High Road Montreal recently had the pleasure of working with Xbox to put together an event to promote the latest features of Xbox LIVE, the online entertainment experience that lets you play Kinect and controller games with friends, as well as instantly watch HD movies, TV shows and sports.

While High Road has teamed up with Xbox before to unveil some of those awesome new features in to Canadian media, this was the first chance we had to present Xbox LIVE’s latest features to the Quebec market.

To make the event more relevant to local media, we partnered up with Radio-Canada to showcase their TOU.TV app. Launched online in 2010, TOU.TV is a go-to portal for all Radio Canada content.

Available for the first time on a gaming console—the Xbox 360— TOU.TV is also the first-ever app to deliver French Canadian content to Xbox users, showing the gaming giant’s commitment to the Quebec market.

Xbox was also unveiling the much anticipated app, Karaoke, which was developed in partnership with Stingray Digital, a Montreal-based company. While the app’s name alone sells itself, Karaoke gives users access to over 8,000 songs in its music library, almost guaranteeing a good time.

In the end, Montreal’s top entertainment, lifestyle and gaming media attended the event.  The attendees loved singing along with the Karaoke app and couldn’t get enough of Xbox Live and the new TOU.TV app.

Working with the Xbox Live team was nothing short of exciting.

The only question the HRC team were left wondering was this: Can this really be considered work when everything’s just fun and games?

Forget bake sales and walking your neighbour’s dog, in Fall 2012, SCENE gave students an opportunity to work with their peers and get creative with how they fund their education. To do this, High Road joined together with SCENE, the popular entertainment loyalty program from Cineplex Entertainment and Scotiabank, and Redwood Strategic, to run the SCENEster campaign.

So what’s SCENEster?

It’s a series of contests and initiatives that rewarded one lucky student with a $5,000 scholarship. SCENE and Redwood selected 20 student leaders (and their associated organizations) from across Canada to compete in a series of challenges. SCENE provided $35,000 in sponsorship and prizes to students participating and helped them raise awareness for each club nationwide.  In addition to the scholarship funding, students were trained in skills such as marketing, presentations, working in groups and dealing with media – skills they can take with them beyond their time in academia.

To help publicize the students’ efforts, High Road developed a community media relations program.  By working with local media in the different regions, we helped to shine a light on their community work and progress with the challenges, all while highlighting their charitable initiatives.

At the end of the three month campaign, Christina Wong was the winner from University of British Columbia (UBC). Wong chose to donate her $5,000 SCENE scholarship to World Vision, a charity she is closely involved with at UBC. She also got to treat nine friends to a Canadian movie premiere courtesy of SCENE. The second place winner was Ian Watson from Laurier’s Fashion ‘n Motion and third place was Laura Mitchell from the Trent University Synchro Club.

High Road was honoured to partner up with SCENE and Redwood Strategic on this campaign that helped students achieve skills that they will use for a lifetime.

To learn more, head to www.scene.ca.

Just two months after the successful launch of Nature Unleashed: Inside Natural Disasters, The Canadian Museum of Nature capped off a fantastic 2012 with the grand reopening of the Vale Earth Gallery.  The permanent exhibit is double the size of the museum’s previous Earth Gallery and contains more than 1,000 awe-inspiring mineral, rock and gem specimens.

These samples truly have to be seen to be believed.

In the gallery you’ll find 14 oversize mineral samples (including crystals) weighing from 100 to 500 pounds, more than 30 meteorites collected from Canada and all around the world, and a sample of the oldest rock on earth (3.8 billion years old!).

The museum has also added a number of fun, interactive displays.  Kids of all ages can build volcanos, cause earthquakes and simulate making different kinds of rock with steam-punk machines like the Sedimentator, Magmanator and the Metamorphicator. And for those who want to wield the power of the universe, how about taking the controls of a six-foot animated globe? Make it spin, drain the oceans, see the web of tectonic plates that cover the earth, etc. Last, but not least, explore an incredibly lifelike limestone cave, complete with its very own dripping waterfall.

With High Road’s assistance, museum staff landed some great coverage.  Their team appeared as guests on CTV Morning Live and Rogers Daytime, while great print and broadcast coverage appeared in The Ottawa Citizen (see the Video Gallery here), The Ottawa Sun, CTV, CBC, EMC, and Ottawa Life Magazine.

The debut of the new Earth Gallery even attracted national coverage with articles popping up in the travel pages of The Vancouver Province, The Winnipeg Free Press, The Cape Breton Post, and Sympatico.ca, as well as a number of high profile Quebec blogs.

All and all, it was for a rock solid opening for yet another fascinating, world-class exhibit at the Canadian Museum of Nature. If you happen to be in Ottawa over the holidays, be sure to drop by the Canadian Museum of Nature as kids (ages 3-12) are half-price) until Dec. 24, 2012.