蘑菇AV

This is the first installment of our annual 鈥淐补苍补诲补 Ad Spending Benchmarks鈥� series, which helps ad buyers and sellers calibrate their spending and revenue mix against the market.

Retail media will set the pace for digital advertising growth in the coming years as more retailers invest in monetizing the channel and more advertising options become available to media buyers.

National Bank is distinguishing itself as the first major Canadian bank to implement a secure data feed (API) for its retail customers to share financial information with approved fintech applications, putting it ahead of Canada's potential 2026 open banking rollout. This innovative approach significantly reduces security risks by redirecting customers to National Bank's own website for identity verification, eliminating the need for customers to share online banking passwords with third-party aggregators (known as "screen scraping"). By taking an 80% stake in Flinks, a financial data aggregator that now accredits fintechs, National Bank transforms a potential threat to customer loyalty into an opportunity to deepen relationships, ensuring it remains the central hub for customers' financial lives even as they use other apps.

Our annual Trends to Watch report for Canada highlights expected developments in the country鈥檚 media and advertising market for 2025. Next year, we anticipate a shift in media buying will favor domestic publishers and retail media channels, while large platforms will contend with the new Digital Services Tax.

Digital ad spending growth in Canada is being driven in large part by a host of industries. Our rankings show that retail and consumer packaged goods continue to have the most ad spending share.

Our annual report on ecommerce in Canada highlights our most recent forecasts for all flavors of retail, including brick-and-mortar, digital buying, and mobile commerce.

On today's episode, in our "Retail Me This, Retail Me That" segment, we discuss why US home improvement company Lowe's didn't work out in Canada, why Canadian athletic apparel retailer lululemon athletica succeeded in the US, and which Canadian brands would prosper in the US if they chose to fly south. Join our analyst Sara Lebow as she hosts analyst Paul Briggs and vice president of content Suzy Davidkhanian.

Ralph Lauren and Canada Goose defied luxury slowdown in Q1: But tariffs and uncertainty could reverse that momentum.

Retail media will account for about 1 in 5 digital ad dollars this year. That鈥檚 about double the share it held in 2020. We expect it to surpass the one-quarter mark by 2028.

Companies are beginning to feel the sting of anti-US boycotts. Anti-US sentiment is especially visible in Canada, where consumers are directing more spending to local retailers and brands鈥攁nd making fewer visits south of the border. Still, while Canadians are using boycotts to push back against US trade policy, there are few signs elsewhere that anti-American sentiment is driving shoppers away from US brands.

The outlook for retail media ad spending remains bright throughout most of the world, even as ad budgets are increasingly constrained in the face of economic storm clouds.