Digital integration in political advertising: Insights from expenditures in the 2019 and 2021 Canadian elections

Abstract Digital political advertising is “interactive content placed for a fee” (Fowler et al., 2020, 111). It has been long assumed that Canadian political parties engage in digital advertising during and in between campaigns, but how much was being spent and how that spending compared to other types of advertising was impressionistic at best. This all changed in the 2019 federal election when parties were asked to report their spending on digital advertising for the first time. This study examines the extent to which Canada’s political parties have integrated digital political advertising into their overall advertising strategies. To do this, we develop a classification of digital advertising strategies based on relative investment in online and television advertising. The data for this analysis comes from the new expenditure reports of six political parties following the 2019 and 2021 elections. The analysis shows a strategic shift toward digital advertising. In total, Canada’s parties spent more than 10 million dollars on digital political advertising in 2019, increasing to more than $25 million 2 years later, accounting for 25% and 49% of party advertising budgets, respectively. However, the data reveal that parties have very different relationships with digital technologies, shaped by distinct strategic preferences and capacities. It is the first study to systematically analyze this new data source, and it provides a baseline of the state of digital advertising and its place in federal election campaigns.