Reaching Gen Z in Canada Means Thinking Local
Marketers have spent years trying to understand Gen Z.
Which platforms are they using? What content do they respond to? How do you get their attention? What makes them actually care about a brand?
But one of the biggest mistakes is treating Canadian Gen Z as a single audience in the first place.
A 22-year-old living in downtown Montreal has a very different cultural context from someone the same age in Calgary, Toronto or Halifax. Language matters. City matters. Community matters. And increasingly, the context in which someone discovers a brand matters just as much as the platform they're using.
That makes reaching young Canadians more complicated — but also a lot more interesting.
Gen Z is online. They're also getting tired of being online.
About 9 in 10 Canadians aged 34 and younger regularly use social media, according to Statistics Canada.
No surprise there.
What's more interesting is what appears to be happening underneath those numbers.
A 2025 Leger study found that 75% of Canadian Gen Z believe they spend too much time on their smartphones, while 80% said they would rather connect more with the physical world than through their devices.
That's an important tension for marketers.
This is an extremely connected generation, but that doesn't necessarily mean they want more digital noise.
They want things that feel useful, entertaining, relevant or genuinely connected to their lives.
And they're particularly good at ignoring everything else.
The platform isn't the strategy
Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat all remain important ways of reaching younger Canadians.
But platform behaviour changes quickly.
Toronto Metropolitan University's Social Media Lab found significant recent growth in Instagram and YouTube adoption among Canadians, while TikTok continues to occupy an important — but increasingly mature — position in the social media landscape.
The lesson isn't that brands should suddenly move their budgets from one platform to another.
It's that building your entire youth strategy around a particular social network is risky.
Platforms change.
Algorithms change.
Formats change.
What doesn't change nearly as quickly is people's interest in what's happening around them.
Where should I eat this weekend?
What just opened?
What's going on in my city?
Where should I travel?
What is everyone talking about?
For young Canadians especially, discovery increasingly happens through a combination of social platforms, creators, search and digital media.
Statistics Canada found that 62% of Canadians aged 15 to 24 use social media for news and information, compared with just 18% of older Canadians.
The lines between media, social, search and creators are becoming increasingly blurry.
Brands need to think the same way.
There really isn't one "Canadian Gen Z"
One of the more interesting pieces of recent Gen Z research came from Citizen Relations, which broke the generation into several different personas.
There are the obvious digital natives who jump onto new platforms early.
There are privacy-conscious young people who are far more selective about where they participate online.
There are highly digital consumers who are nevertheless extremely resistant to advertising.
And then there are older Gen Zers who are now approaching 30, progressing through their careers, getting married, buying homes and starting families.
They're technically all part of the same generation.
They're clearly not all the same consumer.
That distinction matters.
A lot of marketing to Gen Z still seems based on a slightly outdated image of someone who is 19 years old, spends all day on TikTok and responds to brands using internet slang.
That audience certainly exists.
It's just not the entire generation.
Canada adds another layer: geography
This is where we think Canadian marketers have an especially interesting challenge.
Canada is technically one national market, but culturally it often doesn't behave like one.
What feels relevant in Toronto won't necessarily work in Vancouver.
Calgary has its own identity.
Atlantic Canada has its own identity.
And Quebec isn't simply another geographic market that can be handled by translating an English campaign into French.
The cultural context is different.
Across Narcity Canada, Narcity Québec and MTL Blog, we see these differences every day.
A story can explode in one city while generating little interest somewhere else. A topic that feels completely ordinary to someone in Montreal can seem strange to someone in Toronto.
That's the advantage local media has always had: proximity.
You understand what people are talking about because you're part of the same conversation.
For brands, that local context can be incredibly powerful.
Instead of starting with:
How do we reach Gen Z?
It may be more useful to ask:
What does a 25-year-old in Montreal care about right now?
That's a much more actionable question.
Authenticity is mostly about context
"Authenticity" has become one of those marketing words that gets used so often it can lose its meaning.
But with younger audiences, it still matters.
Gen Z grew up surrounded by advertising, sponsored content, influencers and algorithmically optimized feeds. They understand the mechanics behind digital marketing better than previous generations did at the same age.
Trying too hard is immediately noticeable.
This is also why creator marketing works best when brands give creators enough freedom to actually sound like themselves.
The strongest partnerships generally happen when there is a natural alignment between the brand, the creator and the audience.
Not when someone is reading approved talking points into a camera.
Recent examples highlighted by IAB Canada show how effective creator-led campaigns can be when that alignment works. An INFINITI campaign generated a 16-point lift in consideration and a 13-point increase in purchase intent through creator storytelling.
That doesn't mean every brand suddenly needs an influencer campaign.
It means the messenger, environment and context matter.
Think beyond individual campaigns
One of the biggest changes we're seeing is brands becoming more sophisticated about creator and local media strategies.
Rather than running one activation, measuring impressions and moving on, stronger programs are becoming continuous.
IAB Canada's 2026 outlook points toward brands building always-on creator programs that generate not only reach, but ongoing creative learnings, consumer insights and measurable business outcomes.
That approach makes sense.
Every campaign tells you something.
Which message resonated?
Which city responded?
Which creator generated meaningful engagement?
Did awareness move?
Did intent move?
Did behaviour change?
Those learnings should inform the next campaign rather than disappearing into a campaign recap deck.
That's also part of the thinking behind Narcity Insights: using the audiences already consuming local content to understand what Canadians actually think, instead of relying entirely on assumptions about demographic groups.
The more directly brands can listen to their audience, the less guessing they have to do.
Online and offline are starting to reconnect
There's another interesting shift happening with younger consumers.
For years, marketing moved relentlessly toward digital.
Now some of the behaviour is starting to move in the opposite direction.
Research from Vistar Media found that 61% of Canadians report being annoyed by online advertising, while 50% said they trust out-of-home advertising.
Gen Z was also the generation most likely to take action after seeing out-of-home advertising.
That doesn't mean digital advertising is disappearing.
It suggests the strongest strategies increasingly connect environments rather than treating them separately.
Someone sees something happening in their city.
They encounter a creator talking about it.
They search for it.
They read an article.
They see it again on Instagram.
Then they experience it in real life.
That's the actual consumer journey.
Not a neat funnel inside one advertising platform.
Local creators become especially valuable
Creators add another dimension to local relevance because their relationship with an audience often comes from shared experience.
They know the restaurants.
The neighbourhoods.
The events.
The jokes.
The things everyone in a city is suddenly talking about.
Through our work with creators and Locals.tv, we've increasingly seen the opportunity for brands to combine creator storytelling with geographically relevant distribution.
And importantly, the creator doesn't necessarily have to live in the exact neighbourhood or city being targeted.
What matters is whether they genuinely reach and resonate with the audience the advertiser wants.
That's a different way of thinking about local influencer marketing.
It's less about buying someone's entire following and more about reaching the relevant portion of their community.
The opportunity for brands
The brands that will do the best job reaching young Canadians over the next few years probably won't be the ones chasing every new platform or trend.
They'll be the ones that understand their audience with more precision.
Not just their age.
Their city.
Their language.
Their interests.
Their communities.
Their creators.
Their context.
Canada's young audience is highly connected, highly fragmented and increasingly skeptical of advertising that doesn't add anything to their lives.
That raises the bar.
But it also creates a significant opportunity for brands willing to become more relevant rather than simply becoming louder.
At Narcity Media, that's ultimately the space we operate in: connecting brands with young Canadians through local media, creators, audience insights and storytelling built around the communities people actually live in.
Because reaching Canadian Gen Z isn't really about finding the perfect platform.
It's about understanding the people on the other side of it.
Find out how Narcity Media Group can help you launch a successful campaign targeting Gen Z in Canada.