A T. rex can make a persuasive case for walking an extra few blocks. John Swettenham tested the idea in 2019, when a herd of inflatable dinosaurs rolled through Ottawa on the upper deck of an open-roof tour bus. The creatures stopped traffic, earned media and eventually reached hotel lobbies through banners and giant footprints. There was mischief in the stunt, but its purpose was precise: give visitors clustered around Parliament Hill a reason to continue south to the Canadian Museum of Nature.
Swettenham explained the geographic problem with an operator’s economy. Other tourism marketers needed people to walk through a door. His job began earlier - he needed them to walk down the street. The dinosaurs made distance feel like anticipation.
That mix of institutional seriousness and human invitation runs through his career. He has marketed shipping during the early rise of online commerce, helped a national museum find new audiences, worked across Ottawa’s tourism network and, since 2022, led marketing and communications at The Ottawa Hospital Foundation. His present assignment is the Campaign to Create Tomorrow, a five-year, $500 million fundraising effort tied to a new hospital campus and supporting infrastructure.
The same problem, wearing different clothes
Born and raised in Ottawa, Swettenham studied economics at McGill University before earning an MBA from Western University’s Ivey School of Business in 1988. His early work included marketing consulting at Woods Gordon, now part of Ernst & Young, the management of several small companies, and roles at Purolator and Canada Post.
At Canada Post, the physical network was enormous and the emerging behavior was tiny: buying something on the internet and expecting it to arrive cleanly at home. In 2006, as general manager of marketing for the parcels division, Swettenham represented a partnership that placed Canada Post shipping services inside eBay Canada and PayPal. Sellers could calculate postage, prepare customs forms, buy labels and track parcels online. Convenience was the visible product. Trust was the deeper one.
He later led marketing for the $6 billion Crown corporation and played a role in moving its parcel business toward a leading position in e-commerce home delivery. A 2011 mobile promotion with the Toronto International Film Festival let people turn phone pictures into mailed postcards. Even here, the pattern is recognizable: take an established institution, meet a new habit, and build a bridge that feels easy enough to cross.
A career in translation
A big brand with a small budget
Swettenham joined the Canadian Museum of Nature in 2013. In an Ivey alumni interview two years later, he offered a crisp description of the constraint: the museum’s budget was small, but its brand was huge. Partnerships were the lever. They could extend reach, distribute cost and let each participant borrow relevance from the others.
The museum also gave him room to be playful. He liked its mammal gallery, where animals appear in three-dimensional dioramas first assembled in the 1930s and 1950s. His line to visitors was that these scenes were the deluxe 3D televisions of their time. It is a curator’s observation filtered through a marketer’s instinct: connect an unfamiliar format to something the audience already understands.
Nature Nocturne, the museum’s after-dark series, carried that invitation into adult nightlife. Visitors could dance, have a drink and wander among exhibitions. The premise did not dilute the museum. It widened the number of ways people could belong there. Swettenham’s team kept testing other formats, including an event connecting drinks to botany and the traffic-stopping dinosaur promotion.
Their marketing mission for tourists is to get them to walk in the door; mine is to get them to walk down the street.John Swettenham on the museum’s location challenge
His remit grew to include public affairs, media relations, corporate communications, external relations, advancement, individual giving and membership. He became Vice-President, Public Affairs and Chief Marketing Officer. In 2022, after the retirement of the museum’s president, Swettenham and Charles Bloom served as interim co-CEOs until a successor arrived.
When the building disappeared
March 2020 removed the central promise of museum marketing: the visit. Half a million annual visitors could no longer enter the galleries. Faced with a blank channel plan, Swettenham began with inventory. The team listed finished work already online, then asked what could be repackaged for the moment.
They picked up a camera. Swettenham, already accustomed to giving in-person tours, recorded a 30-minute video walk-through. By late 2021, he said it had been watched 20,000 times on YouTube. Short gallery clips followed. A Matterport scan turned the building into a detailed 360-degree environment, and collaborators added interpretive material and rich media. The result improved access, gave schools new resources and created useful assets long after the doors reopened.
The finished-work inventory
- List what is complete and already usable.
- Reframe it for the audience’s current constraint.
- Package one long experience into smaller entry points.
- Invite partners to add reach, context or capability.
The approach was quick without being disposable. Instead of treating digital as a holding pattern, the museum built a second front door. Swettenham believed the virtual layer would remain, particularly for schools and hybrid events. Closure accelerated ideas that the institution had wanted to pursue but had never made urgent.
He was candid about measurement. The team watched social and web performance, but struggled to identify the right indicators. The clearest answer came later: when visitors returned, the museum sold out for months. People had not forgotten the place. Connection had survived separation.
We understand that we are an attraction within a broader ecosystem.John Swettenham on partnership and place
The city is the network
Ottawa is more than the location on Swettenham’s biography. It is the network his work keeps assembling. He served Ottawa Tourism from 2016 to 2022 as a board member, chair of its Tourism Development Council and chair of the board. He served on the Ottawa Symphony Orchestra board and chaired its marketing committee. He has also been a vice-president of the Canadian Courier Association. In 2026, City Council approved his appointment to the board of Rogers Centre Ottawa.
These connections matter because his marketing problems rarely end at an organization’s boundary. A museum depends on a destination. A convention centre depends on a healthy civic calendar. A fundraising campaign depends on donors being able to picture how a large capital plan changes their city. Partnerships are not an accessory to that work. They are part of its distribution system.
Swettenham has said that the projects a museum did not initiate could be the ones worth the most pride. When other organizations call with an idea, they are placing a bet on the institution’s ability to contribute. The invitation is evidence of accumulated trust.
Two bright ideas
There is one small habit that makes his philosophy unusually concrete. When Swettenham attends a conference, he likes to leave with at least two bright ideas - things someone else has considered and he has not - and then try them. The number matters. Two is enough to stretch a team and few enough to survive the return to a crowded calendar.
The habit also reveals a willingness to learn in public. Marketing leaders are often expected to arrive with answers. Swettenham’s version of the job leaves room to borrow, test and revise. The virtual museum was not presented as a master plan waiting for its moment. It began with a camera, grew through experimentation and became more sophisticated through collaborators. The work earned durability one useful layer at a time.
His comments about brand return to the same idea. People watch an institution because they care, he argued, and they care because they feel part of it. That definition moves brand away from decoration. Belonging has operational consequences: it affects whether partners bring opportunities, whether visitors return and whether a community will carry a campaign beyond paid media.
It also explains why he speaks so often about ecosystems. The museum could not market itself apart from Ottawa, just as Ottawa could not tell its visitor story without museums. Canada Post’s parcel service became more useful when it moved inside the tools sellers already used. The Foundation’s campaign sits inside a wider civic conversation about what Ottawa wants to build. In each case, the organization becomes stronger when it stops behaving like an island.
Now the subject is philanthropy. At The Ottawa Hospital Foundation, Swettenham leads the group translating a long construction horizon, research ambitions and a $500 million target into language the community can hold. By May 2026, he shared that the Campaign to Create Tomorrow had passed 80 percent of its goal. The work still asks the same question that appeared beside an eBay shipping label and underneath an inflatable dinosaur: how do you make a vast institution feel close enough for someone to act?
His career offers a practical answer. Begin with what the institution already does well. Give that strength an accessible form. Let partners carry it into places you cannot reach alone. Measure the response that matters, even when it arrives later than the dashboard. And keep enough humour in the system for a dinosaur to catch the bus.
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