Holiday Advertising Trends for 2026: Why Adaptability Will Define the Season
Holiday advertising is becoming less of a sprint toward Black Friday and more of a season of constant adaptation as consumers’ needs and behaviors shift.
Consumers are planning earlier, strategically buying around promotions, shopping across physical and digital spaces, and becoming increasingly selective about where each discretionary dollar goes. At the same time, the biggest conversion moments still matter enormously.
For advertisers, that creates a difficult balancing act:
- Start early without peaking prematurely
- Prove value without competing on price alone
- Move quickly enough to respond when consumer intent changes
Smartly’s own holiday research points to the same evolution. By the 2025 Holiday season, Smartly platform analysis showed ecommerce and retail advertisers beginning to pace spend roughly three weeks ahead of Black Friday. During peak periods, ecommerce and retail spend reached approximately 2–4x October levels, while CPMs increased roughly between 30% and 200% compared to that same period.1
The takeaway for 2026 is clear: Black Friday is increasingly the peak of a curve that starts weeks earlier, rather than the start of the shopping season.
Here are five trends marketers need to understand to prepare for the 2026 holiday season.
1. Holiday shopping starts long before Black Friday
The traditional holiday calendar no longer tells the whole story.
According to NRF and Prosper Insights & Analytics, 42% of consumers intended to start shopping before November in 2025. Among those early shoppers, 54% said getting started early helped spread their budgets, while 41% wanted to avoid last-minute stress. Yet, 63% still planned to wait until Thanksgiving weekend to do most of their shopping.2
Those behaviors might sound contradictory, but they're actually evidence of an extended buying cycle.
Consumers might discover a product in October, add it to a wish list in November, compare prices across retailers, and wait until Black Friday to transact. PwC's 2025 Holiday Outlook estimated that roughly 40% of planned gift expenditure would occur during the five days from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday.3
Smartly's own first-party advertising data shows marketers responding to the same dynamic. In Q4 2025, the November 23–December 1 period saw the greatest ad spend by channel, with cross-channel advertising spend on November 28 reaching more than double that of the same day in October.4
What marketers should do: Treat pre-Thanksgiving as a learning and consideration window, not dead space before the "real" campaign begins. Test audiences and creative concepts early, then carry those signals into the high-intent promotional period.
This is where Pre-launch Intelligence adds value: helping teams validate audience, channel, budget, and creative decisions before peak-season dollars are committed, then connect those plans to in-flight signals as demand changes.
That requires budgets that can move with demand rather than being evenly distributed against a static calendar. Smartly's holiday guidance recommends:
- Prepare templates and catalogs
- Schedule budgets around peaks
- Use automated triggers with clear thresholds and human oversight
2. Value wins over discounts
Deloitte's 2025 Holiday Retail Survey found that 89% of consumers planned to seek deals, 75% intended to shop promotional weeks, and 77% planned to spend more conservatively across brands or retailers.5 Circana's U.S. Holiday Purchase Intentions research separately found value, free shipping and deals among consumers' leading priorities.6
Deloitte's research offers an important clue: 72% of consumers said wish lists make holiday shopping easier, while 64% liked receiving wish-list gifts because they knew they'd use them.5 That creates a clear creative opportunity: ground messaging in the consumer context that makes a purchase feel worthwhile.
The opportunity isn’t simply to make more creative. It’s to adapt creative to consumer needs without losing the distinctive brand signals that make it recognizable.
3. Discovery is fragmenting across channels
Holiday shopping isn't following a neat awareness-to-conversion funnel anymore. Discovery, consideration, and conversion are all happening in real time, sometimes within minutes. For example, while social remains valuable for reach and discovery, Deloitte found that 59% of consumers planned to use social media for holiday shopping in 2025. Among Gen Z holiday shoppers, 74% turned to social media or influencers for inspiration and product discovery, while 43% planned to use AI.5
Generative AI use points in the same direction. Deloitte also found that 33% of consumers planned to use generative AI for holiday shopping in 2025, more than twice the prior year's share.5
But the buying isn’t strictly digital. McKinsey ConsumerWise found 54% of consumers expected to split their holiday shopping between online and physical stores.7
A shopper might see a creator recommendation, ask an AI assistant for alternatives, compare products on a retailer site, and ultimately buy in-store. For marketers, that makes connected execution—and measurement that shows how creative contributes across channels—increasingly important.
4. Black Friday remains the conversion epicenter (but December needs a different playbook)
Numerator's verified-buyer research found 76% of Cyber Weekend shoppers purchased or planned to purchase on Black Friday, versus 59% on Cyber Monday.8 That concentration confirms Cyber Weekend as the conversion epicenter.
We know this window is the peak of holiday shopping, but what changes afterwards is why people buy. The research suggests four holiday buying phases: pre-Thanksgiving research and comparison; Thanksgiving–Cyber Monday promotional purchase intent; early-December completion and remaining gifting; and the final Christmas stretch, when urgency and convenience become increasingly important.
This means the ad that works on Black Friday shouldn't necessarily be the ad running two weeks later. Holiday creative should evolve from discovery and value to urgency and convenience as the season progresses.
5. Creative agility becomes a performance strategy
All of these trends create the same operational challenge. Brands need relevant creative across more channels, for more audiences and more buying moments, and they need to make decisions while the opportunity is still live.
Kantar's 2025 Christmas creative-effectiveness research, benchmarked against more than 250,000 ads in its effectiveness database, points to distinctive brand assets, emotional response, attention, recall and purchase intent as mechanisms differentiating effective holiday creative.9
In other words, marketers need enough creative variety to remain relevant without losing the brand signals that make an ad recognizable in the first place.
That’s exactly where modular creative versioning and automation can help. Smartly's holiday guidance recommends building templates and catalogs before campaigns launch, using automated triggers to respond to performance, and leveraging intelligence to turn successful creative concepts into variations for subsequent holiday moments rather than rebuilding campaigns from scratch.
The advantage is not automation for automation's sake. It’s the ability to connect creative production, media execution, and intelligence quickly enough to respond to a volatile peak season.
The 2026 holiday playbook: build for change
The 2026 holiday season will reward marketers who build interest early, demonstrate consumer value continuously, convert aggressively around Thanksgiving and Cyber Weekend, shift toward certainty and convenience in December, and personalize creative messaging. Consumers are entering the funnel earlier, becoming more deliberate about value, discovering products across more channels, and changing their priorities as the season progresses. Black Friday remains a critical conversion moment, but winning the holiday season means responding to consumer context before, during and after the peak purchasing days.
For marketers, that translates into a few clear actions:
- Start early, but don't peak too soon. Use the weeks before Thanksgiving to test audiences, messaging and creative, then apply those learnings when purchase intent accelerates around Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
- Communicate value beyond the discount. Price matters, but so does usefulness, relevance, convenience and purchase confidence. Build creative around the reasons different consumers believe a product is worth buying.
- Plan for a fragmented, omnichannel journey. Discovery, consideration and conversion can happen across social, AI assistants, ecommerce, and physical retail—sometimes within minutes. Connect creative, media and measurement so those experiences reinforce one another.
- Personalize around needs and shopping context. Adapt creative to the consumer’s likely priority in that moment: discovery, value, urgency, or convenience.
- Change the message as the season changes. Think discovery → value → urgency → convenience: build consideration before Thanksgiving, maximize conversion during Cyber Weekend, then emphasize gifting solutions, availability and convenience as Christmas approaches.
- Make creative agility part of the performance strategy. Build modular templates and creative variants before peak season, automate versioning where possible, and use performance signals to continually adapt creative and media rather than rebuilding campaigns from scratch.
Ultimately, holiday success won't come from predicting one perfect message. It will come from building a system that can learn and change as quickly as consumers do by connecting creative production, media execution and intelligence to turn real-time signals into more relevant advertising throughout the season.
The marketers best positioned to win will not predict every turn. They will be ready to respond with confidence when the season changes. Advertise Smartly.
Footnotes & Sourcing
- Smartly, Holiday 2025 // Retail | NORAM; Smartly holiday guidance and platform analysis of North American Meta ecommerce and retail advertisers.
- NRF / Prosper Insights & Analytics, Holiday Consumer Survey. Consumer holiday shopping timing, including pre-November browsing/buying and motivations for starting early.
- PwC, 2025 Holiday Outlook. Holiday spending and Thanksgiving-to-Cyber-Monday purchase concentration.
- Smartly first-party platform data. Q4 cross-channel advertising spend, vertical spend trends and new multiplatform account trends.
- Deloitte, 2025 Holiday Retail Survey. Approximately 4,300 U.S. consumers; deal seeking, promotional shopping, trade-down behavior, wish lists, social media and generative AI usage.
- Circana, U.S. Holiday Purchase Intentions. Consumer priorities including value, deals and free shipping.
- McKinsey ConsumerWise holiday research. 4,000+ U.S. consumers; omnichannel shopping intentions and holiday spending intentions by income.
- PwC / Numerator post-season receipt analysis. Observed 2025 holiday expenditure by generation and household income; Numerator, Cyber Weekend verified-buyer research. 9,100+ respondents; Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Cyber Weekend shopping behavior.
- Kantar, 2025 Christmas creative-effectiveness research. Analysis benchmarked against Kantar's database of 250,000+ ads, including distinctive brand assets, emotional response, attention, recall and purchase intent.
Holiday Advertising Trends for 2026: Why Adaptability Will Define the Season
Holiday advertising is becoming less of a sprint toward Black Friday and more of a season of constant adaptation as consumers’ needs and behaviors shift.
Consumers are planning earlier, strategically buying around promotions, shopping across physical and digital spaces, and becoming increasingly selective about where each discretionary dollar goes. At the same time, the biggest conversion moments still matter enormously.
For advertisers, that creates a difficult balancing act:
- Start early without peaking prematurely
- Prove value without competing on price alone
- Move quickly enough to respond when consumer intent changes
Smartly’s own holiday research points to the same evolution. By the 2025 Holiday season, Smartly platform analysis showed ecommerce and retail advertisers beginning to pace spend roughly three weeks ahead of Black Friday. During peak periods, ecommerce and retail spend reached approximately 2–4x October levels, while CPMs increased roughly between 30% and 200% compared to that same period.1
The takeaway for 2026 is clear: Black Friday is increasingly the peak of a curve that starts weeks earlier, rather than the start of the shopping season.
Here are five trends marketers need to understand to prepare for the 2026 holiday season.
1. Holiday shopping starts long before Black Friday
The traditional holiday calendar no longer tells the whole story.
According to NRF and Prosper Insights & Analytics, 42% of consumers intended to start shopping before November in 2025. Among those early shoppers, 54% said getting started early helped spread their budgets, while 41% wanted to avoid last-minute stress. Yet, 63% still planned to wait until Thanksgiving weekend to do most of their shopping.2
Those behaviors might sound contradictory, but they're actually evidence of an extended buying cycle.
Consumers might discover a product in October, add it to a wish list in November, compare prices across retailers, and wait until Black Friday to transact. PwC's 2025 Holiday Outlook estimated that roughly 40% of planned gift expenditure would occur during the five days from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday.3
Smartly's own first-party advertising data shows marketers responding to the same dynamic. In Q4 2025, the November 23–December 1 period saw the greatest ad spend by channel, with cross-channel advertising spend on November 28 reaching more than double that of the same day in October.4
What marketers should do: Treat pre-Thanksgiving as a learning and consideration window, not dead space before the "real" campaign begins. Test audiences and creative concepts early, then carry those signals into the high-intent promotional period.
This is where Pre-launch Intelligence adds value: helping teams validate audience, channel, budget, and creative decisions before peak-season dollars are committed, then connect those plans to in-flight signals as demand changes.
That requires budgets that can move with demand rather than being evenly distributed against a static calendar. Smartly's holiday guidance recommends:
- Prepare templates and catalogs
- Schedule budgets around peaks
- Use automated triggers with clear thresholds and human oversight
2. Value wins over discounts
Deloitte's 2025 Holiday Retail Survey found that 89% of consumers planned to seek deals, 75% intended to shop promotional weeks, and 77% planned to spend more conservatively across brands or retailers.5 Circana's U.S. Holiday Purchase Intentions research separately found value, free shipping and deals among consumers' leading priorities.6
Deloitte's research offers an important clue: 72% of consumers said wish lists make holiday shopping easier, while 64% liked receiving wish-list gifts because they knew they'd use them.5 That creates a clear creative opportunity: ground messaging in the consumer context that makes a purchase feel worthwhile.
The opportunity isn’t simply to make more creative. It’s to adapt creative to consumer needs without losing the distinctive brand signals that make it recognizable.
3. Discovery is fragmenting across channels
Holiday shopping isn't following a neat awareness-to-conversion funnel anymore. Discovery, consideration, and conversion are all happening in real time, sometimes within minutes. For example, while social remains valuable for reach and discovery, Deloitte found that 59% of consumers planned to use social media for holiday shopping in 2025. Among Gen Z holiday shoppers, 74% turned to social media or influencers for inspiration and product discovery, while 43% planned to use AI.5
Generative AI use points in the same direction. Deloitte also found that 33% of consumers planned to use generative AI for holiday shopping in 2025, more than twice the prior year's share.5
But the buying isn’t strictly digital. McKinsey ConsumerWise found 54% of consumers expected to split their holiday shopping between online and physical stores.7
A shopper might see a creator recommendation, ask an AI assistant for alternatives, compare products on a retailer site, and ultimately buy in-store. For marketers, that makes connected execution—and measurement that shows how creative contributes across channels—increasingly important.
4. Black Friday remains the conversion epicenter (but December needs a different playbook)
Numerator's verified-buyer research found 76% of Cyber Weekend shoppers purchased or planned to purchase on Black Friday, versus 59% on Cyber Monday.8 That concentration confirms Cyber Weekend as the conversion epicenter.
We know this window is the peak of holiday shopping, but what changes afterwards is why people buy. The research suggests four holiday buying phases: pre-Thanksgiving research and comparison; Thanksgiving–Cyber Monday promotional purchase intent; early-December completion and remaining gifting; and the final Christmas stretch, when urgency and convenience become increasingly important.
This means the ad that works on Black Friday shouldn't necessarily be the ad running two weeks later. Holiday creative should evolve from discovery and value to urgency and convenience as the season progresses.
5. Creative agility becomes a performance strategy
All of these trends create the same operational challenge. Brands need relevant creative across more channels, for more audiences and more buying moments, and they need to make decisions while the opportunity is still live.
Kantar's 2025 Christmas creative-effectiveness research, benchmarked against more than 250,000 ads in its effectiveness database, points to distinctive brand assets, emotional response, attention, recall and purchase intent as mechanisms differentiating effective holiday creative.9
In other words, marketers need enough creative variety to remain relevant without losing the brand signals that make an ad recognizable in the first place.
That’s exactly where modular creative versioning and automation can help. Smartly's holiday guidance recommends building templates and catalogs before campaigns launch, using automated triggers to respond to performance, and leveraging intelligence to turn successful creative concepts into variations for subsequent holiday moments rather than rebuilding campaigns from scratch.
The advantage is not automation for automation's sake. It’s the ability to connect creative production, media execution, and intelligence quickly enough to respond to a volatile peak season.
The 2026 holiday playbook: build for change
The 2026 holiday season will reward marketers who build interest early, demonstrate consumer value continuously, convert aggressively around Thanksgiving and Cyber Weekend, shift toward certainty and convenience in December, and personalize creative messaging. Consumers are entering the funnel earlier, becoming more deliberate about value, discovering products across more channels, and changing their priorities as the season progresses. Black Friday remains a critical conversion moment, but winning the holiday season means responding to consumer context before, during and after the peak purchasing days.
For marketers, that translates into a few clear actions:
- Start early, but don't peak too soon. Use the weeks before Thanksgiving to test audiences, messaging and creative, then apply those learnings when purchase intent accelerates around Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
- Communicate value beyond the discount. Price matters, but so does usefulness, relevance, convenience and purchase confidence. Build creative around the reasons different consumers believe a product is worth buying.
- Plan for a fragmented, omnichannel journey. Discovery, consideration and conversion can happen across social, AI assistants, ecommerce, and physical retail—sometimes within minutes. Connect creative, media and measurement so those experiences reinforce one another.
- Personalize around needs and shopping context. Adapt creative to the consumer’s likely priority in that moment: discovery, value, urgency, or convenience.
- Change the message as the season changes. Think discovery → value → urgency → convenience: build consideration before Thanksgiving, maximize conversion during Cyber Weekend, then emphasize gifting solutions, availability and convenience as Christmas approaches.
- Make creative agility part of the performance strategy. Build modular templates and creative variants before peak season, automate versioning where possible, and use performance signals to continually adapt creative and media rather than rebuilding campaigns from scratch.
Ultimately, holiday success won't come from predicting one perfect message. It will come from building a system that can learn and change as quickly as consumers do by connecting creative production, media execution and intelligence to turn real-time signals into more relevant advertising throughout the season.
The marketers best positioned to win will not predict every turn. They will be ready to respond with confidence when the season changes. Advertise Smartly.
Footnotes & Sourcing
- Smartly, Holiday 2025 // Retail | NORAM; Smartly holiday guidance and platform analysis of North American Meta ecommerce and retail advertisers.
- NRF / Prosper Insights & Analytics, Holiday Consumer Survey. Consumer holiday shopping timing, including pre-November browsing/buying and motivations for starting early.
- PwC, 2025 Holiday Outlook. Holiday spending and Thanksgiving-to-Cyber-Monday purchase concentration.
- Smartly first-party platform data. Q4 cross-channel advertising spend, vertical spend trends and new multiplatform account trends.
- Deloitte, 2025 Holiday Retail Survey. Approximately 4,300 U.S. consumers; deal seeking, promotional shopping, trade-down behavior, wish lists, social media and generative AI usage.
- Circana, U.S. Holiday Purchase Intentions. Consumer priorities including value, deals and free shipping.
- McKinsey ConsumerWise holiday research. 4,000+ U.S. consumers; omnichannel shopping intentions and holiday spending intentions by income.
- PwC / Numerator post-season receipt analysis. Observed 2025 holiday expenditure by generation and household income; Numerator, Cyber Weekend verified-buyer research. 9,100+ respondents; Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Cyber Weekend shopping behavior.
- Kantar, 2025 Christmas creative-effectiveness research. Analysis benchmarked against Kantar's database of 250,000+ ads, including distinctive brand assets, emotional response, attention, recall and purchase intent.
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