Ringing in the holidays (early) with retail data
The Trade Desk
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Retail media lights up the holiday shopping season earlier than ever
By Damian Fowler
Costco is already selling Christmas trees.
The retailer got a jump on the most wonderful time of the year before the autumn leaves had even started to fall. One popular Instagram account showed Costco’s Christmas décor laid out in the first week of September. While some say, “Too soon,” retailers are reflecting a new reality: Holiday shopping season is opening earlier than ever. And it’s yielding stronger outcomes.
Ever since the pandemic caused a disruption in the supply chain, retailers are no longer willing to leave their holiday-selling to the last minute. Consumers aren’t content to wait either. And that extended shopping season has ramifications for agencies and brands looking to capture attention, gain a competitive advantage, and drive better ROI during the last quarter of the fiscal year.
“Our holiday campaign planning started a lot earlier this year than it usually does, and we’ve tried to align to that earlier consumer behavior,” says Jane Sologoubova, the associate director of programmatic commerce at EssenceMediacom, where she oversees the entire Coca-Cola programmatic commerce portfolio.
Sologoubova suggests that the holiday shopping season now encompasses the whole of Q4. And that means a much greater emphasis on audience-driven strategy, which she sums up as “connecting a consumer with a product in a smart way.”
To hear Sologoubova tell it, what’s helping optimize campaigns this season is the ubiquity of first-party data across retail media networks. “We are very audience heavy. We are really leaning into combining behavior together with retail media data and finding the consumer out in the wild while they’re shopping,” she says.
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Just briefly
Halloween spending in the U.S. is expected to reach a record high as consumers prepare for the holiday, increasing 15% from last year.
Kendra Scott CMO Michelle Peterson joins The Current Podcast to break down scaling from local to national with the jewelry brand’s digital strategy.
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What happened to big, bold brand campaigns?
By Zac Wang
“Think different.”
So went Apple’s 1997 memorable exhortation to the masses that were considering their next computer purchase, heralding the company’s remarkable global ascent in the years that followed.
But that stroke of branding genius happened more than 25 years ago. When was the last time you came across an ad campaign that truly stuck with you?
You know the ones. “A diamond is forever.” “Real beauty.” “Just do it.” These campaigns made a clear case that investments in branding can pay off big time when executed at scale — and with some flair.
However, it seems that recently, marketers may have abandoned the path of splashy global brand campaigns that appear to address everyone. In the last few years, brands have instead turned to the easily quantifiable ROI that performance marketing promises, exemplified by the growth of Google’s and Meta’s platforms. And as audiences scattered across search, social, video, and streaming, it became clear that the big, splashy, one-size-fits-all global ad just wasn’t going to cut it anymore.
This all comes as a new crop of channels emerges, one that delivers both the benefits of brand-building (like awareness and loyalty) and those of performance marketing (like measurable results). This new crop is focused on connected TV (CTV) as well as programmatic digital out-of-home (DOOH) and audio advertising, all of which can satisfy marketers’ need for data while providing canvases for unforgettable advertising moments.
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Ready or not, here comes the holiday shopping season! Your ads are like the early decorations, adding that festive touch to the digital landscape. Keep sleighing it! . did you know a webpage that takes more than 3 seconds to load loses 40% of its potential customers?