Reaching Young Canadians: Why Local Context Still Matters

Canada’s digital advertising market reached $21.1 billion in 2025, growing 16% year over year.

But for brands trying to reach younger Canadians, the more interesting question isn’t how much is being spent. It’s where that investment is going, and what kind of attention it’s actually buying.

YouTube, Instagram and TikTok are deeply embedded in how younger Canadians discover entertainment, products, places and ideas. Global platforms are therefore an obvious and necessary part of most media plans.

But they aren’t the whole plan.

For brands operating in Canada, there’s another layer that can be easy to overlook: the value of showing up within content that actually feels Canadian.

A restaurant opening in Montreal. A new experience in Toronto. A weekend trip from Vancouver. A creator people recognize from their own city. A story that understands why something happening in Canada matters to Canadians.

That context is difficult to replicate with reach alone.

Young Canadians are highly connected, but their attention is fragmented

Research from Toronto Metropolitan University’s Social Media Lab shows just how concentrated social media use is among younger Canadians.

Among Canadians aged 18 to 24, 94% use YouTube, 91% use Instagram and 65% use TikTok. Across Canadian adults more broadly, YouTube reaches 73% and Instagram 63%, with both platforms growing significantly since 2022.

At the same time, the picture is becoming more complicated.

TikTok, for example, continues to grow in overall adoption, while daily usage has softened. Audiences move between platforms, algorithms change, new formats emerge and the way people discover content keeps evolving.

For marketers, that makes it increasingly difficult to think about a “youth audience” as a single media buy.

A 20-year-old university student in Montreal and a 38-year-old millennial parent in Calgary technically sit within the broad Gen Z and millennial demographic, but they don’t necessarily consume the same content, use platforms in the same way or respond to the same creative.

The better starting point is understanding who you actually want to reach, where they live and what they care about.

Reach matters. Relevance matters too.

There’s no argument against scale. Global platforms are extraordinarily good at providing it.

But reach and relevance solve different problems.

If a campaign needs to reach young people across Canada, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and other large platforms will almost certainly play a role.

If the objective is to make a new restaurant matter to people in Toronto, introduce a travel destination to Quebecers, get Vancouverites interested in a local activation or make a Canadian product part of a cultural conversation, context starts becoming much more important.

That’s where local media can complement the platform layer of a campaign.

At Narcity Media, we’ve spent more than a decade building audiences around a fairly simple idea: help people discover what’s worth knowing, doing and experiencing where they live.

That can mean a new restaurant, a neighbourhood opening, an affordable getaway, a major cultural moment or a story everybody in a particular city suddenly seems to be talking about.

It also creates a different environment for brands.

Instead of simply asking someone to stop consuming the content they wanted in order to see an advertisement, the opportunity is to make the brand part of content they might have wanted to consume anyway.

Local doesn’t have to mean small

One misconception about local media is that choosing relevance means giving up scale.

It doesn’t have to.

Narcity Media’s organic social distribution alone reaches more than 5 million Canadian followers, with storytelling and advertising solutions designed to connect brands with communities across the country.

That creates an interesting middle ground for national advertisers.

A campaign can have a national idea while still acknowledging that Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary and other Canadian markets aren’t interchangeable.

The creative doesn’t necessarily need to be rebuilt from scratch in every city. But the distribution, storytelling, creators and cultural references can be adapted so the campaign feels closer to the audience receiving it.

For brands trying to build relevance with younger Canadians, that distinction matters.

Canada also isn’t one language market

Any conversation about reaching Canadians at scale eventually has to address Quebec.

Simply translating English creative into French is rarely the same thing as building something for a French-speaking audience.

Language is part of it, but so are references, humour, creators, places and editorial instincts.

Through Narcity Québec and MTL Blog, we’ve learned that reaching Quebec effectively requires treating it as a distinct audience rather than an extension of an English Canadian campaign.

For national brands, that doesn’t mean operating two completely disconnected strategies. It means developing a campaign architecture flexible enough to work across both.

Video has changed what a media campaign can look like

Another major shift is format.

Digital video was one of the fastest-growing areas of Canadian digital advertising in 2025, increasing 26% year over year as advertisers continued investing in connected television and premium streaming environments.

And that growth reflects something obvious to anyone watching how younger audiences consume media: video is now central to discovery.

But “do more video” isn’t much of a strategy.

A six-second piece of paid creative, a creator recommendation, a 30-second social video, a longer YouTube execution and an editorial video all do different jobs.

Increasingly, strong campaigns aren’t built around one asset placed everywhere. They start with an idea and allow that idea to take different forms depending on where someone encounters it.

An editorial story might explain something.

A creator might make it relatable.

A short-form video might make it discoverable.

Social distribution can extend the conversation.

Paid media can give the strongest creative additional scale.

This is also why Narcity Media has expanded beyond traditional publishing. Our media and advertising solutions now span editorial, social, video, performance media and creator marketing through Rally.

The opportunity is to think about those pieces as a connected content ecosystem rather than a collection of isolated placements.

Creators add another layer of local credibility

Creators have become particularly important in this equation.

Younger audiences have grown up with a much broader definition of media. A publisher, TikTok creator, YouTube personality and Instagram account can all influence what they eat, buy, watch or do on the weekend.

For advertisers, the opportunity isn’t simply to “add influencers” to a media plan.

The more interesting question is: who already has credibility with the community you’re trying to reach?

A creator with a highly engaged audience in Calgary can sometimes be more valuable to a Calgary-specific campaign than a much larger creator whose following is spread around the world.

Through Rally, Narcity Media gives brands access to creators across Canadian markets, allowing campaigns to combine the scale and editorial environment of a publisher with the voice and community relationships of creators.

That combination becomes increasingly useful as media consumption continues to fragment.

Native storytelling works when the story deserves attention

Branded content has sometimes earned a bad reputation because too much of it starts with the brand rather than the reader.

The better question is the same one an editor would ask:

Why would somebody care about this?

Maybe there’s genuinely useful information. Maybe there’s a new experience worth discovering. Maybe a product solves a problem people actually have. Maybe there’s a surprising story behind a brand.

Finding that angle matters.

Narcity’s branded content has been recognized by Pressboard, including a Top 5 ranking in its 2023 Highest Converting Articles category. But individual campaigns tell the story better than an award does.

Across Narcity Media’s campaign case studies, brands have used everything from local storytelling and bilingual content to creator campaigns, social video and editorial to reach Canadian audiences.

The larger lesson is simple: branded content works best when people actually want to consume it.

That means treating attention as something that has to be earned, not something an impression automatically guarantees.

Measurement should go deeper than impressions

This also changes how marketers should evaluate a campaign.

Reach still matters. So do impressions, clicks and video views.

But they only describe part of the experience.

Did someone actually read the article?

How much of the video did they watch?

Did they interact with the content?

Did they visit the advertiser afterwards?

Did the campaign change awareness or consideration?

For content-led campaigns especially, quality of attention can be as revealing as quantity of exposure.

For example, one Narcity campaign for REALTORS® achieved four times the average engagement-time benchmark. Other campaigns have exceeded targets for pageviews, clicks, conversions and video views.

The specific metric will change depending on the campaign. The important part is deciding what meaningful attention or action looks like before the campaign begins.

There isn’t one perfect media plan for reaching younger Canadians. The right mix depends on the audience, geography, objective and creative idea. Global platforms provide extraordinary scale, targeting and distribution, while Canadian publishers and creators can add context, cultural relevance and proximity to the communities brands want to reach. The opportunity isn’t choosing one over the other, but understanding what each does particularly well.

Building campaigns for Canada, not just campaigns that run in Canada

Young Canadians aren’t waiting around to see advertising. They’re watching, scrolling, searching, sharing and discovering hundreds of things every day.

Brands have to earn a place in that behaviour.

For us, that means continuing to build around what Narcity has always done best: understanding what Canadians care about where they live and turning that understanding into stories, videos, creator collaborations and experiences people actually want to engage with.

Because there’s a meaningful difference between running a campaign in Canada and creating a campaign that feels Canadian.

If you’re planning a campaign and want to explore how Narcity Media, MTL Blog, Rally or our broader advertising solutions could fit into the mix, get in touch with our team.

Ultimately, reaching younger Canadians isn’t about finding one perfect platform or format. It’s about understanding who you’re trying to reach, where they live and what will genuinely earn their attention. National scale and local relevance can work together, but that means treating markets like Quebec thoughtfully, choosing creators for credibility rather than follower count, letting the idea determine the format, and measuring meaningful engagement rather than impressions alone. The strongest Canadian campaigns are built around the audience first, with the right mix of platforms, publishers, creators and content following from there.