The auto sector is leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else in Canadian programmatic spending, with GM leading the pack.
According to quarterly programmatic auction data supplied to Marketing by real-time ad exchange platform Index Exchange, the auto sector spends 33% more on programmatic advertising than the next-highest sector – financial services.
Playing off its name, Index prefers to present all of its quarterly data in index format so it can identify comparative spending patterns without revealing how much its clients actually spend.
Looking at the top brands in Canada by programmatic spend, it’s not hard to see why auto is so far ahead. Six of the top 10 are international auto brands.
“Automotive and financial services are the verticals that really jump to the top,” said Lizzie Komar, Index Exchange director of research. “Those are companies that have a lot of customer data, and a lot of customer marketing relationships. There are so many audience segments that are focused on automotive and financial marketing, it makes sense that they’ve adopted programmatic rapidly and first by a significant margin.”
But even within that group, one brand stands out: GM. It spent 35% more than the second-ranked advertiser (which, surprising in its own right, was the Government of Ontario). Actually, Index compared Canada’s top brands with those in the U.S., and found a truly shocking result: GM Canada spent nearly half as much in Canada in Q2 as the top-spending American programmatic brand, Unilever, spent across the entire U.S. in the same period.
Given that Canada’s total programmatic spend was only 18% of the U.S.’s spend, per Index’s data, that should be a sign of how much programmatic spending is still concentrated among Canada’s top brands. The last time Index released its Canadian-specific quarterly auction data was in Q4 2013, when it found that the top 100 brands accounted for 77% of overall programmatic spend across the country.
Index’s data is based on 19 billion impressions auctioned in Canada through Q2. To arrive at these spend numbers, it reviews all auctions from its open RTB exchange as well as private marketplaces that use its technology, such as Canada’s Premium Audience Exchange (CPAX).
CPG not so hot on exchange buying
There’s another big surprise on the list: not a single retailer or CPG brand was included. Neither Procter & Gamble nor Unilever broke the top 10, despite both having made large commitments to programmatic in other markets. P&G in particular is in the process of converting 70% of its U.S. digital spend to programmatic.
Mondelez and Kellogg’s, which have also committed heavily to programmatic, did make the top 20 programmatic spenders in Canada.
Komar noted that in the U.S., retail is the top spending sector and CPG Indexes at about 94%. “Clearly, Canadian buyers are mostly allocating their spend if they’re automotive or financial services, whereas the retail and CPG companies are taking more of a wait-and-see approach.” she said.
One potential reason for that may be that Canada still lacks reliable third-party retail data for CPGs to target customers with, which is one of the main factors behind the popularity of programmatic display among CPGs in the U.S. That may also hold true for the retail sector, another very big programmatic spender in the U.S.
“Programmatic makes the most sense to companies that have access to the best data, so that you can actually make efficient, targeting buys,” Komar said. “Perhaps retail is just not there yet.”
Telecom, meanwhile, has matured a lot in programmatic, and now spends the third-most among the sectors listed. In 2013, it was a distant fifth, despite the large amount of customer data telecoms have. Of Canada’s top telecom brands, Telus has invested the most heavily.
