As a marketing instructor, case writer and marketing textbook author, I have found the CASSIES cases to be an extremely valuable resource… They can be used to bring home lessons in marketing tactics and marketing strategy as well as marketing communications. The CASSIES cases provide in-depth insight into the complexities of communicating with today's customers. They clearly illustrate how integrated communications can drive brand value and increase sales. They bring home the lesson that marketing investments need to be tied to measurable outcomes. They promote national pride in students by illustrating the excellent marketing and advertising practice that typifies the Canadian landscape. I have used the CASSIES cases as illustrative examples in the marketing textbooks I co-author with Philip Kotler. I also use them to bring home key marketing concepts in both the graduate and undergraduate classroom. They are especially useful in linking positioning strategy to communication plans. The CASSIES case material has also been the foundation of full length, integrative cases that have been used in the Intercollegiate Business Case competition (ICBC) held at Queen's which attracts teams of students from top universities across North America.

The CASSIES cases provide students with well-documented information on Canadian advertising campaigns. They are invaluable as a tool for connecting students with the real world of marketing communications. Students can be asked to evaluate the effect of advertising in the cases, and to apply concepts and theories discussed in class. In particular, they can be used as a vehicle for developing critical thinking about marketing communications.

In the 2nd year marketing communications course at the Rotman School of Management, students have been given an assignment on the CASSIES, worth 30% of their grade for the course. They are asked to select a case from the CASSIES site, conduct further research and answer the following question:

• How credible is it that the advertising was responsible for business improvement (even though it won an award!)? Are there potential other causes?
• How can the material in the case be linked to the theories and concepts we have covered in the course? What light does communications theory shed on this case? Are there issues the agency and the client haven't considered?
• What has happened since the case was developed? Has the impact of the advertising been sustained? Why or why not?
• What should the advertiser do now? Based on your learning from the course, develop a set of recommendations.
• What key learning can advertisers get from this case, and from your interpretation of it, that will be useful to them as they plan future campaigns? The idea here is to integrate the learning from the course with your research into the case.

I'm immensely impressed by the freshness and variety of the CASSIES cases. In studying them, a student of any age group comes to recognize the wide variety of business and public service situations in which advertising and communications, play a key role. In addition, the cases not only convey, to the reader, the marketing challenges posed in each situation described. They also vividly illustrate the exciting, stimulating ways in which advertising can be used to help solve these challenges in each case.

One of the great challenges for those of us who attempt to teach business subjects, is to have students understand underlying concepts and patterns of success and how they can be applied in the day-to-day business world. We must both take the classroom into the real world, and bring the real world into the classroom. In marketing communications this is doubly important as consumers do not act in a linear function in their buying and especially in their responses to marketing communications stimuli. However, there are patterns of success that can be learned. These patterns can enable organizations to plan and execute their marketing communications better.

So how do we teach this? Cases have been at the very heart of a teaching method that attempts to bring to life real world dilemmas, problems and opportunities. There have been three problems with case teaching in marketing communications in Canada. First, few of the cases have been Canadian, and it certainly helps to have learning set in a context with which students have some familiarity. Second, the cases available have not always been timely, and it certainly helps to have learning about current rather than only historical situations. Third, few of the cases have substantial enough data to allow full analysis, and it certainly helps to have learning founded on data rather than speculation.

For all those reasons, the CASSIES cases are invaluable to teachers and students in colleges, universities, in professional courses, and in just trying to learn more about how marketing communications works. They are Canadian, timely and data-based. They also now cover such a range of situations as to provide good learning in a myriad of real world situations. The CASSIES have created a significant library of insightful learning. They should be utilized more!

HEC Montréal has always owed its uniqueness in Canada to a teaching program that attempts to strike a balance between academic discipline and the most concrete possible experience, which is solidly anchored in contemporary practices. At the core of our undergraduate and graduate marketing communications classes, the CASSIES case studies presented to students have more than a simple illustrative value. Reading and studying them gives students the chance to fully understand the background of the campaigns used as models. An understanding of modern marketing communications issues, and of their underlying strategic and business logic, cannot be achieved today without this exercise, which requires that each of them take an autonomous and critical stance, a conviction that can only come through a questioning of traditional visions or ways of doing things. The CASSIES case studies bank is therefore an indispensable tool, but also a real source of inspiration for the new generations, who are encouraged by current and past Canadian success stories, and are thus better equipped to create their own successes of the future.