Advertisers used to call the weeks following Halloween heading into Christmas the “hard eight”. Today, the commercial calendar is morphing in the face of altered shopping habits and brands that refuse to wait a month to capture market demand.
More than one-fourth (28%) of U.S. consumers (and 37% of millennial consumers) said they had begun their holiday shopping before October; only 11% said they planned to start shopping from Black Friday onwards, per a McKinsey survey. An Experian study also found that 45% of shoppers started purchasing before November. Principally that’s driven by cost-of-living worries; 39% of U.S. consumers say their day-to-day spending was the most stressful element of their lives, up 9% on last year per a survey of 24,000 people by the Kearney Consumer Institute.
If shoppers are buying before advertisers’ holiday campaigns kick in, that’s an issue for brands. “Now, the holiday shopping season starts in October. If your brand isn’t there competing during this time, you can be behind the eight ball,” said Phil Carney, manager of account management at Adroll, a digital marketing platform that’s often used by e-commerce businesses to place media buys.
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