eMarketer studied the average time spent with digital and traditional media among Canadians.

eMarketer article by Amy He 

Average time spent with digital media surpasses that of traditional media and digital ad spending has finally caught up with the changing way in which Canadians are consuming media.

We estimate that consumers in Canada will spend 9 hours, 50 minutes (9:50) per day on media this year, with 4:55 of that time spent on digital and 4:54 spent on traditional.

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Just two years ago, digital ad spending still lagged digital time spent, reflecting some of the ineffectiveness of early digital ad formats and a lack of marketer understanding of the medium’s specific metrics. But this year, digital ad spending will make up more than half (56.5%) of total ad spend, which is 6.4 percentage points more than digital time share.

“Digital ad formats are now being embraced in Canada because they’ve matured dramatically in the past few years,” eMarketer senior analyst Paul Briggs said. “Compared with traditional formats, the granular reporting and behavior tracking of digital ads are much more specific in assessing how well an advertiser is engaging a consumer.”

In turn, this overspending in digital ads is causing an imbalance in the way ad dollars are being spent on legacy media. This year, TV ad spending will make up 20.6% of all ad spending, even though 31.3% of Canadian consumers are spending their time with TV. Radio ad spending makes up 10.0%, even though the time spent share is 15.2%.

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