As women continue to migrate online, a small number of Canadian marketers have begun rolling out Web sites geared toward female consumers – and none too soon, according to a number of industry analysts.

While marketing to women online hasn’t had to be a major focus for marketers before now – women have never before used the Net to the same extent or in the same ways men have – the reality of online gender parity is one that has to be dealt with, says Sandra Tamburino, director of business development with ACNielsen-DJC Research.

‘Whether you need to market to women depends on your product, but if you do, you can’t just make a blanket statement,’ says Tamburino. ‘It would be wise to market specifically to them – and that comes with understanding not only their usage on the Net, but their traditional decision-making process.’

In anticipation of the female move online, Citytv’s home- and lifestyle-oriented television talk show CityLine recently made its debut on the Web. The Net version features how-to instructions, projects, recipes, an ask-the-experts section and the online CityLine AXS loyalty club. The site mirrors the show’s programming by covering several of the main subject areas – health and family, home, fashion, gardening and cooking – and targeting the same audience of women 25 to 34 years old. According to Maria Hale, managing director of ChumCity Interactive, Web-exclusive information will also be developed in an effort to further draw its strong female following online and encourage new viewers to both the show and the site.

‘We’re going to be featuring things like online chats, chats with our experts and a message board system so that our audience will be able to communicate with one another. This is one of the areas that we think will grow and receive a lot of attention moving forward,’ she says.

Last year, 51% of Canadian Internet users were women – a ratio that reflects Statistics Canada numbers for the population as a whole, according to Tamburino. In January, ACNielsen-DJC Research published the 4th annual Women Online Study, which polled a sample of 6,000 Canadians over the age of 12 who’ve used the Net in the last year. In 1997 and 1998, 47% and 49% of those online were women.

The percentage of men engaged in Net activities like downloading, clicking on banners and participating in newsgroups, however, is considerably higher than that of women, according to Tamburino. Women most often use the Net to find education and health information, participate in chat rooms, and obtain recipes. Kraft Canada’s Web site, for one, boasts several female-oriented features including an interactive kitchen, a meal planning service, and a recipe finder/cookbook.

Although women exert a great deal of purchase power, the study shows they are trailing men when it comes to e-commerce: 34% of men have made a purchase online versus 19% of women. And only about 20% of women do online research about future purchases, compared to 36% of men.

Tamburino says while women still do not use the Net as frequently as men, nor do they spend as much time per visit, the time spent online will increase as their experience and comfort level increase.

‘All the types of things women look for in the traditional environment, they also need on the Internet,’ says Tamburino. ‘If your site is difficult to use, loaded or embedded with all kinds of information and layers of content, you’re going to create a barrier.’

She suggests marketers build a community of interest among women by giving them something of value.

Ford Motor Company of Canada has been attempting to do just that by moving some of its traditionally female-oriented activities online, according to Lauren More, the automaker’s sales and marketing communications manager. The company features its Car Smarts Interactive Seminars program for women, offered in partnership with Chatelaine magazine, on its Web site. Bobbie Gaunt, president and CEO of the auto manufacturer, also recently hosted a one-hour live interactive chat from the Canadian Auto Show.

‘Certainly e-initiatives are a focus for Ford in general and the women market is definitely a focus. If you consider that one in three cars and one in five trucks are purchased by a woman, and 85% of all vehicle purchases are influenced by women, it’s absolutely an important market for us.’

According to Web measurement company Media Metrix, U.S. sites with a high concentration of women include toy, greeting card and health sites. In the U.S., women represent 48% of Internet users, with forecasts estimating they will begin to outnumber men online within the next 12 months, according to Jupiter Communications.

Christina Rodmell, co-founder of The Wired Woman Society, a Toronto-based association representing women who work in the online and digital communications industry, says advertisers and marketers need to forge connections and relationships with their female audience if they’re to thrive. They can do this, she says, by making their sites friendly, easy to use and visually appealing, and by including a mechanism by which women can ask questions and offer criticism.

‘The virtual world is slowly starting to reflect its brick-and-mortar counterpart. It’s important to tap into the female market, but you can’t umbrella us under one ad campaign. You really have to understand the dynamics,’ Rodmell says.

Aura Freedom International has taken over Nathan Phillips Square with an out-of-home activation that aims to make femicide a household term.

With assistance from Forsman & Bodenfors on creative, Veritas Communications on PR and Twenty6Two on media, the feminist organization launched its “Behind Closed Doors” campaign over the weekend to coincide with Doors Open Toronto, an annual event that gives the public access to buildings that are normally shuttered.

A public OOH installation in the downtown Toronto urban square kicked off the campaign, which calls attention to the fact that a woman or girl is killed every 48 hours in Canada – most often at by someone she knows. Seventy-seven per cent of femicides in 2024 were committed in private residences, according to the organization.

“Intimate-partner violence and men’s violence against women in general is often hidden away,” Aura Freedom executive director Marissa Kokkoros tells strategy. “So what better way to discuss it than in the most open and visible way possible, which is in front of City Hall in Canada’s largest city and during a weekend when many people will be out and about.”

Aura Freedom and Forsman & Bodenfors also collaborated on “The Body Bag for Her” campaign in 2023, which leaned into classic advertising tropes to call attention to femicide. Toronto declared intimate-partner violence an epidemic later that year but most jurisdictions in Canada have yet to follow.

Kokkoros says one of the key challenges in Aura Freedom’s cause-driven marketing is to unflinchingly draw attention to a violence epidemic without resorting to violent imagery.

“We’re very aware that folks might not expect to see an installation on violence against women in their city’s main square tomorrow,” Kokkoros says. “We’re not interested in making femicide easier to swallow, because we shouldn’t be accepting it. So we balance that boldness. We balance it by not showing actual scenes or depictions of violence, we don’t show bruised faces. That’s never been Aura Freedom’s style.”

Finding a clever way to deliver an uncomfortable, yet impactful, message is key for a grassroots organization with limited budget. Kokkoros says Forsman & Bodenfors’s creative team put in the work to become educated on the issue of femicide and deliver a nuanced message that sticks.

“If we think back to the PSAs of years gone by – those messages we absorbed as kids about smoking and seat belts and other public-health issues – we see them embedded right in the way we view things and the way we address them. So, we’ve never really done that for violence against women, despite it being an epidemic and a pandemic worldwide. So I think this is a really important way of mainstreaming the information.”

“Behind Closed Doors” runs through June 8 and includes a radio spot and media placements across Toronto on highway boards, the TTC, GO Transit and in Sankofa Square.