Retail media is the fastest-growing digital advertising channel at scale in Canada

Retail media will account for about 1 in 5 digital ad dollars this year. That’s about double the share it held in 2020. We expect it to surpass the one-quarter mark by 2028.

Retail media ad spending growth in 2025 (19.7%) will be more than double the growth in digital ad spending (8.8%). Over the five-year span leading to 2028, we forecast a 134% gain in the channel overall.

A rapid expansion in ad inventory is helping fuel growth. These formats go beyond on-site ads (e.g., search or display on a retailer’s website or mobile app) to include off-site ads in partnership with other ad networks leveraging first-party retail data. In-store activations are also on the rise, including a variety of digital screens and point-of-sale options.

Canada leads all countries except China in retail media’s share of digital. All the countries we forecast have seen tremendous growth in retail media in the past five years. But Canada is No. 2 globally, largely due to Amazon’s dominance in the market. (China’s vast lead in this metric is proportional to its position in ecommerce’s share of total retail.)

Read the full report.