Since the Trump administration first threatened a 25% increase in import tariffs on Canadian goods in February, The Great White North’s sentiment toward its southern neighbor has been decidedly less neighborly.
Thanks to a combination of consumer-led boycotts and government-imposed counter-tariffs, products like Florida orange juices and Kentucky bourbons (as well as other US-made liquors) have all disappeared from Canadian shelves.
Tourism from Canada to the United States is similarly down. Although it’s estimated that two-thirds of Canadians live within 100 kilometers (that’s 62 miles, for those of us still stuck with the imperial system) of the border, car trips to the US have sharply declined for eight consecutive months and were down 34% in August 2025 compared to the same month last year.
And yes, even Canada’s media consumption habits are starting to change. Viewership is reportedly up 34% on Gem, CBC’s ad-supported streaming service, and especially on Canadian-produced programs like “Schitt’s Creek” and “Murdoch Mysteries.”
But how deeply has this phenomenon extended into the larger Canadian advertising market? It depends on who you ask.
Dollars do seem to be shifting, according to the Canadian (and mostly Toronto-based) sources that AdExchanger spoke with. Some brands are pulling back on ad spend, while others are updating their media mixes to invest more in local publishers.
So far, these shifts don’t seem all that different from how US advertisers have behaved in the wake of so much economic uncertainty. Part of that is because even though Canadian and US markets contrast in a lot of ways, both still use the same tech infrastructure to reach consumers.
On the creative side, it’s a different story. Advertisers have started leaning into national pride messaging as a positive way to reframe everyday Canadians’ frustrations – including Maple Leaf Foods’ “Look For The Leaf” takeover and Prime Minister Mark Carney’s hockey-inspired “Elbows Up” ads.
What’s the difference?
Before we really dig in, however, some education on how both markets differ might be in order.
There are, of course, the obvious factors that size and geographic location play. Canada’s population (37 million) is roughly one-tenth the size of the US (331 million) and much more spread out in terms of population density, making geotargeting a much trickier prospect up north.
Some of Canada’s postal zones are “so huge” that a brand could end up wasting all its impressions in an area without any nearby store locations, said Luke Moore, VP and managing director of media at Toronto-based agency Fuse Create.
On top of that, getting access to accurate consumer data in the first place can pose a challenge. Unlike the US, Canada has not one but two major federal privacy laws on its books: 1983’s Privacy Act, which regulates government data collection, and 2000’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), which handles private sector organizations.
Which is not to say that using Canadian consumer data is impossible, just that it requires a different approach and often cannot be done with the same level of granularity as would be possible in the US. Samsung Ads Canada, for example, uses its own proprietary ACR data and partnerships with Canadian data providers (such as Environics Analytics) to better understand the households in their market, said Country Manager Dave Pauk.
Speaking of which, the overall media landscape in Canada is much more tightly regulated than that of the US, too. Canada spends over $1.7 billion a year in journalism and media subsidies, and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) mandates that Canadian publishers are required to air a certain percentage of Canadian-made content, sometimes called “cancon.” (And no, foreign broadcasters are not exempt; in 2024, the CRTC also ruled that non-Canadian streaming services must contribute a percentage of their Canadian revenue to government media funds, too.)
Can’t quit you
Due to of all these factors – size and data availability chief among them – a lot of brands with Canadian origins end up making heavy investments in the US market as a way to increase scale and achieve better ROI.
“There’s generally going to be more opportunity in the United States, unless the brand or service is uniquely for a Canadian consumer,” said Brandon Langevin, StackAdapt’s director of sales for Canada.
As a result, most Canadian brands are not particularly incentivized to decrease their US ad spend – at least, not at a different rate than their overall advertising budgets. Nor are they trying to distance themselves from US tech infrastructure, something that tech reporter Paris Marx has advocated for on an individual basis.
“We might have an hour-long conversation with a client about being frustrated with Meta. But is Meta still in the mix? Yeah,” said Rita Steinberg, VP of Media at Fuse Create. “Because it still reaches 96% of the Canadian population, and that’s the only way that we can get scale.”
In fact, a recent study by Canadian Media Means Business found that 92% of digital ad dollars now go to non-Canadian platforms, representing an estimated total of $7.5 billion in advertising revenue between 2017 and 2025. (And, so far, attempts by the Canadian government to address this discrepancy have not been met with much success.)
In fact, some Canadian advertisers may even be investing more in the US as a direct result of the tariffs. Take the headline-grabbing campaign that Canada’s federal government ran in March, which targeted digital billboards in Republican-leaning states with anti-tariff messages.
Many of those billboard ads were bought and displayed via Perion DOOH (formerly Hivestack), which has digital out-of-home ad inventory on both sides of the border. The campaign ended up offsetting some of the impact that overall economic trends were already having on Perion’s bottom line, said Ben Bookbinder, Managing Director of Perion DOOH Canada.
“Anytime we hear terms like ‘depression,’ ‘recession’ or ‘tariff,’ out-of-home typically really suffers,” said Bookbinder.
All that said …
Even though brands in Canada are still spending money in the US, they’ve definitely noticed the members of their Canadian customer base who have stopped.
“If you were to go into a grocery store in Toronto, you can very much see people in their personal lives making deliberate choices and what they’re purchasing or not purchasing on the shelves,” said Langevin. “And I think that’s spilling over into the professional side a little bit.”
In March, a survey from Angus Reid Institute found that 76% of Canadians planned to boycott products made in the US; at the same time, a different survey from YouGov found that 61% of Canadian adults had already started a boycott.
It’s no surprise, then, that many Canadian CPG brands have leaned into creative messaging that encourages customers to buy locally owned and Canadian-made products. The recent “Look For The Leaf” campaign by Maple Leaf Foods, which was developed in partnership with Fuse Create, is a perfect example of this type of campaign.
On a purely anecdotal level, Fuse Create’s media buying team has also noted an increase in localized and out-of-home spending within their Canadian clients’ media mixes. According to Steinberg, this increase seems to be linked with a stronger emphasis on brand storytelling over lower-funnel performance metrics, which runs counter to what you typically see from advertisers in times of economic downturn.
Even more interestingly, brands that have embraced this type of messaging aren’t doing so with any emphasis on price differentiation, added Steinberg. In other words, typically, the narrative is less about buying Canadian because it’s cheaper for consumers and more about buying Canadian as a form of community building and pride.
Although sales on these campaigns are up overall, Steinberg said, she couldn’t speak to whether or not that was due to the messaging itself or other factors.
“Really understanding what’s working and what’s not – and what we take from this year into next year – is going to be tough,” said Steinberg.
In it for the long haul
Each of the Canadian ad tech professionals that AdExchanger spoke to had differing opinions about how long the “Buy Canadian” movement might continue, at least from a marketing perspective.
However, most agreed that an emphasis on anti-American rhetoric might be too negative to have long-term staying power, even when it’s repackaged into a more pro-Canada message.
“More positivity is good for everybody, and hopefully that brings positive ROI for the advertisers,” said Bookbinder.
In the meantime, Canadians seem to be putting their money where their mouths are. In July, Per Bank, the CEO of Canadian supermarket chain Loblaw, shared on LinkedIn that sales volume on tariff-marked items had declined an average of 15% to 20% and in some cases as much as 50% where there was an available Canadian-made alternative.
If there’s one thing Canadian brands need to think about moving forward, it’s that they shouldn’t reflexively slash their marketing budgets when the going starts to get tough – a piece of advice that transcends national borders.
“Time and time again when there’s been economic volatility, the marketers that pull back are the ones who feel the pain of loss of brand recognition,” said Pauk. “It’s important for marketers to stay the course and maintain that cadence of messaging that they have out in the market.”
