When Corus Entertainment takes to the stage for its 2026 Upfronts on June 3, media buyers and planners will be paying close attention. Audiences have fragmented, and the assumptions that once underpinned national media plans about reach, frequency and who’s watching what no longer hold.
Understanding where Canadian audiences actually are has never mattered more.
However, the headline shift in Canadian viewing behaviour is perhaps not what many buyers assume. “Canadians are shifting among platforms, but they’re not shifting away from television,” says Christopher Mercer, SVP of media solutions and sales at Corus. “Live television, on-demand, ad-supported streaming – it’s used in rotation, not in sequence. Therefore, we should think about linear buys in the context of a total video opportunity, rather than thinking about it as a strategy of either/or.”
The data point every planner should know
Linear television continues to lead on speed of reach and co-viewing scale. Streaming extends that reach to lighter TV viewers and younger audiences. And yet, the instinct among some buyers is still to treat them as competing budget lines rather than complementary parts of a unified plan.
“Some people assume that streaming audiences and linear audiences are largely the same people,” Mercer says. “Our data shows there’s low duplication between our streaming platforms and our linear platforms – in a typical campaign, 55% of our streaming audience is unduplicated with our linear audience. You really can’t buy only linear and only digital and expect to deliver the broad reach and frequency goals that a national or even a local campaign deserves.”
Treating linear and streaming as alternatives means leaving a significant portion of your target audience unreached. A buyer who allocates entirely to one platform will, by definition, miss more than half of the available audience on the other.
Quality vs quantity
The Corus approach to audience intelligence goes beyond reach volume. Mercer and his team have invested heavily in reach quality – understanding not just how many people a campaign touches, but whether those people are genuinely incremental, whether they’re being shown the same ad repeatedly, and whether the environment itself is one that structurally drives higher attention. Corus provides clients with advice on campaign weight levels, on which platforms and the appropriate network mixes all before a campaign goes live.
“Fragmentation is both an opportunity and a challenge,” Mercer says. “In today’s landscape, you can reach a very narrow audience very efficiently. But if you show the same ad over and over, even the best campaign gets saturated. Reach quality prevents that pitfall. It’s about foresight, not just hindsight.”
From insight to outcome
Corus applies these principles across a growing roster of brand partnerships, two of which illustrate what a unified, integration-led strategy can deliver in practice.
Luxury travel brand Emerald Cruises wanted to establish best-in-class positioning among discerning Canadian travellers. The solution was a 360-degree integration platform built around a five-day travel series on The Morning Show featuring a trusted Corus travel host showcasing the Emerald Azzurra, from its design to its culinary experience. An audio extension was layered in during the final week to amplify reach and drive community-level engagement.
The results spoke for themselves: a 100% increase in organic search volume, a record 142,000 contest entries on The Morning Show, and a measurable rise in ticket sales purchase intent, with brand metrics peaking during campaign airings.
“What really worked was taking trusted Corus talent and content integrations, the flexibility and reach we can offer, and multiple tools – television and audio – in a way that delivered reach and frequency together,” Mercer says.
For leading appliances brand SharkNinja, Corus in partnership with Horizon Media, created NextScreen, a custom second-screen experience built to support linear, connected TV, and web simultaneously. The innovative, shoppable platform allowed audiences across all three formats to shop, engage, and learn directly from the video creative. By combining upper-funnel impact with direct-response capability, SharkNinja could connect attribution to specific creative executions, all supported by enhanced analytics through a custom reporting portal.
A unified front
As Corus prepares for its Upfronts, the message it will deliver to the buying community is clear: the era of siloed media buying is over. The data no longer supports treating linear and streaming as competing priorities, and the brands that are seeing measurable results are those that have embraced a unified, integration-led approach.
“Stop negotiating CPMs in silos,” Mercer says. “The buyers who will perform best in the next cycle are the ones who move from rate card to performance-backed investments – a single cohesive cross-platform plan, clear incremental reach goals, frequency guardrails, a commitment to premium environments, and an agreed approach to measuring attention or business outcomes.”
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