
PDMI Spring Seminar Series
Virtual education keeping you informed on performance, DTC, and e-commerce marketing trends.

The PDMI's Spring Seminar Series features live monthly webinar events designed to educate and inform leaders in the performance and direct-to-consumer marketing world.
This is part of our seasonal seminar series, which kicked off in 2020. With more than two-dozen of these one-hour webinars now in the books, the PDMI is excited to continue offering regular virtual education to its members and to those in the greater performance marketing community.
CTV in Canada: What’s the Reality?
Thursday, June 1
2 p.m. EDT/11 a.m. PDT
The growth of connected TV — outlets, viewership, and, of course, ad spend — has been one of the biggest U.S. performance marketing stories of the past two years. But different countries evolve at different paces. In Canada — long considered a tremendous testing ground among D2C marketers given its proximity to and demographic similarities with the United States — how quickly is the CTV advertising marketplace growing? What are the opportunities and challenges when considering CTV in Canada — and what types of marketers are finding success? A group of experts will look at these questions and more in this one-hour conversation presented by the PDMI Workshop Council.
Speakers:
-
Ben Hemming, Bulletin
-
Wade Kuiken-Rogers, Finecast
-
Garrett MacDonald, AudienceX
Moderator:
-
Geoff Crain, Kingstar Media (moderator)

Ben Hemming
Bulletin
Ben Hemming is executive vice president and partner at Bulletin. Bulletin has built a successful OOH and instream/connected TV business by exclusively representing premium brands like DAZN. As Canada’s largest sports app, DAZN has seen significant growth due to owning the exclusive rights of NFL, the Champions League, and the English Premier League during the past five years. Hemming’s background includes four years in the agency world, after which he transitioned into sales by exclusively representing Electronic Arts in Canada, selling in-game advertising to brands like Coca-Cola, Hyundai, Canadian Tire, and Nissan. He also spent time at Yahoo! and JUICE Mobile digging into digital and mobile advertising. Just prior to Bulletin, he helped build the programmatic business at Bell Media, Canada’s largest media company — expanding its footprint in Canada from 300,000 to 35 million in two years.

Wade Kuiken-Rogers
Finecast
Wade Kuiken-Rogers is one of the original Canadian pioneers in the programmatic digital space with 10-plus years of innovation and ingenuity. Just more than three years ago, he shifted gears slightly to help start one of the first addressable TV companies in Canada, Finecast. His passion is to identify clients’ business challenges and solve them with seamless marketing initiatives that help drive both environment growth and client value.

Garrett MacDonald
AudienceX
Garrett MacDonald has more than two decades of experience in B2B sales leadership and provides a respected industry voice on the convergence of entertainment, retail, and finance with deep expertise in advertising technology. Before joining AudienceX, he served as chief commercial officer for a streaming video data platform that enabled the advertising ecosystem to transact on the topic of content among online video and CTV. MacDonald has held executive sales leadership positions at Kochava, Airpush, StrikeAd, and American Express in addition to advising several other top adtech and martech platforms. He has been instrumental in creating and deploying some of the industry’s most transformational technology solutions around contextual targeting, real-time bidding, predictive algorithmic optimizations, identity and addressability, and omni-channel measurement. MacDonald earned a bachelor’s degree at UC Santa Barbara where he also played NCAA Division 1 men’s volleyball.

Geoff Crain
Kingstar Media
Geoff Crain is a senior media professional with more than 12 years of experience in planning, buying, and optimizing offline and online media for some of the world's top brands including Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, and Samsung. He has a deep understanding and experience in purchasing performance media across all advertising mediums including linear TV, radio, DOOH, CTV, SEM, SEO, programmatic and paid social. Crain is passionate about people, collaboration, strategy, and learning new things every day.