On the TechTO stage ×1
First seen on the TechTO stage in 2019. Every talk is searchable — ask the archive about Gabe ↗
In their words
We publish about a thousand new creative ideas every month. What can I tell you tonight? There's two things. Curation is creation.
Ideas were built top-down, so you'd have the person with the brilliant thought, and it would go through an executive of some variation — a VP of distribution or an executive producer or an editor in chief — and that creative control lived there.
We're in the digital space, so social listening. And you've got to have good, smart people that know what to look for — human intuition still plays a huge part.
Around the web ×1
Quick answers
Who is Gabe Dunlop?
A Toronto media operator, currently chief operating officer at Upteaming. He led content at Diply, the Ontario-based social publisher, and has also worked at Corus Entertainment and VividMotion.AI. He holds a public relations diploma from Humber College.
What was his TechTO argument?
That curation is creation. Speaking at MarketingTO in February 2019, he said the old top-down pipeline — one brilliant person, one executive gatekeeper — has been replaced by ideas arriving from everywhere at once, so the scarce skill is now sorting the good from the rest, not generating it.
What did he say about data versus intuition?
That Diply needed both. Even with roughly 78 million social fans, he said, somebody still has to pair the data analysis against what the audience actually wants — human intuition still plays a huge part in what the publisher does.