So a couple weeks ago My sister, brother and I met up at the brewery about 3am and started driving to Toronto. We were enrolled in the PR course that the OCB's new agency was putting on (our previous agency is entirely on mat leave…insert joke about OCB's potency here). We got to the downtown offices for about 9am and after figuring out that not all the elevators went to the same floors we got to their offices overlooking Yonge and Bloor.

 The company is Fleishman Hillard http://www.fleishman.com/ and they handle accounts such as Gatorade, AT&T and UPS if the flash on their website is correct. I'm pretty sure they took on the OCB mainly for the beer. The course was on being a PR spokesperson for the OCB and to kick off what they call viral marketing. Sounds like something Pfiser would be into, but apperantly it means putting crap on the internet and hoping other people read it and add their own 2 cents to it.

The PR stuff was cool and I think I did ok; although OCB president John Hay had a much more politically-sensitive response to the question "why isn't Creemore part of the OCB?" than I did. Doug Pengelly from St. Andre had the funniest answer to a question though: Doug: So you see, there really is a style for almost every occassion Interviewer: So what would you suggest for doing housework Doug: Something really bitter The viral marketing stuff was kind of funny to me. Hearing professional pr people talking about the power of youtube and facebook and stuff just seams odd - I enjoyed the clips of the spiders on drugs and Biff from Back to the Future singing about people bugging him non-stop for movie trivia ("was it real manure? no it wasn't, was it real manure? Its a movie!"), but finding out how serious the PR world takes blogging is at the same time funny and scary.

One of our account reps has his own blog about pr, which you can read to get a sense of how important he feels this viral marketing stuff is:http://www.prworks.ca/ The best part of the day was at the very end, when most people had cleared out and just a few veterans were telling war stories from back in their Molson's days over a couple beers. Although also high on the list was getting a hug when I showed up from our other PR rep Anne Yourt - you see, she grew up a couple town's over, roomed with one of my buddies during college and that's just the way it is when you're from a small town.

If I can figure out how to upload pics on this blog thing, I'll post a pic I took of the group…if not I'll post it on my Facebook group the beau's army and tag everyone on it. Cheers!

Posted by Steve Beauchesne, Beau's in Beer, Beau's, OCB