By Ahmad Hathout
A study commissioned by the CRTC, made public Thursday, presses the need for the regulator to allow broadcasters to allocate a portion of their Canadian content expenditures on audience development, such as marketing and promotion.
The Nordicity report, which studied discoverability strategies of Canadian and international players, said Canadian audiences are now viewing content on multiple screens and platforms, which requires marketing budgets to scale appropriately.
“This shift in behaviour stretches the marketing task, requiring larger, smarter, and longer-term investment to sustain interest from early development through release and into catalogue,” the report says, noting that support for marketing and promotion represents a “relatively small portion of overall investment” in both audio and video.
Nordicity recommends that the CRTC – which has said it will allow discoverability as one measure to meet CanCon obligations – consider opening the Canadian programming expenditure (CPE) obligation to include marketing and promotion expenses. “A practical policy response to current and emerging business models would see audience development as an eligible and incentivized spend class across the content lifecycle,” the study recommends.
The consulting firm notes that broadcasters argued that if the regulator implements this recommendation, it would give them a baseline funding for promotion each year that will allow them to reduce the “sole dependency” on advertisers and global economic cycles.
“Ultimately, promotional investments drive audience to seek the content, in seeking the content audiences enhance the prominence of content and its discoverability,” the study says.
The consulting firm also recommended that Canadians secure intellectual property ownership, which includes an adequate share in the financial success of the product for long-term sustainability.
“With regard to Canadian rights retention, Canadian companies (and creators) would have a vested interest and a share in the performance of the content,” the Nordicity study says. “The expertise and financial investment required to market content as well as the access to audience data and financial return would be shared by both producers of content and the platforms distributing that content and would contribute to develop Canadian companies’ (and creators’) understanding of global markets.”
“Simply put, the ideal framework would be: sustainable Canadian businesses control both the story and the storefront. Enabling Canadian companies to own and commercialize IP, and to secure device-level presence for Canadian services, would make cultural objectives durable. This is how Canadian stories could keep paying Canadian creators, how Canadian audiences could find Canadian works on purpose, and how Canada would compete and win in a global market.”
In November, the CRTC ruled that Canadians must own at least 20 per cent of the copyright of a program for that product to be considered “Canadian.” The regulator said this would balance the interests of Canadian producers and foreign streamers who partner on productions.
But a trade group representative a swath of creatives believes the threshold is too low to put Canadians in control of the works.
“Canadian ownership of content is important in terms of ensuring the long-term sustainability of Canadian content creation companies and of creators’ careers, in both the audiovisual and audio sectors,” Nordicity says in the report, noting that Canadian-owned streaming services, such as Bell’s Crave and CBC’s Gem, play a role in discoverability.
“Simply put, the ideal framework would be: sustainable Canadian businesses control both the story and the storefront,” the report says. “Enabling Canadian companies to own and commercialize IP, and to secure device-level presence for Canadian services, would make cultural objectives durable. This is how Canadian stories could keep paying Canadian creators, how Canadian audiences could find Canadian works on purpose, and how Canada would compete and win in a global market.”
The report also recommends that a sustainable discoverability strategy should involve a nationally coordinated effort that brings together the regulator and federal departments; national and provincial funding bodies and agencies; industry associations; and Canadian companies and foreign services “to establish a standing forum to surface barriers, test collaborative solutions, and align policy and market practices over time.”
Last summer, a consortium of federal creative organizations announced it would be partnering to prioritize and harmonize the measurement and collection of audience data to better understand and amplify Canadian stories.
These are all just tools to help drive Canadian content discoverability. But at the end of the day, quality of the programming is still critical, Nordicity conveys. As such, the consulting firm says there needs to be a “mindset shift” from “output-first” to “audience-first.”
“Discoverability is the result of an audience-first strategy, but not the end of the journey: it is the front door to actual consumption,” the study says. “When Canadian content is optimized to reach its intended audience, discoverability becomes easier, though never guaranteed (hence the need for complementary measures).”
“Practically, an audience-first mindset means validating audience interest-IP fit and long-term financial opportunity early in the development phase,” the study continues. “It also means negotiating to preserve exploitable rights, growing lifetime value across a slate/catalogue rather than optimizing a single title/album, and treating export readiness as a design constraint, not an afterthought.
“None of this displaces cultural objectives; it operationalizes them: Canadian stories reach more Canadians, and the world, when they are built to compete for attention.”
