Canadian Tire

The objective

Driving brand consideration and measurable sales during a key shopping moment

Canadian Tire is a trusted retailer known for providing everyday essentials across Canada, from automotive, tools and sports to kitchen, home living and seasonal products. During the heavy promotional window of the holiday season, specifically Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Canadian Tire wanted to find a way to stand out in an increasingly crowded and competitive retail market. The brand sought to reach an audience of Canadians aged 18+ by making the shopping experience more interactive and discovery-led. The brand saw TikTok as the ideal platform to lead this innovative launch, aiming to prove that holiday shopping can be as entertaining as it is functional while driving both brand affinity and sales.

The solution

Launching a first-to-market live shopping experience with an entertaining twist

To bring this vision to life, Canadian Tire developed a social-first shopping strategy centered on hosting the platform’s first-ever shoppable TikTok LIVE in Canada. The Black Friday campaign began in November with a month-long awareness phase using Traffic Ads and Pulse Seasonal-Lineup, one of the Pulse suite solutions designed to keep brands top-of-mind during the busiest sale periods of the year. In the week leading up to the main event, the brand leveraged TopView and Spark Ads to build momentum and encourage audiences to register for the LIVE broadcast.

The three-hour live experience was hosted by popular Canadian lifestyle and entertainment creators Brandon Gonez and Deepa Prashad in an interactive format that blended product demos with real-time engagement. To fuel participation, the Community Interaction to LIVE feature funneled users directly from their For You feeds into the shoppable stream. The experience allowed the brand to showcase hero deals across multiple categories in a participatory environment, enabling audiences to comment, engage and shop authentically as the livestream unfolded. 

Once the livestream concluded, the brand upheld the Black Friday hype with a post-livestream campaign, including cutdowns of the recorded live experience, up until the following week. Additionally, the brand also leveraged a Brand Lift Study as a measurable sales indicator to understand the impact of the livestream.

Results

Delivering breakthrough sales and inspiring community engagement

Canadian Tire’s strategy demonstrated how the integration of live entertainment with commerce can drive measurable retail outcomes during a busy retail moment. The shoppable livestream successfully engaged the community, generating 120K total engagements, 71K views and over 10K comments.

The Brand Lift Study further validated their approach, showing a +12.3% increase in Ad Recall, and a 5% Lift in Brand Favourability among the target audience. By utilizing platform-first tools and trusted creators, Canadian Tire successfully transformed a standard sales event into a high-impact discovery moment. Now that’s a true holiday win.