Categories: Articles

Go Long Lea Longo!

What a night of pride! Last year I was asked to sit on a panel discussion for the music industry at YES Montreal. One attendee, Lea Longo, was quite eager and had many questions. After the session she pulled me aside and asked if I could spare her some additional time. We spoke and she told me that he had recently won the Mix 96 song competition and that she wasn’t 100% sure about how to get some publicity going for that as a catalyst to move forward. We met, she brought her music and I thought her singing and songwriting was strong. I suggested that she speak to two publicists that I knew and they could decide whether or not to work with her.
One was local, one was based in Toronto. She actually started working with the Montreal one. He was a former BMG and Warner Music promo rep and was doing his own thing – he and I had been friends for years. He worked with her for the past little while and through their work, her album was picked up by Dep (a local label) and will be distributed through Universal Music across Canada – her song Ugly, now called Miserably Happy, is all over the radio and the video is now playing on MuchMusic and Musique Plus.
So, she comes to one YES session, gets a lead and BAM – she’s off to the races. Major label, video on TV and song playing on the radio. I wish I could take all the credit, but many people have helped her along the way.
I was at her “launch” party tonight where CHOM FM‘s Too Tall was there, Nick Carbone (the guy responsible for Mitsou, France D’Amour and Kevin Parent’s success) and the entire cast and crew from Universal Music Canada and many other local luminaries.
YES helped her – how many other stories like this are out there?

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.