A Lesson from Black Friday to Better Plan Your Christmas Campaigns
?? Ho ho ho! Will you let the holiday season roast your brand—and waste your budget?
With Black Friday and the festive frenzy just around the corner, advertising pressure is hitting record highs. In this newsletter, we explore the potential downsides of this surge —like excessive frequency, viewer saturation, and brands becoming indistinguishable. To help you navigate these challenges, we share key takeaways from MediaWorld's successful Black Friday campaign last year.
If your brand stakes a lot on Black Friday and/or Christmas (and let’s face it, who doesn’t?), these weeks are absolutely critical for your business—as they are for almost everyone. Unsurprisingly, this period triggers an advertising avalanche where all brands fiercely compete for their audience’s attention with irresistible promotions.
In fact, from mid-November to Christmas, major advertisers’ ad coverage increases by as much as eight percentage points compared to the rest of the year, with television leading as the go-to medium for reaching broad audiences.
Perfumes, a holiday classic
This spike in ad pressure is especially pronounced in certain sectors. Take perfume ads, for example: during this time, they’re virtually omnipresent. A study conducted by FLUZO revealed that, on average, each person in Spain is exposed to 77 perfume ads, equating to 30 minutes of fragrance commercials.
Beyond the overwhelming volume of advertising these figures represent, one insight stands out: during our analysis, 25% of the audience experienced more than 100 (!) ad impressions per person. This exceptionally high frequency is a hallmark of TV campaigns—an essential medium for generating broad reach but not very efficient at distributing impressions evenly. High TV Viewers are bombarded, while Low TV Viewers barely notice the campaign, leading to a limited reach at some point.
Other downsides of relying solely on TV include intense competition with other brands’ promotions, which can commoditize yours, and viewer fatigue due to ad saturation, often leaving audiences feeling overwhelmed.
The key lessons of MediaWorld
These were precisely the concerns MediaWorld faced in Italy. The brand wanted to capitalize on the Black Friday period but feared missing key targets and facing fierce competition from neighboring retailers.
To address these challenges, MediaWorld, together with Mediaplus agency, opted for a hybrid campaign strategy with a special focus on Connected TV (CTV) to achieve incremental reach beyond traditional media and effectively engage younger audiences.
FLUZO, in collaboration with its panel partner in Italy, @Nextplora, provided measurement insights into the campaign’s performance. This project combined observational data to track the global and incremental impact of various media (including TV, CTV, Spotify, and social media, among others) and declarative data to evaluate how effectively each medium drove campaign recall.
The results, publicly shared at an event organized by Nextplora, were striking:
NOTE: While this case specifically highlights the role of CTV, many other publicly shared FLUZO case studies demonstrate the power of hybrid campaigns across various contexts. Go and check them!
To Sum up!
In short, during this season, go for hybrid campaigns that help you control your reach within your target audience, and equip yourself with cross-media, single-source measurement to gain a comprehensive view of your strategy. ??