--- "title": "Holiday creative: Personalizing ads beyond the discount" "date": "2026-10-20T21:57:30-04:00" "url": "https://www.criteo.com/blog/holiday-creative/" "description": "Discover how personalized ad creative helps brands reach holiday shoppers with relevant products, offers, and messages that inspire action." "image": "https://www.criteo.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/48bea2ce-01ce-4fd9-801b-d27ec41d54c5.jpeg" "author": "criteo_multi_admin" "category": "Performance Media" --- During last year’s holiday quarter, more shoppers visited US retail sites than the year before, but fewer made a purchase.  According to Criteo’s [Year-End Shopping Decoded](https://www.criteo.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/26-Year-End-Shopping-Decoded-Global.pdf) report, drawing on commerce data from hundreds of partner brands and retailers, US traffic rose 3% year over year while conversion rate fell 10%, and sales dropped 7%. Average order value climbed 5%, which softened the revenue impact but didn’t fully offset it. Retailers across EMEA saw a milder version of the same pattern, with traffic up 6% and conversion down 2%.  While these numbers may seem to reflect broader economic or political concerns, shopping behavior is a big part of the story. Holiday shoppers are comparison shopping widely: When a US shopper browses a category across several retailers, they see six brands on average, compared with two within a single retailer.  With this many alternatives in view, shoppers weigh multiple factors before making their pick. Price, delivery options, return policies, stock availability, and site experience all matter enormously, but most of them sit outside a performance marketer’s control, and by October they’re largely set. What’s still adjustable is the message. Creative isn’t the biggest lever on holiday conversion, but it’s the one advertisers can still pull in-flight: It’s how the offer reaches the right shopper, in the right form, at the right moment.  ### **What do holiday shoppers respond to?**  Unsurprisingly, discounts are the clearest lever to move holiday demand. Criteo data shows that during Black Friday 2025, discounted hair styling tools in the US sold 572% more units than in the first week of November, on an average discount of 13%. Adobe also found that holiday deals pushed shoppers toward higher-end purchases, with the share of the most expensive items sold rising 20% compared with the rest of the year.¹ When shoppers are comparing this many options, they’re actively looking for a reason to pick one. A discount is the most obvious reason, but the data shows it isn’t the only one: Bundled products, gift sets, or the chance to trade up to a more luxurious option can do the same job. These alternative solutions work best when they feel specific to the shopper and to the season.   Creative that looks the same in November as it did in September doesn’t give shoppers the reason they’re looking for to make a decision, nor does it allow for that level of personalization.   ### **What makes holiday creative personal?**  Personalized holiday creative works on three levels:  - **Product:** The item this shopper has been actively considering, rather than the brand’s hero product.  - **Value:** The current price, discount, or bundle, kept accurate as offers change throughout the week.  - **Timing:** Messaging that reflects seasonal urgency, rather than evergreen messaging.   Dynamic creative optimization (DCO), like Criteo’s DCO+, is built exactly for this task. Rather than building a single ad, it assembles the elements that work best for each shopper from an advertiser’s product feed, using live pricing and availability, the products a shopper has shown interest in, and more than 120 shopper intent signals, across thousands of variants and at a scale no design team could produce by hand. The following components drive effective creative optimization:  **Feed data:**Every dynamic ad starts with the advertiser’s product catalog. Titles, prices, sale prices, stock levels, and images flow from the feed into the ad, so a price change or a sellout shows up in the creative without anyone editing it. Prices and titles need to be defined clearly and kept consistent, and product sets allow a brand to group items, such as sale products or new arrivals, to ensure the right products lead during the holiday period.   **Intent signals:**Criteo’s creative optimization engine reads two kinds of signals to decide what each shopper sees. Behavioral signals come from a shopper’s interactions, such as how recently and how often they have viewed a product page, and they help predict what the shopper is likely to do next. Contextual signals come from the page where the ad appears, including its topics and keywords, and they are used when third-party cookies are unavailable. Holiday journeys vary widely: In the US, the slowest 25% of shoppers begin researching an average of 57 days before they buy, while the fastest 25% move from research to purchase in about 8.5 minutes. A shopper eight weeks into research and a shopper deciding in minutes require different messages, and the signals help DCO+ tell them apart.  **Brand guardrails:**Personalization runs inside a design framework that the brand approves first, built either by the brand or with Criteo’s Creative Services team. The framework holds the fonts, color sets, text styles, calls to action, and layouts that fit the brand’s guidelines. For each impression, DCO+ chooses from those approved elements the products, layout, copy, and imagery most likely to work for that shopper, then adapts the ad to the size required by the publisher’s inventory. It can also combine approved layouts into new ones, which is how the number of possible variations reaches the trillions.  **Delivery:**Brands also choose how the variations are served. DCO+ can rotate creatives evenly for A/B testing, sequence them to move a shopper through a structured journey, let the AI optimize toward the best performer, or prioritize the creatives the advertiser prefers. A brand might rotate creatives evenly in early November to see what resonates, then move to optimize or prioritize as Cyber 6 approaches.  In a season where offers change daily and shoppers are comparing six brands at a time, DCO is one of the most practical ways to keep every impression relevant. Criteo’s benchmark for DCO+ is a click-through rate lift of 20% or more compared with standard dynamic banners.  ### **How should brands prepare before Cyber 6?**  Many brands will navigate the buildup to Cyber 6 with holiday creative that highlights a hero product and big savings. Fewer will have a creative personalization plan in place designed to engage shoppers based on their individual interests.  A creative personalization plan doesn’t need to be complicated, but it should cover:  - **Data:** What the brand already holds (purchase history, cart activity, loyalty status) and what commerce signals can add, including in-market shoppers who haven’t visited yet.  - **Feed:** Prices, sale prices, stock levels, images, and promotion end dates, kept current. With DCO, the feed is the ad.  - **Offer rules:** What changes in the creative before, during, and after Cyber 6, decided in advance rather than edited mid-week.  - **Variants:** Several versions per audience and offer, so there is something to compare and learn from early in November.  - **Expected outcomes:** The conversion rate and order value the plan is aiming for, so teams can tell quickly whether to scale or adjust.  - **Disclosure:** Confirmation that any AI-generated or AI-modified creative meets new labeling requirements in the EU² and New York.³ ### **Putting it all together**  By now, most of the holiday plan is set. Creative is the part that can still change, and for this holiday season the practical path is DCO, a disciplined set of variants, and a plan for it all in place well before Black Friday. With a quarter of shoppers starting their research nearly two months before they buy, brands that put a personalization plan in place now will be best positioned for the buildup to Cyber 6.  Ready to make your holiday creative work harder? [Talk to a Criteo expert today.](https://www.criteo.com/talk-to-an-expert/)      ##### **Sources**  ¹ Adobe, Holiday Shopping Season Drove a Record $257.8 Billion Online with Consumers Embracing Generative AI Tools ² European Union, New labeling requirements in the EU ³ Cooley, New York Enacts ‘Synthetic Performer’ Disclosure Law for Advertisements, Including Those Using Generative AI