The Maze: Canadian advertisers are forecast to spend roughly four dollars online for every dollar in traditional media in 2026. EMARKETER, an advertising research company, puts digital spending at C$21.29 billion within a C$26.55 billion market. Here, C$ means Canadian dollars, and spending measures money paid for advertising, not sales generated. The split makes digital the default planning environment. It does not tell a brand which channel will earn its next sale most cheaply.
Digital takes four-fifths of the money. The June 2026 forecast assigns C$21.29 billion to digital and C$5.26 billion to traditional media. Those amounts add to C$26.55 billion. Dividing each component by the total gives about 80.2% digital and 19.8% traditional. These are calculated shares of forecast expenditure, not percentages of shoppers or purchases. The comparison establishes the scale of the online market. It provides no before-and-after series, so it cannot show how many dollars migrated online this year. The report page is dated September 15, but the disclosed amounts retain their June forecast vintage.
Format and device describe the same money from different angles. Digital formats include search ads, video display, nonvideo display and classifieds. A search ad reaches someone looking for something; display ads appear alongside content. The device split separates mobile, desktop and connected television, meaning internet-delivered television advertising. A mobile video ad belongs to both a format and a device category. Adding the format and device totals would therefore count digital spending twice. Their individual amounts remain redacted in the shared disclosure, apart from connected television.
Connected television is a disclosed part of digital. Its C$1.81 billion forecast belongs inside the C$21.29 billion digital total. It is not extra spending to add on top. That works out to roughly 8.5% of digital expenditure, calculated from the published amounts. Mobile and desktop remain in the device breakdown, but their exact values are hidden. Advertisers can see that television delivered over the internet has a meaningful budget pool. They cannot use this disclosure alone to compare its cost per sale with mobile advertising.
Traditional media still represents a C$5.26 billion market. Television, out-of-home advertising such as billboards, radio and print make up the listed traditional breakdown. Each individual amount is redacted. The total is smaller than digital, but smaller does not mean ineffective. A business buying local reach may still find a useful audience there. That is a possible campaign role, not a return established by these figures. Treat the market mix as a benchmark for asking questions, not a command to copy it.
Why it matters: For Canadian retailers and brands, the budget decision increasingly sits within digital: which combination of formats and devices brings useful reach and additional sales? Start with the job each placement must do, then test whether it produces sales that would otherwise not happen. Keep the forecast separate from actual expenditure and campaign results. Readers elsewhere can apply the same discipline, but Canada's 80.2% share is a Canadian benchmark, not a worldwide allocation rule.
Sources: EMARKETER benchmarks · Paul Briggs’s disclosure
