Caveats — vendor quarantine and structural gaps in spend-benchmark evidence

Honest gaps:

1. Enterprise skew. Gartner's decomposition — backbone of the paid/owned split — describes ~$5.7B-revenue companies. SMB behavior almost certainly tilts MORE toward cheap/free owned channels (DIY website, organic social) and AWAY from martech, but no survey confirms magnitude.
2. Channel ≠ cost-to-execute. Gartner's 8.9% SEO and 7.4% email are CHANNEL allocations; the labor + agency to produce content sit in separate buckets, so true "cost of owned digital" is higher than the channel share implies.
3. Definitional drift. "Marketing budget" sometimes includes salaries/agencies, sometimes does not. Advertising-to-sales ratios (~3%) measure a far narrower thing than "marketing % of revenue" (~7.7-9.4%). Don't conflate.
4. Year/recency. Figures span 2023-2026 surveys; AI is actively compressing content/tool costs.
5. Vendor contamination is pervasive even in seemingly neutral "statistics roundup" pages; numbers here are traced to primary surveys wherever possible.
6. Canadian specificity is thin. BDC 2019 + BDC/StatCan digital-tech spend are a few years old and not decomposed into the owned-minus-ads slice.

Quarantined vendor sources used directionally only: Web-design agencies (Innowise, Clique Studios, etc.), SEO agencies/tool vendors (Consultus Digital, FoxxR, HigherVisibility, FireUsMarketing, Digital Elevator, Single Grain, Image Building Media — last misreported Gartner's SEO figure as 8.0% vs official 8.9%), marketing-software / lending / agency blogs (HubSpot, Improvado, Keen, Mercury, Crestmont Capital, TrueFuture, Asymmetric, Model B), descriptive-survey vendors (Ahrefs, SE Ranking, Backlinko, CMI, CallRail, Conductor, Litmus).