Plan, Test, Optimize: Strategies to Maximize Impact in the New Year

January often gets dismissed as a slow month in advertising. Budgets reset, campaigns pause, and many teams use the post-holiday lull to regroup. But for marketers focused on long-term growth, January isn’t a throwaway—it’s an opportunity. 

 With fewer competitors in market and lower CPMs across channels—down by as much as 42% for display and 25% for video—the start of the new year presents an opportunity to recalibrate and re-examine strategies without the pressure of demanding seasonal campaigns. From refining data infrastructure to testing new creative approaches to setting up clean measurement systems, January provides marketers with the space to build a stronger foundation before the year ramps up. 

 Here’s how to use this window to plan better, test smarter, and optimize impact all year long. 

Plan: Recalibrate before you relaunch

For most, Q4 ends in a sprint. The holidays created a frenzy of last-minute budget shifts, condensed campaign timelines, and the pressure to close the year strong, leaving little to no time for strategic analysis. January is an ideal time to reevaluate those strategies and plans. Below are a few examples of key campaign components to review during the first quarter's quiet period. 

• Channels: Dive into reporting to assess which channels helped drive acquisition and which led to conversions. Ask the hard questions like: beyond last-touch attribution, what is the true ROI of each channel when considering its influence on all touchpoints in the customer journey? 

• Metrics: Consider upcoming campaigns and how to best align KPIs with 2026 business priorities. Doing so will enable you to measure campaign performance against business outcomes. 

• Creative: Did your creative resonate with your audience? Assess how different signals can help you better understand your audiences to craft more personalized and relevant ads that capture attention and drive interactions. 

By taking this approach at the start of the year, marketers can avoid launching forgettable, noisy, and ineffective campaigns and instead focus their efforts on driving action and business outcomes with tailored and strategic initiatives that consider audiences, creative content, and channels. 

However, marketers cannot activate strategic learnings without the proper systems and technologies in place. Modern marketers require tools that enable full-funnel, cross-channel activation, optimization, and measurement. That’s where a partner like Cadent shines.  

Cadent enables marketers to view campaigns holistically, regardless of channel or device, whether linear or digital, empowering marketers with the data and intelligence to optimize campaigns. Moreover, because Cadent allows marketers to focus on outcomes rather than just view-based metrics, marketers can assess campaign impact on their bottom line, driving even greater intelligence. 

Test: Learn while competition is quiet 

As more sophisticated tools help marketers gather greater campaign intelligence, many find they have more questions about campaign efficacy and impact at the conclusion of their flights than they did at the start. The good news is that the beginning of the year is an excellent time to test out hypotheses. Organizations across verticals tend to pull back on campaigns in January, making it the perfect time to stand out, experiment, and collect performance data 

Use the start of the year to test new creatives such as CTV pause ads, QR codes, and shoppable ad units. Curious to know if messaging will drive engagement? Try new angles tailored to your audiences, their customer journey stages, and preferences to further uncover opportunities. 

With less noise in market, marketers can make the most of channel testing, exploring new avenues for reaching and connecting with consumers. Connected TV, for example, is often regarded as an awareness-focused channel. However, quieter seasons present the chance to test CTV and assess channel impact on the bottom of the funnel. Here are a few points to consider when launching experiments: 

• Start strategically: Regardless of the channel, platform, or ad format, consider allocating a percentage of your media budget large enough to generate real insight for testing. 

• Get to know your segments: Experiment with different audience segments, such as lapsed customers, for instance, to understand how they respond to new strategies, uncovering low-hanging fruit and new approaches. 

• Prove out impact: Testing is useless without proper measurement. Hold out a small geo or audience group to capture an incremental lift from your efforts.  

Platforms that offer robust, unified solutions, such as custom creative or cross-channel activation like Cadent, make it easier to execute these tests without adding an operational burden. You’re not just testing to test; you’re building the insights that will power higher-performing campaigns for the rest of the year. 

Optimize: Set your brand up for success

With the frenzy of Q4 2025 behind you, use the quieter start to 2026 to set your brand up for success in the new year. Start by: 

Reviewing your first-party data or customer database: Audit your audience segments and refresh suppression lists, for example. Moreover, slower seasons are an ideal time to implement data hygiene processes to ensure data quality and enable activation of first-party data across platforms and partners.  

Sharpening audience strategies: Use this time to determine which audiences require more attention and which to prioritize less. By reviewing and examining previous campaigns and customer databases, marketers should have sufficient intelligence to make strategic audience decisions, enabling the effective use of their media budget and achieving better returns. 

Establishing an optimization cadence: It’s easy to get bogged down by the hustle and bustle of busy seasons and tentpoles. Stay ahead of the curve by establishing an optimization cadence in advance. With weekly, monthly, or quarterly reviews, marketers can effectively use new intelligence to optimize campaigns and ensure long-term success.  

These practices are just as essential for external partners as for internal teams. Work with your account managers and client service representatives to establish regular reporting cadences to discuss optimization opportunities. Alignment across teams can make all the difference to campaign performance.  

Make the most of the new year 

If your team is looking to scale with precision this year, it starts by connecting the dots between media, data, and measurement. Cadent helps advertisers do exactly that—across CTV, linear, digital, and beyond—so every screen, segment, and dollar works harder. 

Let January—and Cadent—be your unfair advantage.