Jeff Fraser

Odds are that cryptocurrencies are here to stay, but it’s a lottery and there is a really good opportunity to lose most of your money. Despite all that, MoneySense knows its readers want to understand how it works, even if they don’t actually invest in it. So, in the spirit of investor education, with a dose of caveat emptor, let’s get started.

John is an old high school friend I mostly see at weddings, so I wasn’t expecting to see a message from him blinking on my desktop one night in December. He asked if I still had the Bitcoin he’d given me back in 2011. “I still have it I think,” I replied, dimly recalling the loonie-sized brass coin that he’d given me, around the time someone bought a pizza for 10,000 BTC. I remembered seeing some recent headlines about Bitcoin making a comeback. “How much is it worth now?” I asked, thinking that for him to be asking, it must be worth a couple of hundred bucks. “13,000 USD-ish,” he said.

Without Shopify, Manitobah Mukluks would never have gone from a specialty business working with a handful of high-end shoe retailers to a worldwide phenomenon competing with the likes of Ugg. Today, its premiere and one-of-a-kind “story boots” that are painstakingly crafted by aboriginal community elders, retail for upwards of $1,000 on Manitobah’s online store. But back in the mid-2000s, when it was founded by a Métis trader and a former Canada Goose distributor, there was no way Manitobah could afford to work with the big-name enterprise e-commerce businesses.

Konrad Group is a digital agency built to stand on its own indefinitely. Though twin brothers Bill and Geordie started the business when they were just 20, they plan to still be running it when they’re 50.

If digital publishers are having a ball with ad tech, then Bell Media has been Canada’s staunchest wallflower. But with new leadership at the helm of its ad sales, Bell’s looking to finally get into the swing of things.

Another year, another 41% increase in global adoption of online ad blockers. PageFair and Adobe's 2015 Ad Blocking Report, released Monday, says there are now 198 million active monthly users of adblocking software.

If you’ve been to an ad technology conference lately, then you’ve no doubt experienced it: the odd juxtaposition of future-forward cheerleading for innovative technology and grave real-talk about all the threats lurking out there on the exchanges. In one auditorium, sponsors are lining up with a litany of impressive spend projections for 2016, proof-positive that it’s time for your brand to get on the bandwagon. But just down the hall, industry watchdogs are warning that everyone along the digital supply chain is looking to gouge you, including your trusted agency partners.

With so many ad tech companies competing for market share, it’s become nearly impossible for marketers to sort out which vendors are market leaders and which are the underdogs. To try and make things a little more transparent, Montreal-based technology firm AdGear has collected data on which platforms have the highest rate of adoption among Canada’s top online advertisers.

TD is taking a stand against ad fraud, and encouraging other Canadian advertisers to do the same. Working with media agency Starcom MediaVest, the bank has developed a policy to better address the problem of non-human ad traffic. The new strategy includes measures to root out publishers that are acting in bad faith, or aren’t doing enough to control fraud in their inventory.

Around 1.3 million Canadian internet users haven’t used a desktop device to connect in the last month, according to comScore. The finding was part of a detailed presentation at Wednesday’s IAB MIXX conference on the firm’s first month of data gathered by its new multi-platform measurement product, which tracks unduplicated audience reach across mobile and desktop devices.

The World Federation of Advertisers has released a member survey on programmatic advertising, and one thing is very clear from the responses: advertisers are not happy with agency trading desks (ATD).

Andrew Casale built one of the world’s first real-time ad network when he was still in high school. In more than a decade at Casale Media, the company he and his father founded, he’s watched the evolution of digital media from the days before Google cared about advertising to its current incarnation as a complex and sprawling ecosystem full of new ideas, tough competition and not a few bad actors.

Each month, AD-Vantage will be asking experts about the big issues impacting the Canadian digital advertising industry, like advertiser investment, measurement challenges, programmatic strategies and other factors driving major changes in the evolving media landscape. This month, our roundtable says we’re playing into the hands of fraudsters.

The Canadian Premium Audience Exchange (CPAX), a real-time ad exchange operated by some of Canada’s most well-established publishers and media brands, is relaunching at the end of this month with a new mandate to provide more hands-on services for buyers and better representation for publishers.

Real-time bidding is a type of programmatic media buying in which media buyers bid against one another over individual ad impressions, as those impressions are shown to users. When a user visits an RTB-enabled web page, ad placements on the page are auctioned off to advertisers who want to show their ad. Because the auction happens in the milliseconds it takes for the user to load the page, human buyers can’t be directly involved — they have to use computer algorithms.

Integral Ad Science and ADVantage examine a bot's life

Toronto-based tech startup Neuranet has officially launched its Flexitive design suite, designed to give marketers a quick and easy way to design cross-platform HTML5 ads without weeks of training. Designed with simplicity in mind, all it takes to create an ad is an image, some text, a little dragging and dropping, and out pops a URL ready to be fed to an ad server for a mobile, desktop or cross-platform campaign.

Even though the value of automated ad commerce continues to climb rapidly, the total volume of desktop inventory is beginning to stabilize as the last holdout publishers make their ad space available to ad exchanges for programmatic and real-time bidding transactions. As a result, ad tech players have been left to bet on where they can build the next big market. Many of them are firmly banking on mobile, but the bigger question is whether advertisers and the whole technological ecosystem are ready for them.

Nussar’s sudden death left the company’s future in doubt in the summer of 2012. Naveed and his family inherited the company, and had to decide what to do with it. They considered shuttering it—their mother even suggested that option—but after speaking to some of the Addictive team, they realized how much it had meant to Nussar. It wasn’t a financial decision in the end, says Naveed. “It was more about legacy.”

EyeReturn‘s Ian Hewetson, vice-president of client services, has dealt with a lot of fraud. Speaking at the IAB Spring Mixx conference Thursday, he recalled when his team found clear markers of fraudulent traffic on one publisher’s site. The publisher was in the U.S. and was someone Hewetson saw as legitimate — so he called him and shared his suspicions.