The IAB Canada board of directors has selected Eric Morris to succeed its current chairperson, Joe Strolz, for 2016.
Morris (pictured above) is head of search and performance advertising at Google Canada. He’s been with the company for over 13 years, including stints at the head of its mobile advertising and automotive advertising divisions. He helped launch the company’s advertising business in Canada in the early 2000s.
In the five years Morris has been an IAB board member, he has contributed to the IAB’s annual revenue survey, helped design its education programs, and sat on the committee formed this year to appoint a new IAB president, Sonia Carreno.
“Digital has become more important, but it’s also become more complex,” said Morris. “I think the IAB can play a role in clarifying the impact that digital can have on the economy, and for members.”
He said he sees the organization continuing to focus on its three key mandates: educating the digital workforce, advocating on issues that affect the industry, and propagating best practices and research through its membership. “The association is a unique blend of partners and competitors, but we’re all in this together. It’s up to us to build this industry,” he said.
Strolz, who did not seek reelection, will remain a board member. He told Marketing while he continued to believe the IAB has an essential role in the industry, his recent promotion, which gave him global responsibility for merging Microsoft’s ad business with AOL’s, left him with less time to provide leadership to the organization.
Morris and Strolz both joined the board as members in 2010, and met for the first time at the welcome event. “Over the course of five years, Eric has always been a truth teller,” Strolz said. “He’s been pretty fearless in conversations around the real issues we need to get to, and very balanced in terms of thinking about the marketplace overall — not just a publisher’s interests, or a vendor’s or agency’s interests. For all those reasons he makes an excellent choice.”
During Strolz’s two-year tenure, he coordinated the industry’s response to consumer privacy challenges like the Canadian Anti-Spam Law and regulations concerning online behavioural targeting. More recently, he helped focus the organization on the ongoing issues of supply chain transparency and fraud.
The U.S. IAB (a separate organization) recently launched several major initiatives to combat fraud, including a communal blacklist where exchanges can share real-time data about fraudulent publishers, an auditing program to verify publishers’ traffic and advertising practices, and a payment ID system to reliably track down where each ad impression originated from before being sold to intermediate parties. A report released this week by the IAB estimated the related problems of fraud, pirated content and malvertising are costing the industry $8.2 billion annually.
Here at home, advertisers and publishers are looking to IAB Canada to take a leadership role in the fight against fraud. That could mean partnering with the U.S. branch on its initiatives, or launching its own efforts to clean up the ecosystem.
Morris said he sees international collaboration as an important step to solving the problem. “These aren’t made-in-Canada challenges. We are part of a global economy and global ecosystem,” he said. “I think one of the value-adds that our organization provides is we can bring those global insights and best practices to the Canadian market, and customize them where needed.”
