Stop us if you've heard this one:
From the earliest days of his Cleaver-esque childhood in the Toronto suburbs, Mike Tennant and writing were on a collision course. He has early memories of delivering the Globe & Mail (not very well) to customers near Richmond Hill's lovely Mill Pond, where he skated (not very well).
At 14 he was inspired to write for his local paper, The Richmond Hill Liberal. The 'city' room was a cramped basement beneath the Richmond Hill Odeon. A note on the wall read "Last week's news next week, and an apology the week after."
At 16, he started a community access cable TV comedy show Mike Tennant's News, Weather, and Steakhouse, in which a spartan few inspired ideas were tucked deeply inside efforts to mimic heroes Peter Cook, John Cleese, Michael Palin and Bob Newhart.
At 17 he landed a weekly column with Toronto's then-new Sunday Star, at a time when the formative humility of a part time job in food services might have served him better.
After a five-month backpacking tour of countries around the Mediterranean, he sent out some 110 resumes to radio stations across Canada, yielding, months later, an entry level copywriting job at CHAB Radio in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. Soon he migrated to Regina, then Calgary, where he fell in love and married. Then to CHUM Radio Toronto, then CFNY, before leaving, in 1991, to freelance from his home in Kitchener, Ontario.
Since then, he's created hundreds of campaigns for clients in Canada and the U.S., won dozens of awards, conceived, produced and co-wrote two hugely popular CBC Radio series- O'Reilly on Advertising and The Age of Persuasion- and co-written a bestselling book based on the latter.
In between he loves to give talks and workshops on advertising, marketing and creative communication.
He takes great joy in his family, plays pickup hockey (not very well), collects old books about Canadian history, and serves on the board of Mennonite Central Committee Ontario, with whom he recently joined a learning trip to Jerusalem and the West Bank.
