The decision to not seek a new corporate sponsor for a storied Toronto stage, which will be named instead after the late impresario Ed Mirvish, was announced with an uncommon comment from his son.

"They were good partners and I would work with them again in a minute," said David Mirvish upon news that the Canon signage would be coming down. "But I never felt that sponsorship should drive a theatre. It should be the icing on the cake."

The position is an increasingly radical one, particularly in a town where expenditures for public libraries and other attractions are under unprecedented scrutiny, and the idea of selling names of subway stations has entered the realm of reality. Do dramatic arts benefit from being seen as more sacred?

For the renamed Ed Mirvish Theatre, the shows booked for the 2,200-seat palace depend on the optimum level of commercial marketing clout, primarily achieved through mounting productions of musical movies like the current Mary Poppins. So, a Japanese camera company is just one additional branding layer.

When it comes to the Canadian economy, Tim Hortons is like the Beatles — to the point of being able to adopt new systems of information delivery in its own sweet time.

Case in point, the chain's Facebook page was up to 1.7 million followers before it committed to Twitter. The easy ride Tim's has received in the national media no doubt contributed to the lack of hurry.

Yet the recent corporate turmoil — which led to the cushioned exit in May of chief executive Don Schroeder — also reflected a lack of success at interacting with customers. After all, they were counting on more Roll Up the Rim to Win prizes to offset any social media backlash. A profit slip was subsequently blamed on the giveaways.

While Tim Hortons could still count on a steady flow of stories for opening in Dubai or introducing lasagna, it faced a potential public relations snag last month when it was learned that a reverend apparently had an overly amorous lesbian couple ejected from a location in Blenheim, Ont. The company seemed to let the outcry run its course — by saying as little about the incident as it could.

Stepping into the public arena of Twitter, though, might also be an invitation to blunder. No doubt, given the effort to plant a Tim's or two in every neighbourhood in Canada, people will eventually expect responses about issues more complicated than a latte.

Does the Canadian music business need a spoonful of Sugar Crisp? Cereal company Post Foods has promised studio time, producer support and $5,000 for the most popular song submission to a contest called "The First15."

The official explanation for the venture, though, is a relatively nonsensical reflection of how cautious many are about stepping into this arena.

Presumably, the company was inspired to link itself to independent home recording artists after being approached by rapper Ish Morris to use the vintage 1960s "Can't get enough of that Sugar Crisp" jingle in a harmless ditty that itself sounds like a commercial that would air between Saturday morning cartoons circa 1989.

No doubt it would've been easier to just exploit the association with a viral video aimed at kids. So, why go through the hassle of trying lure musicians to upload their own tune?

The fact that Post has been forced to stop skewing its sugar cereal to children — while maintaining that 40 per cent of its eatership is over 18 — might have something to do with it.

"The track is allowed to incorporate the Sugar Bear jingle," stipulate the rules, "but this isn't required."

Big box discount stores are generally glum places by nature. The more aesthetically pleasing the environment, after all, the more it feeds the perception that the cost is being handed down.

Walmart just pushed this cheap philosophy so far that it provided room in the U.S. for a fashion-conscious alternative.

The positioning of Target was further validated when it secured its first 105 locations across Canada. No longer would the country be stuck with so many of those bleak Zellers stores that the Hudson's Bay Company never quite knew what to do with.

And, in the run-up to the $1.8 billion handover of about half of its 273 stores from one U.S.-based owner to another — Walmart will get 39 of them, actually — Zellers has seized permission to publicly admit that it became the last place Canadians wanted to shop at.

The lack of need for traditional advertising in the two-year transition period has reportedly helped HBC make more money off the dying stores. Now, the company has accelerated its use of social media to entice customers through irony.

Movember has served as a case study of how to ping with the modern monoculture — a fundraiser for prostate cancer awareness flecked with just enough ironic entertainment value. Moustache maintenance might as well replace breakfast auditing as status update fodder for a month.

Plus, it puts a fuzzy face on cause that used to never be spoken of in mixed company.

What happens, though, if the novelty value runs its course? The number of Canadian companies looking to align themselves with the campaign foreshadows an inevitable burnout.

For now, advertisers seem eager to attach themselves to something perceived as authentic. But this isn't as much about furthering the potential for social enterprise as trying to reach a demographic that much mass media has given up on.

This year, Movember Canada branding has been attached to Rickard's beer, Speed Stick deodorant, Schick razors, Bread & Butter skincare and Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Basically, the campaign has swept in to provide a more ethical platform than a wet T-shirt contest would.

For me the biggest trend or fad of the last six months is that of gamification, essentially taking a lot of things we love about videogames, and using them for non-gaming exercises. Jane McGonigol's rhetoric has been key in a lot of this – she has termed game designers to be “happiness engineers” - to be those most suited to finding ways to motivate players, and then getting them to have a great time doing so, and hopefully in the process, creating excess social good. Of course marketers have gotten their hands the idea and have run with it – this is gamification, or as Ian Bogost has suggested people put it – exploitationware. It kinda makes everybody uncomfortable, but that's okay. That's the point.

I think that gamification has caught the affection of so many in the corporate world because it holds the same promise that advertising geared to the subconscious desires of humanity did. It attempts – through subtle goals and mechanics, to engineer consumers. By using these methods marketers can once again take the upper hand. I mean, where else is there to go? Sure ads and brands still scramble desperately to appeal to our inner subconscious – to our eternal longing for social acceptance and self-worth – but like over-inoculating entire populations against flu each year leading to stronger viruses immune to contemporary drugs, our overly-self aware, discursive and self-referential advertising culture has bred a generation of jaded, media savvy people, whose very first response to just about everything is often this:

THIS IS FAKE/STAGED/PHOTOSHOPED

Facebook came up in conversation over dinner with a group of friends from university. We all attended McGill between 2004 and 2008, and we entered university at exactly the same time that Facebook began to be available outside of those first Ivy League schools, the first Canadian school they expanded to being McGill.

In a sense, we're Facebook veterans. We remember before liking, before fan pages, before grown-ups or high school kids could have profiles. We remember when the Wall was anonymous, when you logged in at http://www.thefacebook.com and all the many upsets of Facebook design changes.

And so it's now that I am beginning to worry, now when the flames of fury that we felt about every minute change have finally died down. Resignedly, we discussed the new features of the site ("why can't they stay the same? it worked fine!"), and trotted out the same tired "I'm seriously thinking of committing Facebook suicide." lines. But whereas we once complained about the privacy policy and the Beacon advertising system, we now bemoan the sorting of the News Feed or the 'comment by hitting enter' aspect.

Similarly, this Techcrunch article outlines a handful of concerns Orli Yakuel has with Facebook redesigns, but, as with my friends, the concerns are with cosmetic changes, not the privacy issues or data-mining tactics Facebook is angling to implement. There's a reason for this:

Hi there, Metaviewers. My name's Luke and I've been invited to be a guest blogger here for the month of October, so I figured I should introduce myself. Like most millenials, I wear a lot of hats. I'm a freelance journalist, intern producer at TVO.org's Search Engine podcast, and a graduate student at Ryerson University, where I'm part of the Infoscape Research Lab. I've got no set agenda for the blog, so I'll just be posting about things that catch my eye in my role as an observer and participant in internet culture. I hope you enjoy what I've got to say while I'm here. and I'd encourage you to use the comments section if you want to start or join the conversation.

So... hands up if you use adblocking software. I certainly do. In fact, I can barely remember what the web looks like without it. I've been using AdBlock for years, quietly enjoying all that white space around my news articles, blog posts and viral videos, never considering that doing so could be considered controversial. After all, it's my browser, I'll do what I want with it.

Apple has revolutionized multiple industries with their much coveted devices and influential services - just consider the way the iPod transformed the music industry. The company is set to do the same with the online advertising world with their new iAd service. Designed for the applications that run on iPads and iPhones, the iAd system is a departure both in terms of the content displayed and how users interact with the ads.

The key element of this system is all the data that Apple collects about its users, a disturbingly deep pool of behaviour and consumer choices that will allow advertising partners to engage in new frontiers of personalized and targeted marketing. Apple might be going too far when it comes to monitoring what people do with their devices: how aware are Apple users that all of their activity is being tracked by their beloved company?

Not being very active in online gaming, I always sort of idly wondered how apps as bland and harmless as Farmville could pull off the sort of profits they achieved. I presumed there was some advertising, but it seemed unlikely that much data mining could be done from users who are (as far as I can tell) spend hours manipulating a virtual plot of land.

We're slowly beginning to see data collection based marketing emerge. It's my firm belief that these techniques harness the advertising potential of social networks and mobile phones best and most simply.