There’s good news for marketers planning their 2026 holiday campaigns: sales are expected to grow 4.1% YOY. The challenge? Consumers are becoming more deliberate about how and where they’ll spend this year as prices increase and wages struggle to keep up.
This means that shoppers will take longer on their path to purchase as they research and compare prices—with more than half of consumers (50.7%) planning their holiday gifting even earlier this year. Moreover, with 41% of consumers prioritizing needs over wants, brands will be competing for a more constrained pool of discretionary spending this holiday season.
While affordability will be top of mind for holiday shoppers this season, convenience, relevance, and flexibility will shape decision-making. This requires marketers to be more strategic in how they leverage their channel mix and creative assets to drive awareness, consideration, and conversion. And with a longer holiday shopping window, brands will need to create demand earlier in the journey and engage audiences at every stage to drive action.
Let’s explore how brands can make the most of a longer, more deliberate holiday shopping journey by maximizing channel performance, predicting which impressions and creative will drive outcomes, and adjusting media investment as performance signals emerge throughout the season.
To connect with this year’s more deliberate and discerning shoppers, advertisers will need to lean on partners and solutions that enable them to not only reach consumers based on previous behavior, but also anticipate shifts in attention, behavior, and needs to make the most of every advertising dollar.
Cadent's Performance CTV, powered by our Predictive Intelligence technology, analyzes identity, contextual, and behavioral signals using more than 22,000 predictive models to determine the holiday shoppers, inventory, and impressions likeliest to drive outcomes before you buy. This approach enables you to direct your investments toward the opportunities that move the needle on your campaign goals while mitigating waste and maximizing returns before the end of the year.
But prediction is only the starting point. Advertisers must put that intelligence to work across CTV, YouTube, and digital by using each channel’s strengths, pairing it with creative designed for the moment, and adapting both media and messaging as shopper priorities shift throughout the season.
There’s no better way to prove value than with the power of sight, sound, and motion. CTV and YouTube offer high-impact formats on large and small screen environments that can help you showcase products and communicate unique offers that illustrate why your brand is worth considering in memorable and engaging ways.
With Cadent, you can increase relevance by leveraging holiday-themed content. Holiday movies account for more than a third of movie viewing each December, giving advertisers a contextually relevant way of engaging shoppers with gifting ideas and special offers across all channels—especially those last-minute shoppers.
By adding YouTube to your media plan, you can extend your CTV reach, scale, and engage your target audiences on the world’s largest video streaming platform. This helps drive greater awareness and build brand affinity by aligning your brand with relevant, trusted content creators. Contextual collections that span creator-led content can also help you make sense of YouTube’s extensive content library and drive engagement more effectively.
Shorten the path to purchase with Creative Intelligence
With a longer shopping window this holiday season, shortening the path to purchase can mean the difference between making or missing your Q4 goals. By incorporating QR codes that are easy to scan with mobile devices into your CTV and YouTube ads, you can create a direct path to conversion and drive immediate action.
And, with mobile projected to account for more than 60% of holiday ecommerce, marketers can’t afford to exclude mobile shopping from their strategies. Advertisers should lean into second-screen usage and mobile shopping, extending their CTV impact by re-targeting holiday shoppers across digital devices to reinforce promotional messaging. Technologies like Cadent’s Creative Intelligence can help advertisers unlock greater value from every impression with predictive and dynamic approaches.
Shoppers’ needs, inventory levels, and even where products are available change quickly throughout the holiday season, requiring advertisers to tailor their messaging as priorities shift for shoppers.
Our Predictive Creative Scoring uses machine learning models to score every impression in real time, to determine which of your creatives is most likely to drive a desired outcome. This is a powerful approach when you have multiple existing assets and want to reach shoppers effectively with more resonant creative.
Our Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) can further amplify relevance and engagement by determining the right creative combination of copy, product imagery, and CTAs to serve in critical decision-making moments and help sustain performance.
For example, a brand may find that “Shop Now” is an effective CTA for most audiences. But for last-minute shoppers, “Get it by Christmas” might deliver significant engagement.
Both Predictive Creative Scoring and Dynamic Creative Optimization give advertisers different ways to anticipate shopper needs and intent, helping serve more relevant creative and drive action during the high-pressure holiday shopping season.
Other dynamic creative solutions, such as SmartCommerce Creative, give advertisers customizable options that feature real-time inventory updates to drive holiday shoppers to purchase. These options not only offer flexibility but also enable advertisers to encourage immediate action and boost sales.
By bringing all audiences, data, and media together in one place, the Cadent Platform helps advertisers plan, buy, and measure investments holistically—across channels, platforms, and screens.
And, based on the performance channels drive, our unified platform can easily shift spend between digital, CTV, and YouTube as new signals and performance data emerge, prioritizing channels that drive the strongest outcomes. Cadent also eliminates reporting siloes with Connected Outcomes, so you gain access to total campaign performance all in one place, from brand lift and visitation to incremental reach and sales lift.
Make this holiday season your merriest yet by maximizing every media dollar in your budget to drive outcomes, not just impressions, across digital, CTV, and YouTube.
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