Connected TV Advertising Costs in Canada

How much does CTV advertising cost in Canada?

Plan on $20 to $85 CAD CPM. It is a wide band deliberately, because a Canadian CTV rate is not a single price — it is a base rate with things added to it. Where you land inside the band is decided by what you add.

The base is set first by platform — which broadcaster or streamer you are buying — and then by channel, meaning the specific service or feed within that platform. Those two decisions alone put you somewhere in the lower half of the band.

Everything after that adds to it:

• Programming. What the ad sits inside. Live sport and tentpole content carry the steepest premium; library and run-of-service content carry none.
• The hour. Canadian CTV can be bought by daypart. Peak evening viewing prices well above overnight and daytime.
• Placement. Position in the break, and whether it is guaranteed or taken at auction. A guaranteed first-in-pod is a different product from the same audience bought on availability.
• Ad duration. A non-skippable 30 carries a premium over a 15. Longer and interactive formats carry more again.
• Targeting overlays. Every layer of audience data applied on top of the base buy adds cost. This is usually the single largest multiplier, and the one most often left out of a headline CPM.

So a broad, untargeted run-of-service buy on a mid-tier Canadian service sits near $20. The same brand buying a guaranteed 30-second position in live sport with two audience overlays applied sits near $85. Both are honestly described as “CTV in Canada”, which is why a single quoted number tells you almost nothing until you know what is underneath it.

What is the minimum budget for CTV advertising in Canada?

We recommend a minimum of $5,000 CAD — but we would rather be straight with you: $5,000 gets you into CTV. It does not get you CTV done well.

At $5,000 you can run a real campaign against a defined Canadian audience and read the result. It is enough to test creative, prove the channel works for the brand, and produce numbers worth acting on. That is a genuinely useful thing to buy.

What it will not do is build reach. Canadian CTV inventory is finite and concentrated, and frequency against a meaningful audience over a sustained period costs considerably more than that. A brand expecting CTV to carry the awareness weight of a campaign should be planning in the tens of thousands, not the low thousands, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling a test as a campaign.

For context on where the market sets its own floors, the only published Canadian minimums we could find come from Bell Media's 2026 digital offer, spanning Crave, Tubi, TSN and RDS:

Bell Media 2026 upfront digital offer, 23 April 2026. Simplicity minimum is our own commercial position. Figures in CAD.

Why does nobody publish Canadian CTV rates?

Because there is no Canadian equivalent of a published rate card, and no Canadian industry body publishes a CTV CPM benchmark. Not IAB Canada, not thinkTV, not Numeris. We went looking specifically, and it does not exist.

That gap is worth understanding rather than papering over. It means every Canadian CTV price is negotiated, that comparing two agency quotes is genuinely hard, and that the CPM ranges circulating on marketing blogs are almost all unattributed figures extrapolated from American data.

The $20 to $85 band on this page is our own planning range, built from rates quoted to us buying direct with Canadian broadcasters and platforms. It is first-hand rather than borrowed, and we will show you the build-up behind any number we put in a plan.

It also means you should be sceptical of precision. Anyone quoting you a Canadian CTV CPM to the dollar, without naming the platform, the programming and the targeting, is quoting a number they cannot source either.

Is CTV advertising worth it for a mid-sized Canadian brand?

Yes, but not as a replacement for television. The Canadian measurement data is unusually clear on this, and it is the opposite of what most CTV sales decks imply.

Numeris VAM data for spring 2026 shows total TV reaching 81.6% of Canadian adults weekly, of which 41.3% is ad-supported. Netflix reaches 24.5% weekly, but only 10.8% on its ad-supported tier. Prime Video is the standout — 43.2% total weekly reach, 30.9% ad-supported.

So a streaming-only plan in Canada is a reach-limited plan. Prime Video is the one platform delivering broad ad-supported reach on its own; everything else is an audience layer rather than a base. Corus's cut of the same measurement puts 70% of total ad-supported video hours among adults 18+ still going to linear TV.

Where CTV earns its place for a mid-sized brand is precision and entry cost. You can reach a defined Canadian audience on the big screen for $5,000 rather than the six figures a national linear campaign needs, and you can measure completion and incrementality in a way linear cannot.

How does Canadian CTV pricing compare to the US?

Closer than you would expect, and the Canadian range sits slightly below the American one once currency is accounted for.

Paramount's published 2026 guidance puts a competitive US CTV CPM at $20–$40 USD for standard inventory, rising to $40–$60 USD for premium, highly targeted placements. Converted, that is roughly $27–$83 CAD.

Our $20–$85 CAD planning range brackets that. The bottom of the Canadian market is cheaper than the bottom of the US market, largely because Canadian FAST and run-of-service inventory is less contested. The top is comparable, because premium Canadian sport and tentpole inventory is scarce.

The reason this matters commercially: a Canadian brand told that CTV is “cheaper in the US” is being sold a currency conversion, not a media argument. Cross-border plans should be built on delivered audience, not on headline CPM.