The holiday season is a critical period for brands, as a significant share of revenue is secured during the last few months of the year. In 2024, US consumers spent a record $282 billion online during the holiday season, representing a nearly 4% year-over-year increase. Today’s consumer has more avenues for researching, finding, and purchasing products than ever before, creating tremendous opportunity for brands—but also a greater margin for error.
Here are four holiday trends that illustrate how consumer behavior is evolving and how smart execution can help brands reach the right audiences and drive business outcomes.
With nearly 45% of US holiday shoppers planning to browse or buy prior to November, it’s clear that consumers are no longer waiting for Black Friday to kick off their holiday shopping. However, marketers are still building campaigns around traditional seasonality, missing opportunities to reach in-market shoppers. To take advantage of today’s much broader shopping timeline, marketers need to pay careful attention to pacing and how they stay top of mind.
With a Total Video strategy, marketers can unify linear, CTV, and digital video across platforms and devices to reach audiences wherever they’re most engaged and likeliest to take action. Moreover, this approach enables seamless omnichannel video measurement, so marketers can deliver optimal ad experiences that account for frequency and messaging throughout the entire customer journey.
According to Forrester, a surprising 68% of consumers say getting good value is more important than getting the lowest price. This means that discounts might draw attention, but it’s the value that drives outcomes. Showcasing value stems from a brand's ability to understand its consumers by addressing their needs, fostering trust, and delivering messages that feel relevant in the moment. Household and individual identity graphs, paired with predictive creative, enable marketers to reach household decision-makers and influencers with greater personalization and relevance. Marketers can further encourage action by driving potential customers to landing pages that highlight product features, benefits, and brand philosophies to forge greater connections that nurture trust by illustrating value. Whether reaching a gift giver or recipient, relevance is paramount to driving outcomes among modern consumers.
With nearly 80% of holiday gift budgets spent by the end of Cyber Monday, understanding where consumers are in their journey during this pivotal week is crucial for optimizing budgets throughout the holiday season and delivering impactful customer experiences.
With first-party data—specifically, purchase data—and a data onboarding platform, brands can maximize the value of every media dollar. For instance, an electronics brand may place specific emphasis on promoting its newest laptop this holiday season, especially among audiences with high school and college-aged children. By leveraging purchase data, a brand can refrain from serving ads that promote their latest laptop to those individuals and households who have already purchased the item and instead:
By leveraging first-party data, marketers can optimize their media spend this holiday season, improving efficiency and ROI.
More than 70% of shoppers use two or more channels for holiday shopping, demonstrating that the path to purchase isn’t linear. TikTok, Instagram, mobile, and CTV ads, for example, can all contribute to customer purchases. Bringing touchpoints together with a single, unified customer view helps campaigns feel connected and ensures each channel works toward the same outcome. Moreover, by enabling measurement across media buying paths, channels, and ad formats, marketers can ensure cohesive and accurate reporting that illustrates the impact of their campaigns on business outcomes. Working with partners like Cadent, which enable holistic measurement, is essential to end-of-year efforts and long-term success.
The season may be in full swing, but that doesn’t mean it's too late to make strategic optimizations to your media plan. Remember: today’s holiday strategies don’t need to be louder or longer to succeed—they need to be more intelligent.
Cadent provides a smarter way to win the holiday season with an all-in-one platform that enables you to orchestrate your media buy across the entire advertising ecosystem. With tens of thousands of custom predictive models, Cadent empowers you to find the audiences that are likeliest to achieve a desired campaign outcome and then purchase media based on the likelihood of an impression to drive that desired outcome across environments. Because Cadent is an end-to-end platform, it enables holistic measurement, so you’re always equipped with the necessary data and insights for strategic optimizations and to prove campaign impact on the business.
With unified video strategies, household and individual identity graphs, and adaptive creative solutions, Cadent helps marketers adapt quickly, target precisely, and maximize every moment of the season. Learn how we can help you win this holiday.