The name has confused people for sixty years now, and it shows no sign of stopping.
Boston Pizza, which was founded in Edmonton in 1964 and has never operated a single location in Massachusetts, owes its geographically misleading moniker to the aspirations of its founder, a Greek immigrant named Gus Agioritis who apparently harbored a fascination with a city he hoped one day to visit. The chain has since grown into one of Canada's largest casual dining brands, with more than 365 locations and annual system sales exceeding one billion Canadian dollars.
James Kawalecki, who oversees marketing for the company, recently offered his assessment of the current state of the industry, and it was not, as they say, entirely sunny.
"Right now there's a lot of angst," Mr. Kawalecki said. "It feels like one of those major paradigm shifts in the industry where people, because of AI and because we have a major disruptor coming into the industry, are trying to pivot."
The particular challenge, in his view, is that artificial intelligence has created the impression among non-marketers that marketing has suddenly become easy. (A misconception that has plagued the discipline since approximately the invention of the printing press.)
"That pressure is being put on marketing departments to try and adopt it and leverage it as quickly as possible," he said, "without really the intimate knowledge that marketers have on how and where it can come in and be effective."
At Boston Pizza, Mr. Kawalecki said, the technology is proving useful for accelerating content development — social media, email, customer relationship management — and for what he described as sense-checking ideas before they advance too far down the pipeline.
"If you think you're on to something, AI can pretty quickly tell you whether you are in fact on to something — or maybe not," he said.
But Mr. Kawalecki stopped well short of declaring the robots ascendant.
"One thing that's still true is that storytelling is a science," he said. "If there's an idea out there that AI is going to take everyone's job, I don't believe that."
It is a position that will comfort some on Madison Avenue and disappoint others, depending largely on whether they are the ones telling the stories or the ones paying for them.
Original story published in The Drum: "Inside the Jury Room: Boston Pizza’s James Kawalecki on AI angst and why storytelling is still a science | The Drum"