Five holiday advertising lessons for brands planning for Black Friday now

To understand how early movers are preparing for Black Friday, Tatari asked a diverse mix of retail marketers and DTC advertisers, including Bylt, Tecovas, Manscaped and Bearbottom Clothing, about their holiday planning, creative strategy and media mix heading into the biggest sales weekend of the year. 

As the holiday season approaches, one common thread emerged among the retail brands Tatari surveyed: They’re moving earlier, measuring more rigorously and treating TV as a performance channel that needs to earn every dollar. Here are the top five findings from Tatari’s survey and the lessons brands and retailers can apply to their own holiday strategies.  

1. Holiday ad budgets are on the rise (again)

Ad budgets are growing heading into Black Friday, especially for TV. Nearly six in 10 advertisers told Tatari they will increase their Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) TV spend in 2026 compared to 2025. 

In fact, the percentage of advertisers who said they’re planning a significant increase in their BFCM TV ad budget jumped from 16% last year to 22% this year. That doesn’t just indicate that more brands are investing in TV. It shows that existing advertisers are increasing their commitments with greater conviction. 

Only 7% of advertisers said they will decrease their BFCM TV ad budget in 2026, meaning that more than nine in 10 brands will either increase their TV spend or hold it steady heading into the holiday season. Ultimately, more competition means timing and efficiency matter more than ever.

 2. TV drives digital sales, not door busters

Black Friday once meant consumers bundled up at 4 a.m. to wait in line for the mall to open. But for TV advertisers planning this year’s campaigns, in-store is no longer a primary sales channel. When asked which sales channels they’re prioritizing for the holidays, not a single advertiser cited in-store. Only 3% of brands said they are prioritizing Amazon. 

Instead, the majority of advertisers (58%) said they are focusing squarely on their DTC website, while 39% are taking an omni-channel approach that still prioritizes digital. That shift reflects a broader change in how advertisers think about TV’s role in the customer journey. TV has evolved beyond just a brand awareness play into a performance channel engineered to drive consumers directly to a checkout page, with more brands building their creative strategies and measurement frameworks around digital conversion.

3. October is the new November

The traditional Black Friday shopping window has expanded dramatically. More than half of advertisers (54%) said they plan to be in-market with holiday messaging before mid-November, and 17% plan to launch their BFCM TV campaigns as early as October. 

The largest share of advertisers (37%) said their campaigns will go live in early November, weeks before the BFCM shopping weekend. Only one in four advertisers said they will wait until Thanksgiving week to launch their BFCM TV campaigns. 

Earlier campaign rollouts align with changing consumer behavior, as shoppers now begin hunting for deals as early as the fall, according to data from McKinsey & Company. Brands are also launching campaigns earlier to secure stronger inventory availability and avoid increased competition closer to the BFCM shopping window.

4. Marketers unwrap AI for the 2026 holiday season

AI has moved from buzzword to workshop staple. Sixty-one percent of advertisers said they are using AI tools to support their holiday TV campaigns in 2026, whether for creative development, audience targeting, campaign optimization or all three simultaneously. This is akin to having a team of tireless elves handling repetitive, time-consuming work so brands can focus on making larger strategic decisions. 

In addition, 12% of advertisers said they plan to adopt AI tools to support BFCM TV advertising in the near future, bringing the share of AI-engaged advertisers to nearly three in four. Only 27% of brands said that they are not currently using AI tools to support BFCM TV advertising. 

As adoption accelerates, the focus is shifting from whether brands should use AI to identifying where it can deliver the greatest impact across the TV workflow.

5. Performance over presence: Every holiday dollar must earn its place

Not every TV campaign lives or dies by performance numbers, but they increasingly do during the critical holiday season. Seventy percent of advertisers told Tatari that they use pixel-based attribution platforms to measure the impact of their BFCM TV ad spend. More than half of brands (53%) said that they run incrementality testing to measure success, and 45% said they use media mix modeling, often in combination to triangulate TV’s true impact during BFCM. Only 13% of advertisers said that they have no formal measurement approach in place to assess their BFCM TV ad spend.

Perhaps most telling is how advertisers are prioritizing spend and budget delivery for their BFCM TV campaigns. Eighty-three percent of brands said the most important factor of their BFCM TV campaign is maximized performance, while only 17% of respondents said budget clearance is the most important aspect. 

During the holidays, when media costs spike and every dollar is under a microscope, a brand’s instinct might simply be to get the spend out the door. But that’s not what these advertisers are doing. They’re holding their holiday campaigns to an outcomes standard, ensuring every dollar is accountable for driving sales during the year’s most important shopping weekend. Ultimately, measurement turns holiday TV ad spend from a gamble into a strategic investment, giving brands the confidence to know where their dollars are working.

Sponsored by Tatari