Press kit,
in pieces.

Adventures in International Branding

Brand DNA is the easy part — what dies on impact is the cultural translation. Canada is 0.48% of the world’s population with ~450 cultures of its own, and then there are the other 7,500 cultures and 7,000+ languages your brand has to cross into. That’s where global brands stumble: Coors entered Spain promising drinkers diarrhea, KFC entered China telling diners to eat their own fingers, and HSBC’s “Assume Nothing” rebrand got translated as “Do Nothing” in multiple markets. Practical lessons from twenty years of helping Canadian brands cross borders without losing themselves: study the culture, customize the message, and use local experts (plural).

AI Quick Wins for Business and Life

A working tour of what AI is actually good at — built around the five flavours (generative, agentic, perceptive, cognitive, adaptive) and the three levels of using it: ask things, automate workflows, build with it. Walks through the real internal apps Make More Creative has shipped on AI rails (plan.MMC, theKitchen, no5writer, FitNut, RebelRebel, Ducksmith), plus a working prompt-engineering reference — roles, contexts, formats, constraints — that turns “I tried ChatGPT once” into “AI runs part of my business.”

To Bot Or Not To Bot

BrandJitsu™ × AI workshop

A workshop on whether your brand needs a bot — and if it does, how to build one that sounds like you. Part one sequences your brand DNA, voice, and ideal-customer avatar so the AI has something specific to work with. Part two is a working tour of fifteen prompting techniques (zero-shot, role-play, chain-of-thought, hybrid stacks) plus how to ship a custom GPT that translates your story into fifty-plus languages without losing the brand.

From Idea to !ndigo

The (Accidentally) Epic Journey of Publishing a Book

The candid story of how a planned Great Canadian Novel — treasure hunts, octopuses, secret maps — became a brand book instead, and Michael’s fine with how that turned out. Landing an agent, levelling up the deal, surviving the editing trenches (so many edits), and ending up on the shelves at Indigo, Chapters, Coles, Barnes & Noble, and other fine litstablishments. Plus the part nobody tells you: how authors market their book without losing their soul, build visibility, and set up the next deal.

From Desk to Deep End

also delivered as Flash Sideways

It’s not always a flashback or a flash-forward — sometimes you need to flash sideways. A talk on non-linear careers built on a single engine: curiosity, not five-year plans. The principles: position yourself next to decisions before you’re qualified to make them; get a lot of what you want at the cost of a question; lead, follow, or get out of the way; go deep in your craft and sideways into everything next to it. Adventure and wreckage in equal measure — delivered to graduating students, founders, and creative teams.

The Fine Art of Getting Sh*t Done

Less productivity theatre, more honest accounting. Why 91% of resolution-makers fail by Quitter’s Day (Jan 19th) and what the other 9% do differently — habit loops you can rewire, target fixation you can use on purpose, and the “do one more than you think you can” principle Michael learned earning two black belts and running the Canadian Death Race twice. Plus the words to live by, taken from Loose Moose Theatre, jiu-jitsu, and his parents.

BrandJitsu™: Move Your Brand From ‘Meh’ To Memorable

the world’s cheeziest metaphor — a brand is an iceberg

Most teams burn their hours above the waterline — logos, slogans, taglines, the outward expression of the brand — but the work that actually moves a brand from meh to memorable happens down where the angler fish and narwhals live. The keynote walks through that descent: codifying vision, values, and purpose to sequence your Brand DNA, then establishing the Brand Personality that makes it recognisable in the wild — all in service of the real heroes of the story, your customers.

Building a Better Brand Story

lessons from Loose Moose Theatre

Seven ingredients to a memorable brand story, taken from improv and Loose Moose Theatre — start positive, be obvious, embrace truth, build a platform, move the plot forward, find the tilt. Five considerations to apply them: purpose, audience, contrast, consistency, evolution. Real-world campaign examples (My Viva Plan, Life by Mary, B2B manufacturing) showing how thesis / antithesis / synthesis turns a forgettable brand into one people remember and repeat.

Find, Shape, and Share Your Story

BrandJitsu™ workshop · half-day

A four-hour workshop for founders, entrepreneurs, and senior leaders who need clarity around their brand’s purpose, personality, and positioning. Not slogans — the core story at the heart of the business, shaped into something clear, credible, and resonant. Through guided exercises, discussion, and real-world examples, participants leave with a focused brand narrative they can use across strategy, marketing, sales, and internal communication.

PitchJitsu™: Opening Minds and Wallets

The audience already wants to open their wallet for you — they’re looking for the next big thing. You just need to open their mind first, with a memorable story. PitchJitsu™ is about the unglamorous half of pitch craft: preparation deeper than the deck, knowing what your audience actually wants before you walk in, the stagecraft blunders that lose a room (and the fixes that keep you in it), and how to work an audience without performing at one. The BrandJitsu four questions sit at the centre — what you do, why you do it, who you do it for, why they care — with examples drawn from Guy Kawasaki, Keith Johnstone, and the Loose Moose stage where they help.

Your Story Needs a Job

Dogs need jobs. So does your story. A dog is happiest when it has something meaningful — or fun — to do; an audience is happiest when your story shows up with something they can use. Twenty minutes. Five short stories. Five tools you keep. A working talk that uses live stagecraft to show how attention, timing, and restraint turn information into action. The same craft that holds a theatre can hold a boardroom, a regulator, or a room full of skeptics.

The Creative Life

for student audiences

Michael speaks to students of all ages about creativity, curiosity, and the many different paths learning can take. He didn’t always fit neatly into the system — those same instincts are what built his career as entrepreneur, author, illustrator, actor, director, podcast host, speaker, and creative director. Tailored to the age of the audience, the talk encourages students to stay curious, develop their voice, and trust that success doesn’t follow just one path — even when their strengths don’t look like everyone else’s.