Q3 2026 Marketing & Customer Experience: Marketing Moves Closer to Commerce

By Craig Patterson

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As part of Retail Insider Reports, this Q3 2026 Marketing & Customer Experience Report analyzes Q3 2026 developments in Canadian retail marketing, media, and customer engagement. Drawing on Retail Insider coverage, industry research, company disclosures, and broader market signals, it identifies key dynamics shaping campaigns, loyalty, retail media, physical experiences, and measurement. These reports are designed to deliver executive-level insights across major retail sectors and can be accessed through the Retail Insider Report Hub.

This report examines retail marketing, advertising, branding, customer acquisition, loyalty, digital media, social commerce, PR, and consumer engagement strategies.

Report Contents

Executive Summary

Canadian retailers connected marketing more closely with customer behaviour during the third quarter of 2026, using campaigns, retail media, loyalty programs, physical experiences and live content to create clearer paths from attention to shopping. Reitmans linked national ambassadors and its Toronto Tempo partnership with campaign content, e-commerce and in-store merchandising. Loblaw and Walmart expanded retail-media capabilities built around retailer audiences and commerce data, while Canadian Tire and Tim Hortons linked loyalty programs in a partnership that brings Triangle Rewards into a frequent foodservice occasion.

Physical places also became part of the media strategy. Cadillac Fairview marketed shopping centres around social connection and experiences, eBay used the Toronto International Film Festival to expand livestream shopping into fashion, and temporary brand activations generated content extending beyond the people who attended.

Artificial intelligence added another dynamic. Marketing content became easier to produce while Canadian research showed widespread AI adoption alongside low trust in its outputs and considerable uncertainty about return on investment. Together, the developments place greater importance on defining what marketing is intended to accomplish. An impression, event participant, linked loyalty account, new customer and sale are all measurable outcomes, but they represent different stages of the customer relationship.

Retail marketing became more closely connected with commerce, customer data and measurable behaviour during Q3 2026.

  • Reitmans connected national ambassadors Lilly Singh and Katherine Levac with its Toronto Tempo partnership, campaign content, e-commerce and store merchandising. Its measurement plan extended from reach and engagement through customer acquisition, traffic, conversion and sales.
  • Loblaw Advance named Criteo a preferred demand partner, expanding advertiser access to email audiences across Shoppers Drug Mart, PC Optimum and PC Express. Walmart Connect introduced additional self-serve retail-media capabilities in Canada.
  • Triangle Rewards and Tims Rewards linked their programs, allowing members to earn Canadian Tire Money on eligible Tim Hortons purchases while continuing to collect Tims Rewards points.
  • Cadillac Fairview used events, tenant activations and other programming to give consumers additional reasons to visit its properties. Reported engagement and participation measures did not establish equivalent gains in tenant sales.
  • eBay Live used TIFF to extend its Canadian livestream shopping activity into vintage fashion and luxury resale, connecting entertainment and seller interaction with direct purchasing.
  • A Canadian study found 81% of marketing professionals surveyed were using AI, while only 3% fully trusted its outputs and 43% did not know whether AI was improving marketing ROI.
  • Canadian sponsorship spending reached an estimated $4.7 billion, while sponsorship’s share of marketing communications budgets declined over five years and pressure to demonstrate effectiveness increased.

Retail Insider Coverage

Reitmans Connects Culture, Content and Commerce

Reitmans provided one of the quarter’s clearest examples of a campaign designed around multiple points in the customer journey. The retailer’s August presentation at Scotiabank Arena brought together 146 creators, media representatives and cultural personalities to introduce its fall collection and national ambassadors Lilly Singh and Katherine Levac. The event also connected the campaign with Reitmans’ partnership with the Toronto Tempo women’s professional basketball team.

Singh and Levac provided distinct cultural connections across English Canada and Quebec while supporting common messaging around confidence, individuality and personal style. The campaign extended into commerce through a Shop the Look experience that allowed customers encountering outfits through campaign content to move into the corresponding e-commerce assortment. The styling approach continued in stores.

“Customers don’t think in terms of channels, they simply experience Reitmans,” Isabelle Bonin, vice-president of marketing, e-commerce and visual presentation, told Retail Insider. Reitmans declined to disclose campaign spending. Its measurement plan included reach, engagement and brand consideration alongside customer acquisition, traffic, conversion and sales. Those were measurement objectives at the time of Retail Insider’s interview, not demonstrated campaign results.

Retail Media Connects Advertising With Commerce

Retail media continued expanding in Canada as major retailers increased advertiser access to audiences built around their own customer relationships. In August, Loblaw Advance named Criteo a preferred demand partner in Canada, appointing the commerce-media company as a direct sales agent for email display placements across Shoppers Drug Mart, PC Optimum and PC Express newsletters.

Loblaw said its connected-commerce ecosystem included more than 18 million active PC Optimum members, approximately 2,500 stores and roughly 25 million opted-in emails deployed each week. The partnership gives brands and agencies another route into an audience connected with Loblaw’s loyalty, e-commerce and store ecosystem.

Walmart Connect Expands Self-Serve Advertising

Walmart Connect expanded advertisers’ direct control over Canadian retail-media campaigns with a self-serve onsite display platform combining bidding, audience targeting, forecasting and reporting. Its reporting capabilities can extend beyond impressions and clicks into commerce measures such as conversion, return on ad spend and new-to-brand customers, depending on the campaign and format. Walmart did not disclose adoption or advertiser-return figures for the self-serve platform at launch.

The Loblaw and Walmart developments illustrate retail media’s commercial proposition. Retailers can provide access to first-party audiences in environments where advertising exposure and subsequent shopping behaviour can potentially be connected. As more commerce data becomes available, advertisers also have greater opportunity to examine whether media activity influenced customers and sales.

Triangle Rewards Moves Into a More Frequent Routine

Canadian Tire and Tim Hortons launched their linked loyalty partnership in September, connecting two established Canadian rewards ecosystems. Members who link Triangle Rewards and Tims Rewards accounts can earn Canadian Tire Money on eligible Tim Hortons purchases while continuing to collect Tims Rewards points. The reward currencies remain separate, and Canadian Tire Money earning rates vary according to payment method.

The partnership extends Triangle into a purchase occasion that can occur considerably more frequently than many Canadian Tire transactions. Coffee and foodservice purchases can become daily or weekly routines, giving Canadian Tire another point of contact with customers between visits to its retail banners.

Canadian Tire has described the broader direction of Triangle as giving members value in “more places, more often.” The Tim Hortons partnership puts that strategy into a high-frequency consumer category. Neither company disclosed financial terms or evidence of incremental spending attributable to linked accounts.

The partnership announcement referred to more than 12 million Triangle members, while other Canadian Tire reporting has referred to 9.8 million active registered members. Those are different measures, and memberships across Triangle and Tims Rewards cannot be added together to estimate a unique combined audience.

Shopping Centres Market Reasons to Visit

Cadillac Fairview’s It’s Better in Real Life platform placed physical connection at the centre of its national marketing during the quarter. The campaign combined local programming, retailer activations, pop-ups and cultural events with out-of-home, digital, audio and influencer content. Online event calendars and membership benefits supported activity around individual properties.

CF research found that 31% of property visits were socially motivated, while seeing and touching products remained an important reason consumers gave for visiting. The findings supported a strategy built around several purposes for a shopping-centre trip, including meeting people, eating, discovering retailers, attending events and purchasing. CF reported engagement above its usual campaign benchmarks and said a Summer Garden activation at CF Carrefour Laval attracted approximately 5,300 participants.

Those figures measure engagement and participation. They do not establish an equivalent increase in incremental property traffic or tenant sales. An event can legitimately target affinity, visitation, dwell time or discovery. The metric used to judge it should correspond with the intended result.

Physical Activations Create a Second Audience

Oatly’s Matcha-tality Suite on Toronto’s Ossington Avenue transformed a storefront into a monochromatic green hotel environment built around the company’s matcha offering, with branded amenities, sampling and other interactive elements. The installation gave visitors a physical experience while creating visual material designed to circulate online.

Retail Insider’s interview with Black Label Designs founder Pria Rajput provided another example through an Amazon creator event, where products were placed within settings involving tennis, a swimming pool, food and hospitality. Sunscreen, hair-care and other products appeared in circumstances related to their use. The people attending an activation can represent its first audience. Photography, video, creator recommendations and social content can reach a much larger second audience, while affiliate links, promotional codes and product pages can provide routes toward purchase.

These experiences can require significant design, fabrication, logistics, approvals, staffing and installation for an event lasting hours or days. Neither the Oatly reporting nor the Amazon example supplied a measured sales return.

eBay Live Connects Community With Transaction

eBay used its Toronto International Film Festival partnership to expand Canadian livestream shopping beyond the enthusiast and collectibles communities involved in the platform’s earlier launch. TIFF-related programming featured vintage fashion, luxury resale and distinctive merchandise that viewers could discover and purchase during livestreams.

The format is suited to products where condition, rarity, provenance or specialist knowledge affects the buying decision. Sellers can show an item, explain its history and answer questions while viewers participate in bidding or purchasing. eBay described TIFF as an opportunity to introduce fashion audiences to the format and develop relationships extending beyond the festival. It did not disclose Canadian transaction volumes or conversion results from the partnership.

The activation demonstrates category and audience development without establishing livestream commerce as a mass-market Canadian shopping behaviour.

Measurement Becomes More Complicated as Discovery Fragments

Some areas of marketing are becoming easier to connect with commerce while others are becoming harder to observe. Retail media can give advertisers purchase-linked information that helps connect exposure with subsequent shopping behaviour. Loyalty partnerships can measure linked accounts and reward activity, while livestream commerce can observe viewing, bidding and purchasing within the same environment.

AI-mediated product discovery creates a different measurement problem. Salesforce’s Caila Schwartz told Retail Insider that retailers cannot fully observe product research taking place inside an AI shopping conversation before a customer arrives at their website. “If the discovery is staying in the conversation, we don’t have visibility into any of that,” Schwartz said. A customer can research products, compare alternatives and substantially narrow a decision before visiting a retailer directly. Conventional referral and click data may capture only the later portion of the journey.

Q3 therefore produced both sides of the measurement shift: retail media and loyalty systems capable of observing more customer behaviour, alongside emerging discovery environments that can hide interactions traditionally captured through search or referral signals.

Broader Industry Coverage

Canadian Marketers Adopt AI Faster Than They Can Measure It

Artificial intelligence created a different marketing challenge during the quarter as content became easier to produce while marketers continued working out how much business value the technology creates. A study by Stone-Olafson and ZGM Modern Marketing Partners surveyed more than 300 Canadian marketing professionals and found that 81% were using AI in their marketing work. Only 3% said they fully trusted AI outputs, while 68% reported appreciating the technology but double-checking what it produced. Another 43% did not know whether AI was improving marketing ROI.

The gap between use, trust and demonstrated return makes adoption alone a weak measure of marketing maturity. Separate research from Cashew found that 65% of 206 senior North American marketers experienced what the company described as “differentiation anxiety” as organizations increased content production while searching for ideas competitors could not easily reproduce. “The competitive advantage isn’t producing more content anymore. It’s having something original to say,” Cashew CEO Addy Graves said. As text, images and campaign variations become easier to generate, proprietary research, expertise, customer knowledge, cultural relevance, access and recognizable creative ideas become more important sources of differentiation.

Consumers Grow More Skeptical of Brand Content

A separate Cashew study of 2,149 consumers in Canada and the United States found that 87% believed brand content was at least partly AI-generated. Only 13% said they were very confident they could distinguish AI-generated material from other brand content.

The findings suggest skepticism can extend beyond content known to have been created with AI. Cashew found product quality and real customer stories among the factors consumers said helped brands stand out. The research measures stated attitudes, not purchasing behaviour, and its Canada-U.S. sample should not be interpreted as a Canada-only result.

Canadian research from Vistar Media also pointed to frustration with digital advertising volume and reported higher stated trust in out-of-home advertising than social and online advertising. Vistar operates in the out-of-home media industry, making that commercial context relevant when interpreting its findings. The broader issue is differentiation and credibility in an environment where consumers encounter growing volumes of content across channels.

Faster Content Production Raises the Cost of Bad Information

Greater creative output also creates an operational risk. Neato’s September discussion of AI-assisted content production highlighted the possibility of a professionally produced asset containing an incorrect package size, unavailable product or outdated offer.

For retailers, creative production increasingly depends on current product data, inventory, pricing, promotions and marketplace requirements. Generating more variations quickly provides little advantage when the underlying commercial information is wrong. Employee- and creator-led content can raise additional questions around permission, compensation, brand boundaries and measurement. A successful individual post can generate substantial reach without establishing a repeatable customer-acquisition channel.

Sponsorship Spending Grows as Measurement Receives More Attention

The 2026 Canadian Sponsorship Landscape Study estimated Canadian sponsorship spending at $4.7 billion, providing broader context for the partnerships and cultural marketing visible during the quarter. The study included 188 participating brands, properties and agencies and found that sponsorship’s share of marketing communications budgets had declined from 25% to 21% over five years even as total sponsorship spending increased.

The study also reported greater attention to evaluating sponsorship investments as brands seek clearer evidence of effectiveness. Its findings cover the broader Canadian sponsorship industry, not retail specifically, and the $4.7-billion estimate does not represent Q3 spending. The results show sponsorship competing for budget alongside an expanding range of measurable media and commerce channels.

Editor’s Take & Outlook

Outlook: Define the Job Before Choosing the Metric

The growing number of marketing channels makes it increasingly important to define what an investment is intended to accomplish before deciding whether it worked. Measures of attention include reach, impressions and views. Engagement can include clicks, interactions, participation and time spent. Measures of behaviour move closer to commercial activity through store visits, linked loyalty accounts, product exploration and additions to cart.

Commerce can be measured through conversion, purchases, sales lift and customer acquisition, while longer-term relationship measures include repeat purchasing, frequency, retention and customer lifetime value. The metric closest to a transaction is not automatically the most appropriate one. A national brand campaign may legitimately target awareness or consideration, a shopping-centre activation may target visitation, and a sampling program may prioritize product trial.

Problems arise when one type of measurement is used to imply another result. An impression is not a sale. Event participation does not necessarily represent incremental traffic. A linked loyalty account does not establish incremental spending, and a viral piece of content does not by itself demonstrate sustainable customer acquisition.

The strongest Q3 examples gave customers a defined next action, whether shopping a Reitmans look, linking rewards accounts, visiting a property, bidding on an eBay item or responding to retail media closer to the point of purchase. The corresponding measurement should show whether the action the marketer intended to influence actually occurred.

Editor’s Take

Canadian retail marketing moved closer to observable customer behaviour during Q3. Reitmans connected cultural marketing with products and shopping, Loblaw and Walmart expanded commerce-linked media capabilities, Canadian Tire and Tim Hortons connected loyalty programs, and eBay placed purchasing inside live content.

AI is simultaneously making content production increasingly accessible. Canadian marketers are already using the technology widely while expressing considerably less confidence in its outputs and measurable return.

Distinctive information, relevant cultural connections, accurate product data, physical experiences and established customer relationships become more valuable in that environment because they give marketing substance beyond additional content volume.

Measurement requires the same discipline. Awareness, engagement, visits, transactions and customer retention can all be legitimate objectives, but they answer different business questions. The important question is what commercial job the investment was intended to perform and whether the evidence shows that it did.

Representative Articles

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Craig Patterson
Craig Patterson
Located in Toronto, Craig is the Publisher & CEO of Retail Insider Media Ltd. He is also a retail analyst and consultant, Advisor at the University of Alberta School Centre for Cities and Communities in Edmonton, former lawyer and a public speaker. He has studied the Canadian retail landscape for over 25 years and he holds Bachelor of Commerce and Bachelor of Laws Degrees.

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