About

We’re on a mis­sion to make mean­ing­ful marketing.

Sound crazy? Not to us. From where we sit, crazy = wast­ing resources on mar­ket­ing peo­ple are doing their best to ignore.

How do we do it?

We’re lazy cheats (in a nice way)

We only work with orga­ni­za­tions that could hon­estly be work­ing on some­thing that mat­ters to people.

If you’re doing some­thing evil or sell­ing some­thing that sucks, we’re sim­ply ill equipped to make a case for you. Any­way, work­ing with inter­est­ing peo­ple doing things that mat­ter has turned out to be a bit of a niche. It actu­ally sets us apart.

Putting brands on a mis­sion (if they aren’t already)

So we start by defin­ing the nee­dle you can cred­i­bly attempt to move.

In this media sat­u­rated era, earn­ing people’s inter­est, let alone their loy­alty is a lot eas­ier if you part­ner with them to work on things that mat­ter to them. We teach brands that mat­ter to develop a fol­low­ing by being ‘on’ a mis­sion instead of sim­ply ‘hav­ing’ one.

Then we make their mar­ket­ing about help­ing peo­ple who are inter­ested in the mis­sion take part in it.

Why do we do it?

• We sleep bet­ter, and work doesn’t feel like ‘work’
• We actu­ally get to like our clients–every one of them is inter­est­ing and doing some­thing cool
• We’re offended by the dol­lars wasted on com­mu­ni­ca­tions folks are doing their best to ignore
• We’re objec­tive about the kinds of things that get our atten­tion, influ­ence our deci­sions and earn our support
• Mar­ket­ing doesn’t have to be an “offen­sive” practice–we feel it’s mov­ing more towards rela­tion­ships than ever

Our peo­ple

Hypenotic is a crack team of expe­ri­enced communicators.

Barry A. Mar­tin, Prin­ci­pal (@hypenoticbam, @SlowFoodTO)

The sec­ond youngest in a fam­ily of 5 sib­lings, Barry learned the value of mak­ing a clear and com­pelling case early. Fol­low­ing a degree in Adver­tis­ing Design from Syra­cuse, Barry ended up in Toronto, worked with a bunch of agen­cies on brands like 7Up and Hershey’s, but really wanted to work directly with peo­ple who had seri­ous busi­ness itches that needed scratch­ing. He founded Hypenotic in ’98 and has helped brands rang­ing from Tilley Endurables to Sym­pa­tico define and com­mu­ni­cate the right mes­sage in the right medium since.

Jodi Last­man, Gen­eral Man­ager (@jodilastman)

After 5 years at Social Mar­ket­ing firm Man­i­fest Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, Jodi ended up at Hypenotic where she wears three hats: Research, Strat­egy and Gen­eral Man­ager. She’s been a large fac­tor in help­ing us stick to our inter­ests and focus on values-driven clients. She’s an index of strate­gies for non-profits, has a nose for uncov­er­ing truf­fles in mounds of data, and no stom­ach for poor com­mu­ni­ca­tions. She’s a good fit.

Sonya Bar­nett, Art Direc­tion (@sjfbarnett)

Sonya’s got a print design past that blends well with a video pro­duc­tion present. Web­sites, edi­to­r­ial, pack­age or event design, a multi/media era takes a multi-disciplined designer. We’ve got one. She tweets about design/music/media, and runs the noto­ri­ously steamy Key­hole Ses­sions life draw­ing classes (in case you need to bone up on your fig­ure drawing).

Rick Sten­der, Account Man­age­ment (@getstender)

Rick walks the line. Between extro­vert and intro­vert; cre­ative and prag­matic; easy-going and earnest. Which is why he loves serv­ing clients and com­ing up with big ideas one minute and get­ting lost in the details the next. He has led project teams on big web ini­tia­tives for the for­tune 500 and care­fully hand-crafted web­sites and blogs for solo­pre­neurs. The com­mon thread is Rick’s bound­less curios­ity and his love of help­ing orga­ni­za­tions share their vision online.