Vancouver-based brand and creative agency Pendo was awarded Silver in the inaugural Small Design Agency of the Year category at Strategy’s Agency of the Year Awards Ceremony in Toronto on October 28, 2026.

Co-founded in 2015 by Brand Director Don Cleland and Creative Director Peter Ladd, Pendo has earned the trust and respect of clients in multiple categories, including retail, consumer packaged goods and technology.

Aligning business strategy with strong creative vision, Pendo creates brands that respond to shifts in perspective, culture and trends.

“This is an exciting time to be a lean and nimble creative agency, as clients of all sizes are buying winning creative and strong results rather than infrastructure,” says Cleland. “The Strategy Awards are particularly meaningful to us because the jury consists of industry leaders on both the agency and client sides.”

Ladd elaborates on the agency’s thinking: “In our creative work, we push for internal alignment, thorough current and potential customer understanding, and long-term relevance. In everything we do, intuition, clarity and our clients’ trust help us uncover the niches that hold the strongest opportunities. We keep searching and then refining the creative until it feels right.”

One client’s comment illustrates Pendo’s approach: “Pendo’s strategic advisory was integral to positioning us at a global scale and closely connecting with our internal culture, setting us up to drive the next phase of our brand.”

The Strategy Awards Program is produced by Strategy, Canada’s national marketing and media news platform. The new Small Design category celebrates agencies with fewer than 25 employees doing exceptional work across the visual communications spectrum.

OTAVA®, a leader in secure and compliant private cloud and data protection solutions, today announced the appointment of Rebekah Telford to Vice President of Marketing. She will lead OTAVA’s brand strategy, digital marketing, and communications, as well as partner and customer engagement initiatives to support the company’s ongoing growth.

“We’re excited to welcome Rebekah as our VP of Marketing,” said Donnie Gerault, CEO, OTAVA. “Her strategic marketing leadership, sales expertise and technology background make her a strong addition to our team. Rebekah’s hands-on, analytical approach will strengthen customer relationships, accelerate growth, and help lead the OTAVA brand into its next chapter.”

Telford brings 20 years of leadership experience and a strong record of building successful programs from the ground up. Prior to joining OTAVA, she was a marketing leader at the private equity-backed software/fintech company Continuous. There, she set the marketing strategy across three acquisitions, built and led the company’s revenue enablement function, and transformed marketing into a revenue-generating organization by scaling demand generation to accelerate growth.

Earlier in her career, she held various marketing and management roles at organizations across several industries including banking and market intelligence. Now serving as OTAVA’s Vice President of Marketing, she is focused on accelerating growth, strengthening the brand, and supporting sales and partners.

“I’m excited to join OTAVA at such a pivotal moment,” said Telford. “Great marketing doesn’t live in a silo. It thrives when sales, partners and customers move forward together. I’m looking forward to strengthening those connections and helping accelerate the company’s next phase of growth.”

Based in Florida, Telford joins OTAVA’s executive leadership team, as she directs the company’s growing marketing organization.

AI product-matching model gives retailers across all product categories a clearer view of their competitive position in pricing, assortment and online marketing

ZoomInfo (NASDAQ: GTM), the all-in-one AI GTM platform, today announced an MCP integration with Notion that brings ZoomInfo GTM Intelligence into Notion AI. ZoomInfo customers on Notion Business and Enterprise plans can connect ZoomInfo as a connector in Notion AI chat and get answers grounded in ZoomInfo company and contact data while they work in Notion.

The integration runs on GTM.AI, ZoomInfo’s headless GTM context layer. GTM.AI connects ZoomInfo’s data and agentic orchestration through an API and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, so platforms such as Notion can connect to ZoomInfo without building their own data layer. Notion AI reaches ZoomInfo through the same MCP connection that powers ZoomInfo’s other partner and developer integrations.

ZoomInfo’s GTM Context Graph covers about 100 million companies, 500 million contacts, and billions of signals. Identity resolution connects those records across sources, so a question about an account or a buying committee returns one consistent answer, whether it is asked inside Notion or in another connected tool. Use the MCP with Notion to help build out your campaign audience, size out your TAM, and much more.

The capabilities for the connection between Notion and ZoomInfo include being able to pull real-time context like firmographic data, and buying signals directly into your Notion notes, project docs and AI prompts without switching between apps. This can help to prep for account or customer calls and to create strategy documents for unified go-to-market planning.

“Notion AI is most useful when it can reach the context teams rely on every day,” said David Rosenberg, Head of Ecosystem at Notion. “Through ZoomInfo’s MCP connector, go-to-market teams can ask Notion AI about any account or buying committee and get answers grounded in ZoomInfo’s data. This partnership is a strong example of how open connections make Notion AI more useful for the work our customers already do.”

Enterprise controls apply to the connection, including access control, permissioning, data lineage, and audit logging.

The Notion launch adds to a growing set of places where ZoomInfo GTM Intelligence is available through MCP. Each connector draws on the same GTM Context Graph, so customers get consistent records wherever they work.

The Notion connector is available to ZoomInfo customers on any ZoomInfo plan whose Notion workspace is on a Business or Enterprise plan. Notion workspace admins manage which connections are available to users.

Core ZoomInfo tools, including contact search and enrichment, work on all ZoomInfo plans; some advanced tools require additional entitlements or credits. Customers can find setup steps and the connector listing at zoominfo.com/integrations/notion. ZoomInfo’s broader catalog of partner integrations, including its MCP and API options for developers, is available at zoominfo.com/integrations.

Globally, 47% of consumers have cancelled, switched brands, or cut spending over AI data concerns, while 52% would pay a 7% premium for brands that are transparent about how they use AI with their data. In the UK, 80% of consumers would stop using a service if it misused their personal data.

Agreements expand Transworld Business Advisors and The Great Greek Mediterranean Grill into key international markets

Connects AI visibility audits with prioritized actions to help biopharma teams improve how brands and disease education content are represented in AI-generated answers

Acquisition brings localized ad execution to Yext’s agentic marketing platform

SourcetoMCP reports two to three leads per week from outreach to people found through brand, competitor, and keyword monitoring.

Customers can now use verified ZoomInfo company, contact, intent, and Scoops data inside Snowflake CoWork, Cortex Agents, and their own warehouse pipelines.