Blue Ant Media has partnered with American publishing group, Bonnier, signaling a boost in the Canadian media company’s ad offering potential.

The partnership will see Blue Ant represent Bonnier’s Canadian digital inventory, which includes more than 30 special-interest magazines such as Saveur, Outdoor Life and Popular Science.

According to Blue Ant SVP, Mitch Dent, the partnership will allow the company (which is home to channels such as Makeful, BBC Earth and Cottage Life) to create custom advertising opportunities across more categories including outdoor living, lifestyle and technology.

“One of the things we always thought was great about [Bonnier] was that their business is a lot like ours,” he said, citing Popular Science as a particularly aligned offering for people who would usually watch Smithsonian Television or BBC Earth.

Dent sees the ability to track these “complementary audiences” as having a positive impact on its digital audience growth.

“It’s really about hyper-targeting against people’s area of interest. It’s a much different world than just taking a shotgun and blasting out [into] a digital audience,” he said, adding that today it’s all about targeting audiences with contextually relevant branded content.

The move is in response to advertisers who desire greater reach when it comes to audience targeting. “Even though we have good levels of penetration and good scale, sometimes advertisers want even more people just to have enough reach to make their ad campaigns work,” he said, noting that the Bonnier partnership will allow the company to deliver “more of a full service solution for advertising.”

The partnership was announced as the media brand revealed its slate of original Canadian programming late last month, which included six new series and several renewals on its Cottage Life and T+E channels.

“There’s a lot of doom and gloom about Canadian media and we’re in a much different zone. Our subscribers are growing and our audiences are growing on television, and now our digital audiences are growing and we’re getting new partners.”

With Bonnier, Blue Ant’s total monthly unique digital views will be boosted to more than nine million, according to the company, a sign of the growth it has seen across the board including a 51% boost in its TV viewership in the past two years. It also boasts a combined reach of 5.5 million Canadians on its Blue Ant Media and the DHX Media channels it represents and manages the advertising sales for. Time spent watching its T&E, Cottage Life, Makeful and BBC Earth networks are also up 25%, 33%, 11% and 17% respectively.