Holiday marketing campaigns in the summer? You better believe it.

For many marketers, the holiday season still begins with the same mental checkpoint: Black Friday. Campaign calendars revolve around late November, creative deadlines pile up in October, and advertising budgets are held back for the weeks when shoppers are expected to spend the most. It’s an approach that’s been repeated for years, largely because that’s when the biggest sales numbers have traditionally appeared. But replicating this approach will leave you susceptible to significant customer loss.

Long before Black Friday banners fill inboxes and Cyber Monday promotions dominate homepages, shoppers have already started making decisions. They begin researching products, comparing retailers, saving gift ideas, reading reviews, and deciding which brands deserve their attention weeks—and often months—before they ever reach the checkout page. By the time many businesses officially launch their holiday campaigns, they’re often entering a conversation that has already been happening for quite some time.

That’s one of the biggest shifts shaping modern holiday marketing. Shoppers may not have shifted their purchasing behavior earlier, but brands are often marketing to them earlier and earlier to beat out their competition.

For businesses of every size, especially small and growing brands competing against much larger retailers, recognizing that shift is becoming one of the biggest competitive advantages available. Holiday success is no longer determined solely by who has the biggest discount or the largest advertising budget. Increasingly, it’s determined by who earned a shopper’s attention before everyone else started asking for it.

Holiday shopping has become a journey, not an event

There was a time when holiday shopping followed a relatively predictable pattern. Consumers waited for major sales events, visited a handful of stores, compared prices, and made purchases over a concentrated period of time. While promotions certainly influenced buying decisions, the actual decision-making process itself was relatively short.

No so much anymore. Instead of waiting for a specific shopping weekend, consumers move through dozens of digital touchpoints before making a purchase. They discover products while scrolling social media during lunch, research reviews on publisher sites later that evening, compare prices across retailers over the weekend, and return multiple times before finally deciding where to spend their money. Mobile devices, laptops, connected TVs, social platforms, retail websites, and the open web all play a role in that journey, often within the span of just a few days.

For marketers, this means the first impression has become just as, if not more, important than the final promotion.

Imagine two outdoor brands preparing for the holidays. Both sell nearly identical camping equipment, both offer competitive pricing, and both launch attractive Black Friday promotions. One brand begins advertising in September, introducing gift guides for outdoor enthusiasts, running display campaigns that showcase best-selling products, and using video to inspire shoppers planning next year’s adventures. The second waits until Thanksgiving week, believing that’s when holiday advertising truly begins.

When Black Friday arrives, the second brand isn’t simply competing against discounts. It’s competing against familiarity. And that’s the power of beginning your advertising earlier. You get a leg up on your competition. Even if your consumer doesn’t buy in that moment, you’ve started establishing familiarity so when they are ready your brand will be the first one to come to mind.

Why waiting until November can actually make marketing harder

One of the biggest misconceptions about holiday advertising is that waiting allows marketers to “save” their budget for when shoppers are most active. On paper, yes, the logic makes sense. But the last thing you want is to enter the New Year and realize you haven’t hit your numbers and there is budget left on the table earmarked exactly for that.

Yet you still see the same practices, again and again. As the holiday season approaches, virtually every retailer begins increasing advertising activity at the same time. Ecommerce brands promote gift guides. Department stores launch seasonal sales. Consumer electronics companies unveil discounts. Travel companies advertise year-end getaways. Businesses across nearly every category suddenly compete for the exact same audiences using the exact same advertising channels. And they all do it trying to target this Black Friday & Cyber Monday sweetspot.

The problem is that this creates way more competition for your advertising dollars, making them stretch less far they they should be.

Think about your own experience. You’ll scroll through social feeds encountering promotion after promotion. See display inventory for product after product. Your email inboxes (don’t get us started) will fill with nearly identical subject lines promising the biggest sale of the season. Every brand is trying to capture demand at precisely the same moment.

Standing out at this time becomes dramatically more difficult.

For larger organizations with enormous advertising budgets, that challenge can often be solved by spending more—at least in their minds. Small and medium-sized businesses rarely have that luxury. Every dollar needs to work harder because there are simply fewer of them. Launching campaigns earlier changes this equation.

Rather than competing exclusively during the busiest period of the year, businesses have an opportunity to introduce themselves while shoppers are still researching, comparing products, and building purchase intent. Advertising environments are often less crowded, consumers are more receptive to discovering new brands, and marketers have more room to experiment before peak demand arrives.

Importantly, if you work with the right advertising partner, it helps you get in front of high-intent shoppers who are most likely to be interested in your brand before they know they’re ready to buy. Seeding your brand in their minds once they are ready to purchase.

Building demand is just as important as capturing it

Performance marketing often focuses on measurable outcomes. Clicks, conversions, return on ad spend, customer acquisition costs—these metrics matter because they help marketers understand what’s working and where budgets should be invested.

This is still important for holiday marketing campaigns, but just as important is the ability to build demand. The final conversion may happen during Black Friday or Cyber Monday, yet the demand behind that purchase is often created much earlier.

Consider someone shopping for their child’s first laptop. They might spend weeks comparing specifications, reading reviews, watching product demonstrations, asking friends for recommendations, and narrowing down their shortlist before they ever visit a checkout page. During that period, every interaction influences the eventual purchase. A helpful video explaining key features, a display ad highlighting a seasonal bundle, or a compelling article introducing a brand can all shape the final decision, even if none of those interactions immediately generate a sale.

This is why the strongest holiday marketing campaigns don’t think exclusively about conversion. They think about momentum. They think about them as a team, one feeding into the other.

Every impression should be thought of as a way to move a shopper one step closer to making a confident purchasing decision. Sometimes that means generating immediate revenue. Sometimes it simply means becoming memorable. Neither outcome should be underestimated or ignored.

Research consistently shows that people are more likely to buy from brands they recognize than brands they’re encountering for the first time. Familiarity reduces uncertainty. It creates confidence. During the holidays, when shoppers are making dozens of purchasing decisions under time pressure, confidence often becomes one of the most valuable marketing assets a business can build.

Waiting until the final weeks of the season leaves very little time to establish that trust. Starting earlier gives marketers the opportunity to earn it gradually, long before shoppers begin comparing checkout pages.

The smartest holiday campaigns spend September learning, not just selling

One of the biggest advantages of starting your holiday marketing campaigns early has nothing to do with generating immediate revenue, and often don’t have to focus on familiarity either. In fact, some of the most valuable insights you’ll gain during the early stages of the season won’t show up in your sales reports at all.

Every marketing team has assumptions about what will resonate with customers. Perhaps you believe one product will become your holiday bestseller. Maybe you’ve already decided which headline will perform best, or you’re convinced a particular audience is your highest-value customer segment. Those assumptions are often based on experience, intuition, or previous campaigns.

But you know what they say about assuming. Launching campaigns earlier gives marketers something they often don’t have enough of during the holidays: time to experiment without the pressure of peak-season performance.

That might mean testing whether lifestyle-focused creative generates more engagement than product-focused messaging. It could mean comparing static display ads against short-form video, experimenting with different promotional offers, or discovering that an audience you hadn’t considered becomes one of your strongest sources of new customers.

Every campaign you run becomes an opportunity to answer questions before your largest budgets are on the line. And that shift changes the role of peak shopping season entirely. Instead of spending November gathering insights, you’re spending it executing the ideas that have already proven themselves.

For growing businesses with limited advertising budgets, that confidence can make an enormous difference. Rather than distributing spend evenly across dozens of untested ideas, marketers can concentrate investment behind the campaigns that have already demonstrated results. The holiday season stops becoming one giant experiment and starts becoming the payoff from weeks of preparation, research, and A/B testing—without wasting significant budget to do.

Early planning creates space to try something new

There’s another benefit to getting ahead of the holiday rush that often goes overlooked. Testing channels you’ve always wanted to try but may have been too busy, or too unsure of their benefits, to try.

We all know that it’s difficult to test a new advertising channel when every campaign needs to deliver immediate revenue. It’s equally difficult to experiment with new creative formats or messaging when you’re already in the middle of your busiest selling season. The closer businesses get to Black Friday, the more risk-averse they naturally become. Familiar campaigns feel safer than new ones, even if those new ideas have the potential to outperform.

But when you plan early you can change that mindset. September and October become opportunities to learn rather than periods of intense execution.

Perhaps you’ve been considering expanding beyond the channels you’ve always relied on. Maybe you’ve wanted to incorporate more video into your advertising strategy or reach customers across additional digital environments. Perhaps you’ve been curious about how AI-generated creative compares to manually produced assets but haven’t wanted to risk testing it during your most important sales period.

Those are exactly the kinds of questions worth exploring before the holidays begin in earnest. You get the chance to discover whether new channels, new formats, or new creative approaches can complement the strategy you’ve already built.

Businesses that continuously test and refine their marketing tend to adapt much faster than businesses that only evaluate performance after the season is over. By then, the opportunity has already passed. And who knows if those learnings will be relevant in our ever-shifting cultural environment a year from now.

AI is changing what holiday preparation looks like

For a lot of smaller or growing businesses the desire to test new things is there. But they constantly run into the issue of finding the time in their busy days to deviate from what needs to be done to what should be tested to help them grow. It’s a lack of time problem.

Holiday campaigns involve far more than choosing a launch date. Creative needs to be designed. Ad copy needs to be written. Campaigns need to be built, reviewed, approved, and optimized. Assets have to be adapted across formats and channels, while performance is monitored closely enough to make meaningful adjustments before budgets begin to scale. We get it, trust us.

That’s one of the biggest reasons why artificial intelligence is beginning to reshape how marketers approach campaign planning. AI is increasingly removing the manual work that slows teams down from testing new designs and copy concepts.

Creative production that once required multiple rounds of revisions can now begin with AI-assisted generation. Campaign setup that previously demanded dozens of individual decisions can be simplified through guided workflows. Optimization no longer relies solely on manual adjustments, with AI helping marketers continuously improve bidding, targeting, and creative delivery as campaigns run.

Instead of spending weeks preparing assets before a campaign can even launch, marketers can spend those weeks understanding customers, refining messaging, and identifying opportunities that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.

Preparing earlier doesn’t have to mean working harder

One of the biggest misconceptions about early holiday marketing is that it requires more work when you’re already incredibly busy running day-to-day operations.

But actually, it’s the opposite of this. Rather than compressing every decision into the weeks leading up to Black Friday, successful marketers distribute that work across several months. Creative is developed earlier. Campaigns launch sooner. Performance is reviewed continuously. Adjustments happen gradually instead of overnight.

It removes the stress of immediate timelines and gives you times to make mistakes and not worry about fixing them with plenty of road until the holidays ahead of you.

That’s particularly true as AI continues making campaign management more accessible for growing businesses. Criteo GO was built around that philosophy. Rather than expecting marketers to manually manage every aspect of campaign creation, it combines Commerce AI with a streamlined workflow that helps businesses launch cross-channel, full-funnel campaigns across display, video, the open web, and supported social channels. AI-generated creative, automated optimization, and simplified campaign setup reduce much of the manual effort traditionally associated with holiday advertising, allowing marketers to spend more time refining strategy and less time navigating campaign complexity. Because campaigns continue learning and optimizing as they run, businesses can begin gathering valuable performance insights well before the holiday shopping season reaches its peak.

Holiday success is built long before the holidays arrive

It’s easy to think of holiday marketing as a sprint that begins sometime in November. But as advertisers we really need to switch that to a marathon mindset.

By the time shoppers are actively searching for Black Friday deals, they’ve already discovered new brands, compared products, watched videos, read reviews, and started narrowing their options. Every interaction leading up to that moment has influenced where they’ll eventually spend their money.

Businesses that invest time in understanding their audiences, testing creative, refining messaging, and building brand familiarity before peak season arrives place themselves in a much stronger position once competition inevitably intensifies. They aren’t scrambling to launch campaigns while everyone else is doing the same. In other words, preparation is key. And these businesses will be able to build on months of insights that help every advertising dollar work harder.

Holiday marketing will probably continue starting earlier with each passing year because shopper behavior continues evolving in that direction. With that in mind we have a question for you. Will your business be part of that journey—or will you wait until your competitors have already introduced themselves.

Ready to get ahead of the holiday rush? See how much ROI Criteo GO can drive for your business this holiday season.

Frequently Asked Questions

When should I start my holiday marketing campaigns?

While every business has a different sales cycle, many marketers benefit from planning and launching holiday campaigns weeks or even months before Black Friday. Starting earlier allows you to build brand awareness, test creative, refine audience targeting, and optimize campaigns before competition reaches its highest point.

Why is it important to advertise before Black Friday?

Many shoppers begin researching products well before they make a purchase. Advertising early gives your brand an opportunity to become part of their consideration process before they’re overwhelmed with promotions from competing retailers.

Are holiday advertising costs higher closer to the holidays?

Advertising demand generally increases as more brands compete for consumer attention during major shopping events. Launching campaigns earlier can provide opportunities to build awareness and gather campaign insights before competition intensifies.

What should I test before the holiday season?

The weeks leading up to the holidays are an ideal time to test creative, messaging, promotional offers, audience segments, ad formats, and emerging advertising channels. Learning what performs best before peak season allows you to invest your budget more confidently when holiday shopping accelerates.

Why is brand awareness important during holiday marketing?

Consumers often make purchasing decisions based on brands they already recognize and trust. Building familiarity before the busiest shopping period increases the likelihood that shoppers will remember your business when they’re ready to buy.

How can AI improve holiday marketing campaigns?

AI can simplify campaign setup, generate creative across multiple formats, optimize bidding and targeting, and continuously improve campaign performance as new data becomes available. By reducing manual work, AI gives marketers more time to focus on strategy and customer engagement instead of campaign administration. Criteo GO uses Commerce Intelligence to help businesses launch and optimize cross-channel campaigns with less complexity while generating creative across display and video formats.