AI Analysis: Advertising and related services, industry expenditures

Executive Summary

Statistics Canada's Table 21100034 tracks advertising and related services industry expenditures across 8 NAICS sub-sectors from 2013 to 2024, revealing a strongly right-skewed distribution where most cost categories represent small percentage shares but a few dominant categories — particularly Salaries, Wages, Commissions & Benefits and Subcontracts — drive the bulk of industry spending. The dataset's 337 valid records show a mean expenditure share of 11.15% against a median of just 2.20%, underscoring how a handful of large cost components distort the overall average. Correlation analysis further reveals clusters of expenditure categories that move together over time, suggesting shared economic forces shaping Canada's advertising services cost structure across the 12-year period.

Key Findings

• The dataset contains 337 valid records spanning 2013–2024, covering 21 distinct expenditure categories across 8 NAICS sub-sectors in Canada's advertising and related services industry.
• The value distribution is strongly right-skewed, with a mean of 11.15% versus a median of 2.20% and a standard deviation of 24.05%, indicating that most expenditure shares are small while a few categories dominate.
• 75% of all expenditure values fall below 5.7% (Q75), yet the maximum reaches 100%, producing an extreme range of 100 percentage points and an IQR of just 5.10.
• Salaries, wages, commissions and benefits and Subcontracts are consistently the largest cost drivers in the advertising services industry, anchored against a Total Operating Expense baseline of 100%.
• Approximately 10% of observations (33 out of 337 data points) were flagged as statistical outliers using the IQR method, pointing to specific years of notable industry disruption or structural change.
• A correlation analysis of 19 expenditure variables identified clusters of categories that rise and fall together over time, suggesting shared economic drivers influencing multiple cost components simultaneously.
• The dataset provides over a decade of annual coverage (2013–2024) with the most recent Statistics Canada update in March 2026, offering a robust long-term foundation for tracking structural shifts in Canadian advertising industry costs.