TL;DR

In 2025, Canadian Marketers expect to invest significantly more in TV Streaming, Influencer Content and Video Streaming. Despite our concerns about the trustworthiness of TikTok handling our data, we still expect to give this channel the highest budget increases. According to this Kantar report, the reason may be that TikTok’s innovative approach to keep consumer attention outweighs the safety risks of the channel.


Keep reading for a few more of the insights and details for our May 14 webinar on Influencers.

Digital Budget Shifts

TikTok is the big winner claiming the biggest increase of the Canadian Marketing budget. Perhaps unsurprisingly, X (formerly Twitter – when can we stop saying this?) is the biggest loser.  It’s important to keep in mind that these aren’t actual budget dollars, as Meta and Google still take a lions share of the most marketing budgets. 

Trust in Digital 

Although TikTok is the big budget winner, Canadian Marketers consider it one of the least trustworthy digital channels. 

The Irony of Trust? 

Ask any marketer how we build brands and trust inevitably comes up as a key factor. Interestingly, our media budgets aren’t strongly correlated with our perceived trustworthiness of the medium.

For example, trust in more traditional channels (Pink bars) like TV, Cinema & OOH all very high compared to the trust we have in more digital channels (blue bars) like OLV, Podcasts, Influencer Content, Video Streaming & Online Gaming. Despite these difference in trust, Canadian Marketers expect to reduce budget in the high trust channels and increase budget in the lower trust channels. 

The disconnect between investment and trust suggests that we only need a media to meet our minimum trust requirement for us to invest. Other factors like past success, meeting campaign objectives and innovation have a bigger impact on Canadian Marketers media choices. 

Influencers for Attention 

According to Canadian Marketers, Influencers, OOH and Cinema are the top three ad formats for delivering attention. In addition, Influencer content is also considered by Canadian Marketers to be more innovative than most other forms of advertising. 

If the medium is the message, perhaps Canadian Marketers are shifting budget away from trustworthy mediums and toward influencers and TikTok to improve their perception as innovative brands.