Blog

The year’s not over yet, but it’s probably safe to say that issues with digital advertising was very much the story of the year. Concerns about ad fraud, brand safety, ad tech transparency and many billions of wasted dollars have rightfully become a preoccupation for marketers around the world. Those headaches were the motivation behind […]

Programmatic is fast-becoming the dominant approach to buying digital media but many marketers remain in the dark about how their money is spent. On June 23, Andrew Altersohn, Chief Executive Officer, AD/FIN Solutions, will speak at ACA’s Executive Forum at Corus Quay, sharing results of the study, Programmatic – Seeing Through the Financial Fog. ACA […]

Transparency (or the lack of it) in programmatic buying was the elephant in the room last week at Marketing magazine’s AD-Vantage Programmatic Trading Conference. And Ian Hewetson, VP of Client Services for ad server and demand-side platform Eyereturn Marketing, made sure to address it during his morning keynote session.

“You’ve got a lot of different players in almost every single programmatic buy,” Hewetson (pictured, right) told a packed room on Tuesday March 31 at the Bram and Bluma Appel Salon in the Toronto Reference Library. “You’ve got the site, the supply-side platform (SSP), the exchange, a demand-side platform (DSP), maybe you have a verification vendor, maybe you’ve got third-party data in there, and an agency trading desk too.

That milestone we all had been watching for, when digital media ad spend would finally surpass TV in Canada, arrived early this fall when IAB revealed that their number was $3.5 billion vs. TV’s $3.4 billion. Never mind that online video ad spend, estimated at a mere $140 million, would be a more appropriate comparison. […]