Dear IAB Canada Members,
Every December, we take the time to reflect on the many highlights that took place throughout the year. While most people on the planet would cite 2020 as “memorable”, for the digital advertising industry specifically, it has been particularly so. Faced with a constant stream of challenges hurled at the industry, we can celebrate the fact that our community at large showed a tremendous amount of both grace and grit.
The IAB Canada team was proud to serve our community with uninterrupted connectivity, information and collaborative opportunities. We were also amazed by the goodwill and charity of so many members this year. Aside from so many members doing awesome work for their customers facing hard times, we would also highlight the generous publisher inventory matching programs made available to charitable organizations for marketers willing to donate their suddenly unused media spends. Simply stated, IAB Canada members came through for one another when it counted.
This year, Canadian news publishers felt the full impact of advertisers’ long held news category blocking practices as news became increasingly difficult around the world, consumption rose by almost 50% while domestic publishers were unable to monetize the surge. This reality kicked off major IAB Canada efforts to help level the playing field for domestic publishers. Our domestic news allow list available globally through Tech Lab was first of its kind and our efforts to build out a comprehensive Canadian publisher media directory will be ready by the end of this month.
2020 also saw IAB Canada members rise to the issue of Diversity and Inclusion within our industry. Never before has there been so much passion and promise to do better and our newly formed working group hit the ground running with an active working session which included the IAB Canada Board of Directors, to help inform our strategy to tangibly make a difference.
While the year of the pandemic demanded so much from our community, urgent and fundamental challenges of our industry did not stand still. This year we saw the amended privacy legislation come through while we juggled several working streams to address the diminishment of third-party cookies. Significant advancements in measurement were made with the release of the updated IAB Tech Lab Open Measurement SDK which brought much needed consistency between mobile and web video.
Looking ahead, 2021 will have us hitting the ground running on several fronts. We’ll be focused on enabling modernized privacy compliance, preparing the industry for cookie independence, and welcoming new advancements in cross media measurement. We will also see tremendous growth in the small to medium sized business sector as they come online with eCommerce capabilities. This surge of commerce activity in Canada will represent a great opportunity to develop new tools and services to make online advertising accessible while delivering on a level playing field for domestic publishers.
I’d like to thank our amazing community for bringing out the best in our industry during an extremely challenging time. We’d like to celebrate the amazing level of engagement, generosity and kindness from all of our members this year and on behalf of the entire team at IAB Canada, I would like to extend our warmest wishes for a peaceful, joyous and uninterrupted holiday season.
See you in 2021!
