ClickZ: Media Buying in the Canadian Market

Canada native Tessa Wegert reviews some of the ways Canadians are becoming a useful audience to online marketers, with one of the highest Internet penetration rates in the world. About 30 million Canadian Internet users reside just north of the world's second longest undefended border.

While a highly disproportionate percentage of Canada's gross domestic product goes to exporting goods into the U.S. market, rather than buying from it (about 40 percent of their economy, seven years after the ratification of NAFTA), this largely reflects the manufacturing sector, rather than the consumer sector that concerns most Internet advertisers. About 85 percent of Canadian exports find their way to the U.S., including natural gas, lumber, heavy and light manufacturing, and an often cloying sense of social righteousness. But Canadians buy a disproportionate amount of consumer manufactured items, drugs, services and intellectual property from the U.S. - some of the very categories best sold online.