IPG Mediabrands has unveiled its Outlook 2024 report that identifies the key themes that will shape the media landscape in Canada, and the trends that could dominate marketing in the upcoming years. The report brings together the views of IPG’s network teams, including UM, Initiative and Media Experts.
The report shows that Canadians are thinking more about the cost-benefit of each decision. Consumers, who now have greater access to technologies and the freedom to choose how to use them, are no longer willing to compromise. As a result, they are increasingly adopting the tech they want, regardless of what they see others doing. The pandemic also caused mental health and individual needs to become a priority for them. While the desire for connection persists, COVID-19 has marked the beginning of a shift toward how Canadians, especially younger generations, seek connections.
All of this makes brands that understand consumers on a deeper level, while providing timely and relevant solutions for individual moments and needs, resonate more with their audience, according Kyla Ames, digital director at Initiative, and Christian Kern, group strategy director at Initiative.
“For brands, this is a call to be nimbler and more nuanced in finding their consumers. Cohorts that previously seemed rather homogenous may no longer be the case, and it’s even more important to evolve from generalized assumptions about its consumers to understand what the moments and need states are that require brand presence,” Ames and Kern said in the report. “Technologies, such as AI, are not far away in their development to enable more robust tracking and analysis, to allow brands to be more anticipatory in consumers’ times of need.”
Canada is also experiencing its fastest population growth in more than six decades, with more than 41 million residents, and 98% of the growth is attributed to immigration. This population increase has put pressure on the infrastructure and supply of affordable housing in the country. Governments and businesses are working to provide more usable spaces for residents and innovative urban initiatives.
This is why we are likely to see growth in OOH touchpoints in communities where it may have made less sense to invest before. In the near future, activations in communities outside of major cities, including Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton, will become more feasible in costs as dwell time within those neighbourhoods increases, according to Katey Gault, VP of Strategy at UM Canada and Jeenal Patel, senior director of Strategy at UM.
“As communities transform into more modern, vibrant spaces that promise to bring everyone under one roof, these enclaves will likely become more integrated, and therefore turn into fewer but bigger multi-ethnic cultural spaces that not only stay authentic to the respective cultures, but also offer broader audiences more accessible opportunities to engage and interact,” Gault and Patel said in the report.
Another trend the report identifies is the difficult access to Canadian news, at a time when the media is fragmenting and Meta has removed Canadian news content from users’ feeds. According to the report, many users logging into Meta’s platforms are largely exposed to U.S.-centric pop culture, so there is a opportunity for Canadian marketers to localize these trends through partnerships.
“By partnering with Canadian creators and businesses, brands can add local credibility to macro-cultural trends to drive increased relevancy in Canada,” said Taylor Guthrie, group director of Strategy at Media Experts, in the report. “With the Barbie phenomenon, we saw a number of Canadian partnerships materialize, including well-known brands such as Roots, and upstarts like the PWHL, both adding iconic Canadiana as they rode the cultural train.”
“Beyond business collaborations, influencer partnerships are another way to add some Canadian flair to US-led monocultural moments,” Guthrie added.
Finally, the report finds that the pandemic has made Canadians eager for shared cultural experiences. 2023 epitomized this resurgence, with events such as Barbenheimer and Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, as well the launch of the PWHL and the Women’s World Cup.
Meanwhile, fears of a recession have become more prominent, so companies and organizations face the challenge of articulating and demonstrating their value.
“The use of augmented technology, especially, can help address the desire for connection that we crave as a society while solving Canadian-specific challenges that brands and marketers traditionally encounter.” said Kelvin Mak, senior director of digital strategy and partnerships at UM.
“For instance, imagine the kind of immersive experiential activations that are able to connect communities from coast to coast without the costs that have normally inhibited these activations in smaller neighbourhoods, or uniting consumers of different cultures with an event where language can be simultaneously translated,” Mak added.
