5 Things 2025 Taught Us About Holiday Advertising
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If we were building every holiday campaign again for 2026, these are the principles we'd take with us.
We analyzed more than a billion programmatic impressions across the Growth Channel platform in H2 2025 — across display, audio, CTV, and remarketing, across categories, across markets. The data didn't point to one winning tactic. It pointed to something more useful: a clearer picture of how the holiday season actually works, and why the same strategy rarely performs the same way in September as it does in December.
Here's what we'd do differently — and what we'd do the same.
1. Build demand before you need to capture it.
The audiences that perform in November are built in September and October.
2. Don't expect every month or channel to do the same job.
Prospecting, CTV, display, audio and remarketing shouldn't all be judged against the same immediate outcome. Know why each one is in the plan.
3. As attention shrinks, relevance matters more.
Holiday creative isn't about making your brand look festive. It's about understanding what your customer needs right now and making the connection quickly.
4. Don't confuse cheap media with efficient media.
December delivered the cheapest CPMs of Q4 and nearly twice October's impression volume. November still produced substantially stronger returns.
5. Know when your audience has had enough.
More frequency isn't always more persuasion. Audience size should help determine how much you spend, particularly in local markets.
Holiday advertising gets harder as the year progresses, but not simply because more advertisers are competing for media.
Your customer changes.
They have less time, more choices, more things to get done and increasingly little patience for advertising that makes them work to understand why it matters.
The strongest holiday strategies recognize that change.
Build demand before you need it. Learn while customers still have time to consider. Scale when intent arrives. Stay selective when the market gets noisy.
And throughout the season:
Every one of these principles comes from the same dataset. 1B+ Q4 impressions, broken down month by month, channel by channel. If you're planning 2026 holiday campaigns, the full analysis is worth the read.
