When Sarah Thompson departed Dentsu at the start of last summer, she didn’t head straight for another corner office. Instead, she gave herself a mission.

For several months, Thompson pored over stacks of policy reports and incentive studies, scanning not only Canadian research but global examples, hunting for a holistic measurement of the true economic heft of the advertising, marketing and media industry.

Page after page, market after market, she kept coming up empty-handed.

“In advertising, we often just extrapolate claims about the economic value we create, but it can come across as hyperbolic,” Thompson, who is Glassroom’s executive managing director, told strategy.

She wanted to understand how much of Canada’s GDP and job creation is truly tied to the industry as a whole. As she dug deeper, she saw how fragmented and siloed the conversations tend to be: Canadian content in one corner, advertising in another, journalism somewhere else. Even within advertising, debates often splinter by channel: radio, OOH, digital, television, connected TV.

Working with Nordicity – an independent consulting firm that works with both government and business – Thompson finally found the single source of truth she was looking for. And even she was struck by the sheer scale of it.

For every $1 million invested in Canadian advertising, 8.2 jobs are created and $1 million is added to the GDP. Looking at 2023 specifically, the industry directly generated 138,000 jobs and added $9.7 billion to Canada’s GDP. Factor in the indirect, induced and spillover effects, and that number swelled to $22.6 billion.

“The fact that our media and advertising industry is bigger [in terms of job creation] than automotive, manufacturing, telecommunications, mining and other industries that have received a lot of subsidies and support from a governmental level was surprising,” she said.

In 2023, Canada’s mining sector – a fixture of the national economy – supported 83,000 jobs. That’s 40% fewer than the 138,000 jobs directly tied to media and advertising, according to the report. Other major industries also trail behind: automotive employed 129,000 people, air transportation was 70,000, computer and electronic product manufacturing sat at 55,000, and oil and gas extraction was 54,000.

Beyond the topline numbers, the report also broke down how specific sectors feed into Canada’s economy: $1.4 billion was spent in Canadian content television production, which accounted for 26,360 jobs and $1.6 billion toward the country’s GDP; 11,900 Canadians held journalism roles, which generated $1.1 billion in GDP; and advertising companies invested $175 million annually in OOH street furniture, which generated $286 million in revenue-sharing payments for municipalities.

More than economic gain, there has also been tremendous loss.

Most notably, between 2019 and 2024, the three largest traditional media subsectors (print, television, radio) lost more than 11,000 jobs. That adds to the $7.5 billion in Canadian ad spending that was diverted to non-Canadian digital platforms from 2017 to 2022.

To arrive at these figures, the study cast a wide net in defining Canada’s media and advertising sector.

At its centre are the agencies and intermediaries Statistics Canada classifies under the advertising, public relations and related services industry. The scope also encompassed major platforms, from television, audio, online and out-of-home, to newspapers, magazines and directory publishers. Taken together, it reflects the total ecosystem, with one exception: display advertising was excluded from the analysis. The estimates were calculated using data from Statistics Canada, the CRTC, ThinkTV, IAB, as well as the Canadian Media Producers Association (CMPA).

Thompson emphasized the industry’s web of dependencies. She says that without Canadian radio, music artists lose a key source of support. Without dollars tied to Canadian content, film and television production suffers. Even out-of-home advertising feeds back into communities, since agreements with municipalities help fund public infrastructure – reducing the tax burden and channelling more dollars into public works. And Canadian broadcasters play a role in regularly donating media to non-profit organizations, which rely on mass reach for their fundraising.

Without those contributions, she said, the benefits begin to erode.

Ultimately, a goal for Thompson is to reframe the conversation around the local Canadian media landscape – not as an industry in need of rescue, but as an economic catalyst.

“This becomes a really interesting public policy conversation to have, when we know that every dollar spent fuels a dollar of GDP,” Thompson adds. “The question then is: How do we stimulate more of that and pay close attention to the erosion, because every lost job means a direct hit to our GDP. We wanted to quantify just how much of a powerhouse this industry really is for the economy.”

Thompson said the next step is getting the report in front of decision makers – starting with an OOH campaign, created by The Garden, around Parliament this fall – and into the hands of marketers who want to engage with its findings. Industry groups like the CMDC and ACA, she noted, also see the value, recognizing that marketer and media jobs depend on the sector’s interdependence.

The report is the first initiative out of the newly created Canadian Media Means Business (CMMB), which brings together Canadian-owned media companies and industry organizations as sponsors, including Adapt Media, Bell Media, the Canadian Association of Broadcasters, Friends of Canadian Media, La Presse, Pattison, Glacier Media, Cogeco, ThinkTV and Village Media.

“At this point … we’re democratizing this as much as possible, so that when anyone is in a conversation about the significance of the industry, you can pull this data and talk to it,” she adds. “It gives us a unified platform that hadn’t existed before.”