In 2020, digital video ad spending exceeded TV ad outlays for the first time in Canada. Digital video gained the most momentum of any format amid the pandemic last year, growing by 10.0% year over year (YoY). This includes both in-stream video formats (e.g., YouTube ads) and those outstream (ads appearing in social media feeds).

The adoption of social commerce—the ability to shop and buy, directly or indirectly, via social media platforms—accelerated during the pandemic. The vast majority of social commerce today is within the discovery and consideration stages. However, checkout capabilities are not available from the leading social networks in Canada.

Average daily time spent with media shot past the 10-hour mark last year, pushing media consumption to new levels in Canada.

This report summarizes our forecasts for nine countries—the US, Canada, France, Germany, the UK, China, India, Japan, and South Korea—and offers comparative analyses of the major time spent numbers for each.

But digital buyers in Russia, rather than the US, rank second by this measure with 49.5% of digital buyers expected to purchase via social media this year. It’s worth noting that Germany and the UK don’t even place in the top 10 by this measure.

LinkedIn is a fixture for professionals in Canada, as it is in other markets. B2B brands have taken notice and have doubled down with organic and paid promotion to engage a Canadian audience on the platform.

Where are people buying into social buying?

Canada trails only Japan worldwide across a variety of Twitter penetration metrics: About one-fifth of the population (22.1%), a quarter of internet users (25.0%), and more than a third (35.2%) of social network users in Canada use Twitter. Compared with the US, Twitter adoption in Canada is significantly higher.

US and Canada. The US accounts for the lion’s share of Snapchat users. As a result, the decelerating growth in the country means North America, which we define as the US and Canada, will see only a modest increase in the number of Snapchat users, too. This is despite a better-than-expected bump in Canada. Mixed fortunes mean modest growth overall.