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Weekly Promotional Intelligence
The Attention Premium: What It Actually Costs To Be Noticed
A note before the numbers. This letter has been off for a couple of weeks, and yesterday was British Columbia Day, a statutory holiday where we are, so the Monday edition arrives on a Tuesday. The alert feed never stopped: everything filed while we were away is on the site.
We track every public filing in which a small-cap issuer discloses that it has hired a marketing, investor relations, or market-making firm. That is a narrow beat, and the file is now large enough to answer a question no single filing can. What does it actually cost to be noticed?
The answer, across 353 disclosed engagements between 1 January and 30 July 2026, is that the two things issuers buy from this industry are priced in completely different ways. One is a commodity. The other is whatever the parties agreed to that morning.
The Two Markets
Of those 353 engagements, 93 were market-making mandates and 260 were investor awareness or marketing engagements. Where a market maker's monthly fee is disclosed, the number barely moves.
Market Making — Monthly Fee, 93 Engagements YTD
The middle half of the entire market sits between $5,500 and $7,500 a month: a spread of about 1.4 times, across dozens of separate negotiations between unrelated parties. The terms rhyme too. One-month or one-year initial periods, automatic renewal, thirty days' notice to cancel, and repeatedly, in near-identical wording, no performance factors and no shares or options as compensation. This is what a functioning commodity market looks like. An issuer shopping for liquidity is shopping for a known price.
Now the same exercise for awareness campaigns, where the fee is most often a single budget rather than a monthly retainer.
Investor Awareness — Disclosed Budget, 260 Engagements YTD
The middle half spans $45,000 to $250,000: a 5.6 times range, four times the dispersion of the market-making book. End to end, the gap between the smallest and largest disclosed campaign is a factor of six thousand, with a top figure of $3,000,000. Campaigns billed monthly instead of in a lump sum show the same pattern, with a median around $10,000 and disclosed figures running from $1,500 to $150,000 a month.
The Number Worth Remembering
The median awareness campaign costs about what twenty-one months of the median market-making mandate costs. At the top of the range, a single campaign equals more than forty years of keeping an orderly book.
Both line items are paid by the same issuer out of the same treasury, and they buy fundamentally different things. Market-making buys the mechanical ability to transact: a two-sided quote, so a buyer can find a seller without moving the price ten percent. Awareness buys an audience. The first is plumbing, priced like plumbing. The second is distribution, priced like distribution.
Neither is improper. Both are disclosed, which is exactly why we can count them. But the ratio between them, for any given issuer, tells a reader something real about what that issuer is currently prioritising, and it is knowable from public filings in advance rather than inferred from a chart afterwards. A company paying six thousand a month to keep a book orderly is doing housekeeping. A company paying a quarter of a million dollars to be talked about, in the same quarter, is doing something else. The filings do not tell you which is the better investment. They do tell you which question the issuer thought was more urgent.
The Honest Counterweight
We would rather publish the number that cuts against us than have a reader find it. Market-making disclosures are not uniformly more forthcoming. Roughly a third of market-making alerts, 32 of 93, state no dollar figure at all in their disclosed terms, against about one in six on the awareness side, 41 of 260. Market-making pricing looks tidy partly because the deals that do disclose are so standardised, not because the category discloses more often.
There is a currency caveat too. Roughly half these agreements are denominated in Canadian dollars and roughly half in US dollars, and the figures above pool them without converting. That makes any single number approximate to within the exchange rate. It does not meaningfully affect the comparison, because both categories draw from the same mixed pool, but a reader pricing a specific deal should check which dollar the filing means.
The last caveat matters most. A meaningful minority of engagements filed as market-making are actually bundles, pairing a market maker with investor relations work under a single agreement. Those are the mandates carrying the outlier prices, including a disclosed figure of $62,500 per month that sits far above the range charted above. When the mandate stops being purely market-making, the price stops looking like market-making. Read the terms, not the headline.
Where The Money Is Pointed
Sector Mix — 45 Engagements Filed In July
Gold and silver issuers alone accounted for 9 of July's 45 filings. Year to date the tilt is heavier still: 219 of 353 engagements, or 62 percent, were mining and metals issuers. Listing venues follow the same logic. TSX Venture appears in 188 of the engagements and the CSE in 140, against 17 on Nasdaq and 2 on the NYSE. This is overwhelmingly a Canadian venture-market phenomenon and, within it, overwhelmingly a metals phenomenon.
That is not a surprise given where the metal price has been this year, but it is worth stating precisely, because promotional spend is a leading indicator of retail attention rather than a lagging one. Firms are hired before campaigns run, and campaigns run before volume arrives. When six of every ten awareness budgets in a seven-month file are being spent by mining issuers, the audience being assembled is a mining audience.
Filing volume itself peaked in April at 76 engagements and has run between 45 and 57 a month since. July's 45 is the quietest month since March. Worth watching, not yet a trend.
How To Use This
Three questions the file supports, none of which require you to trust anybody's opinion. First, has this issuer bought liquidity, attention, or both? Both line items are disclosed, and their ratio is informative. Second, is the campaign budget proportionate to the company? A $250,000 campaign means something different at a $10 million market capitalisation than at $200 million. Third, when does it start and when does it end? Terms and renewal dates are disclosed, campaigns have end dates, and the end date is public.
Every figure above comes from issuer filings on SEC, TSXV and CSE systems. We have named no marketing, investor relations or market-making firm in this analysis, and no issuer. This is an aggregate study of a public file, not an assessment of any participant in it.
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All data sourced from SEC, TSXV, and CSE public filings, reflecting market making engagements observed in the 2026 year to date filing record as of July 13, 2026. Concentration figures are counts of named-firm engagements, not dollar volume, and will shift as new filings are added. Market making is a legitimate, arm's length liquidity service; nothing here implies either firm named performs any promotional function. For informational purposes only. Not investment advice.