The back-to-school shopping season in Canada is the second-largest retail event of the year, with 3 out of 4 Canadians expected to spend at least $50 on back-to-school shopping and sales are expected to reach $40 billion in 2025, marking a 7.7% YoY increase.
72% of Canadians anticipate making dedicated shopping trips to retail stores for back-to-school and spending over $50 on stationery, clothing, books, home electronics, personal care products, and more. But we also see that consumer buying habits in Canada have evolved due to economic factors, and shoppers are spending smarter and prioritizing value over brand loyalty.
Key 2025 Back to School Trends to Watch
- Research starts early, fueled by Prime Day and wraps up by August, making early action key to driving consideration and influencing purchase decisions.
- Deals are a tipping point, with over 50% of parents planning to align their purchases with key sale events and promotions.
- Outreach and brand connection are key to loyalty, with over 45% of Canadian students spending 2+ hours daily on social platforms and streaming music; expecting brands to connect with them there.
- Students are more likely to discover and trust brands through endorsements, reviews, and comments on social and gaming platforms.
Dynamic creatives engage shoppers where they watch, browse, and buy
As purchase behaviors shift, savvy advertisers are leveraging dynamic creative optimization (DCO), a form of personalized advertisement that uses real-time data triggers to automatically tailor ad copy or visuals, delivering bespoke and highly relevant ads to individual users that grab attention and drive action.
Let’s look at examples of how we tailor ad creatives dynamically:
Based on location and proximity data
Brands can leverage location data to capture demand around specialty locations such as supply stores, community centres, and movie theaters, with tailored ad messaging and creative.
Here’s an example of our dynamic Store Locator ad served dynamically to either consumers within a certain radius who were likely to visit a store vs. ecomm-focused ads in areas where consumers tend to shop online.
Based on buying signals
By integrating insights like buying signals (e.g., items added to cart) brands can tailor their messaging at every stage of the customer journey. Here’s an example of how we helped an alcohol brand customize messaging by dayparting their ad creatives to be more relevant to the users’ experiences.
With value-seeking consumers syncing their purchases with key sales events and deals, DCO can also be used to highlight relevant discounts, deals and bundles that appeal to budget-conscious consumers and their browsing history (i.e. searching for office chairs).
Based on real-world data
Another advanced DCO strategy many brands utilize adapts to real-time moments like the weather or stock markets to maximize relevance and engagement.
Here’s an example of how we helped an ice cream brand customize their messaging and creatives across Toronto, Vancouver and Ottawa based on the current weather.
By strategically implementing programmatic advertising and DCO, Canadian brands can cut through the noise, reach the right back-to-school audiences with relevant and personalized messages, and ultimately drive sales during this crucial retail season in 2025.
MiQ isn’t just your programmatic media partner; we’re also your creative strategy partner.
While MiQ helps you drive media efficiency by connecting audience insights, customized targeting, omnichannel activation, and measurement, media effectiveness is driven by impactful, personalized creatives.
With attention split across the plethora of digital channels, your creative needs to be scalable, targetable, measurable and drive the outcomes you want.
Our creative studio team uses your existing brand assets to produce custom and standard formats for your media creative needs.
We collaborate with you, whether you have minimal creative resources, an internal creative team or a creative agency. Let our team help guide your creative strategy and do the heavy lifting on adapting it for optimal programmatic execution.
Reach out to david.ratcliffe@miqdigital.com to learn more about how we can supercharge your creative possibilities or visit the MiQ creative portal to know more.
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