By Steve Faguy
AS THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT argues big tech giants are threatening traditional media, its annual report on advertising shows it’s buying more than four times as much in advertising from Facebook and Google alone than from the entire Canadian radio industry. And that’s despite a boost given during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.
For the fiscal year 2019-20, which ended as the pandemic was only two weeks old, the government spent $24.7 million on digital advertising, representing 55% of its advertising total for the year. Of that, $5.85 million went to Facebook (including ads on Instagram), $4.3 million to Google, $1.1 million to Twitter, $920,000 million to Snapchat, $670,000 million to LinkedIn and $300,000 million to Bing.
Google and Facebook alone represented 41% of digital media spending, according to an analysis by Radio Connects. (Figures in this story exclude agency fees and creative production costs.)
Meanwhile, the entire radio industry received $2.4 million in government advertising that year, of which $1.3 million was Covid-related in March 2020. Another $2.4 million was spent on print advertising, $3.7 million on out-of-home ads and $11.7 million on television.
The early pandemic spending mitigated what was an even worse disparity in previous years. In 2017-18, the ratio of internet versus radio advertising by the federal government was 46:1 and Facebook versus radio was almost 15:1.
In 2019-20, excluding Covid-19 ads, which were more heavily weighted toward radio and television, the ratio of internet to radio spending was 22:1.
In August, the Canadian Association of Broadcasters warned dozens of radio stations could shut down because of severe drops in advertising revenue. (Their prediction of 50 stations closing in four to six months seems to have been exaggerated, though.)
Earlier this month, Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault told the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage that the government has already started to change the way it buys advertising in order to spend less on digital giants and more on local Canadian media.
Other highlights of the government advertising report:
- Spending on programmatic online display ads — where computers bid automatically for space on websites — went up 349% year-over-year.
- In 2019-20, the government spent more than two thirds of its ad money (and more than three-quarters excluding CovidD-19 ads) in the first quarter, filling media with feel-good government ads just before a federal election blackout period.
