- Cost Per Canadian
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- Cost Per Canadian for May 8th
Presented by Point Blank
The top ten advertisers in Canada spent over $211,000 last week, more than 50% of which was on environmental and greenwashing ads by third-party groups. We also saw a jump in spending by the Liberals and some fresh new culture-war content from the Conservatives.
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Frazer, Digital Director. Point Blank
Seven-Day Ad Spend
(27th April - 3rd May)
Page | Spend | Affiliation |
|---|---|---|
$39,744 | ||
$38,168 | ||
$28,850 | 🇨🇦 CA CPC | |
$20,856 | ||
$16,709 | ||
$16,373 | 🇨🇦 CA AB GOVT | |
$14,735 | ||
$14,606 | 🇨🇦 CA CPC | |
$11,615 | 🇨🇦 CA ON GOVT | |
$10,303 |
Seven-Day Ad Spend By Federal Party
(27th April - 3rd May)
Party | Spend |
|---|---|
Conservative Party of Canada Including spend by the leader. | $43,456 Steady (down 3%) |
Liberal Party of Canada Including spend by the leader. | $8,205 Up 117% |
New Democratic Party of Canada Including spend by the leader. | $818 Down 11% |
Noted:
One of these ads by AFPA was flagged as political, and the other was not.
When is a political ad, not a political ad? When you very carefully try to get around Meta’s approval process. That’s what we’re seeing from the Alberta Forest Products Association (AFPA), a third-party advertiser greenwashing the forestry industry as climate and environmentally responsible despite studies showing that this is, at best, misleading.
Their ads have been carefully crafted not to be flagged by Meta’s automated system for detecting political or social issues content. A good example is the image above, where the video was flagged, but the replacement image was not, despite them pointing to the same landing page. There’s no definitive way to know how much has been spent on these ads, as Meta doesn’t provide that level of data for advertisements outside their political and social issues category.
Make no mistake “Love Alberta Forests" is a political campaign that has spent millions of dollars to shift public opinion on an inherently political issue, land use. No matter how covert and saccharine their content, they are seeking to maintain and even increase unsustainable levels of logging across sensitive ecosystems provincewide.
The AFPA isn’t the only organization running environmentally focused-ads. Between Quality Canadian Milk, RBC, Fair Share Report, and Wild First, over $113,000 was spent on climate and environmental protection messaging.
A new ad about plastic straw bans that the CPC launched last week.
The Conservative Party added a suite of new ads late in the week. The first, pictured above, is testing out a new culture-war-esque topic to drive email sign-ups. When people click through, the landing page links plastic straw bans to food affordability and the Constitution.
The Liberal government is unscientifically, and as determined by the courts, unconstitutionally, declaring all “plastic manufactured items” toxic and seeking to ban them, taking away your plastic straw while raising the price of everything.
Therefore: we, the undersigned citizens and residents of Canada, call upon the House of Commons to follow the Constitution and end their plastic straw ban by voting for the common sense Bill C-380, to let food stay fresh longer and more affordable, while also letting Canadians choose what products, including plastic straws, work best for them.
Lawn sign ads that the CPC launched last week.
The other ads that kicked off invite people to pre-order lawn signs before the upcoming election, which click through to a fairly generic sign-up page. The recent provincial election in Alberta showed that people love lawn signs.
One of a series of ads being run by the Liberal Party
The Liberals also released new attack ads, drawing attention to Pierre Poilievre’s policies.
The window to grab viewers attention and make them think or feel something is so small—it helps to be clear about what you're aiming for. This one seems a little confused.
Between the CPC colour scheme, the not entirely unflattering photo, and the positive sounding headline, it takes some careful reading to understand that it's not a pro Poilievre ad. The Poilievre team is already spending hundreds of thousands per month to tell people he wants to kill the carbon tax. Why waste your own money on the same message?
From a practical point of view, the small type is also quite small here, despite having plenty of room to go bigger. Worth keeping in mind that most people will see this on their phone.
These ads are targeted at people in Toronto-St.Paul’s and Lasalle-Émard-Verdun, and are driving people to a landing page that lays out these attacks as their talking points:
Pierre Poilievre has made his priorities clear: he wants to cut investments that help make life more affordable for Canadians and bring far-right American-style politics here to Canada.
He wants to:
❌ tax builders and cut investments that would slow down the building of new homes
❌ make cuts that would gut our middle class and leave too many Canadians behind
❌ promote volatile crypto-currencies that would hurt our economy
❌ roll back our climate action and cut the Canada Carbon Rebate
❌ put assault weapons back in our communities
He doesn’t care about you.
While Pierre Poilievre is focused on taking Canada backward, our Liberal team will deliver fairness for every generation.
Ads by ETFO via their Elementary Educators page
ETFO, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, jumped up the spending charts this week with ads encouraging people to ‘stand up for better schools’ via their petition page.
Their targeting seems to be primarily focused on reaching Ontario's teachers and other education staff through interest-based targets (people who have listed their occupation as “teacher,” for example), list-matched audiences, and lookalike audiences. This could indicate that the priority here is member engagement.
The digital advertising landscape in 2024 is so precisely targeted that for many people, it’s impossible to know which ads your neighbours, friends and family are being influenced by. We track the biggest spenders and high-profile campaigns every week on Meta, keeping you in the loop with what the rest of Canada is seeing.
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