day Squares. Building the next biggest chocolate snacking brand.  As the Rainmaker, Jake focuses on achieving growth through the business of building genuine relationships – with investors, buyers, journalists, and building out the internal team. In Jake’s better-known role as  Mid-Day Squares’s resident Social-Personality, he passionately inspires others to “get comfortable with the uncomfortable” and be unapologetically themselves. Though he was recognized as an EY Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist and named in the Forbes 30 Under 30 class of 2023, his self-proclaimed “greatest accomplishment” was learning how to be confident in himself.