Canada and Europe Have the Same AdTech Problem

Advertising is the economic engine of the internet.

“AdTech” is shorthand for a complicated and opaque system of automated, targeted advertising.

For the purposes of this blog post we’re not going to try to fully describe the layers of intermediaries and systems that sit between advertisers and publishers. The short version is that there’s a lot of infrastructure, and a handful of large technology giants own every layer of the AdTech stack.

Alphabet and Meta accounted for 74.8% of the $18.4 billion spent on internet advertising in Canada; adding Amazon in takes this up to 89.4% in 2024, according to a study by the Global Media and Internet Concentration Project.

The way this system works matters a lot because it dictates how businesses reach customers, how market intelligence is gathered, and how information of every kind is distributed. Because advertising is the engine of social media and free video platforms like YouTube and TikTok, AdTech is also a key influence on all digital culture and discourse.

AdTech is the hidden layer of knowledge transfer. It is essential infrastructure for the digital realm, owned by private firms and dominated by a few American players. Reducing that dependence is a question of economic resilience, strategic autonomy, and national security.

Canada is not alone in this struggle. In Europe we see efforts to build an alternative to the AdTech stack dominated by American big tech.

As Canada and the European Union are seeking closer ties and opportunities for collaboration, working on a sovereign AdTech stack would be worth considering.

What is the European Union Media Marketplace?

The EU Media Marketplace (EUMM) is a new project that aims to compress much of the AdTech stack into one system. The goal is to bring together premium European media owners, first-party data providers and AI-driven ad activation to compete with the likes of Google, Meta and Amazon.

In doing so, the goal is to keep more advertising money in Europe; currently, more than half of every euro spent on ads is lost to intermediaries. The EUMM does not build from scratch. It runs on the existing infrastructure of Equativ, a French end-to-end media platform. The EUMM’s ten founding partners, which include telecoms, marketing firms, and AdTech companies, are all European.

The EUMM presents itself as sovereign and less privacy-invasive than the big American incumbents. Currently this project is still in its pilot phase, in preparation for a wider launch.

Canada has tried this before

The idea of pooling Canadian premium media was tried back in 2011, with the Canadian premium Audience Exchange (CPAX). The joint project of CBC, Rogers Media and Shaw Media was a real-time bidding exchange for their combined digital inventory, and later it grew to 15 publishers.

Unfortunately, CPAX was a bit of a bust. Many of the roughly 400 buyers were intermediaries that used the promise of premium Canadian inventory to attract clients, but then ultimately funneled advertising budgets elsewhere. Ad fraud was a problem, and ultimately the whole project fizzled after about five years.

Then in 2020, the Maple Network Exchange tried something similar. Operating on Montreal-based District M’s buying platform, the idea was a self-serve programmatic advertising network of premium Canadian news publishers. Ultimately this project failed too, and District M merged with Montreal-based Sharethrough, which was in turn acquired by Equativ — the French platform now powering the EUMM.

A big part of the reason that both CPAX and The Maple Network Exchange failed is because they were mostly focused on pooling ad inventory — basically bundling a collection of premium digital media brands. What actually matters in digital advertising, though, is data. The key to Google and Meta’s success is their ability to target ads and measure ad performance.

At the same time that the EUMM is getting off the ground, yet another Canadian attempt at AdTech disruption is underway. The Canadian Coalition for Connected TV brings together CBC/Radio-Canada, Bell Media, Corus, Rogers Sports & Media, and Quebecor.

Why now might be different

The digital landscape is rapidly changing right now.

For one thing, in the past few years, both Google and Meta have been targeted with antitrust litigation by the U.S. government. (Meta won. Google lost, but what comes next is complicated.) This alone will not upend the AdTech marketplace, but it is an indicator that there is growing awareness of the market concentration exploitation by a few big companies.

Notably, now is also a moment when artificial intelligence is significantly disrupting the entrenched patterns of the digital economy. The Google/Meta duopoly is less ironclad than it once was. 

At the same time, geopolitics is also in a state of rupture. There’s a vivid awareness among middle powers that our reliance on American tech is a major source of vulnerability. The Canadian Shield Institute examined this in our policy series Foundations of Digital Sovereignty and we think there’s more specific policy research to do on AdTech specifically. 

Canadian digital ad spend is projected to grow from $12.36 billion in 2025 to more than $21 billion by 2029. Europe spends around €131 billion on digital advertising.

And this week, leaders from the European Union and Canada are sitting down to talk about all of the ways that we can work together. 

Projects like the EU Media Marketplace and CCCTV are private sector coalitions. It’s not clear what role government co-ordination could play in supporting their success.

What seems abundantly clear is that on AdTech — like on many other files — Canada and the EU are clearly grappling with the same kinds of problems. Surely there must be ways for us to work together to develop a more effective solution.