It was Abraham Lincoln who urged Americans to set aside the last Thursday of November every year to observe Thanksgiving. What started as a one-day event has now become a four days shopping festival. And this year again, two of the biggest shopping days for retailers are quickly approaching: Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Thanksgiving ad spending grew 70% year-over-year for Ecommerce Channel Ads, 58% for Social product ads, and 25% for search shopping campaigns. Last year, the top 10 retail advertisers spent an additional $44 million on Facebook from Oct. 29 to Nov. 26. Walmart continued to increase its Facebook spend leading up to Cyber Monday, while rivals Target, Macy’s, and Kohl’s reached peak spend the day before Thanksgiving, according to a Kantar Media analysis provided to Marketing Dive.
We’ve noticed a trend where many marketers have shifted their spend from TV to digital platforms as they are gearing up for one of the busiest shopping weekends of the year. Retailers prefer using digital display, GDN, and social media advertising majorly. They’re ready to throw-in some proportion of traditional print, radio, and TV as a method of attracting the audience to their website and stores.
A closer look at what typically happens.
During these days, prices are marked down by several big and small retailers across – eCommerce, mCommerce, and all their brand retail outlets. As a new sales tactic, many retailers opt to promote different types of discounts through the four days. For example, a brand may offer 30% off on Black Friday, Buy One Get One over that following weekend, and a flat 50% across all items on Cyber Monday. There is complete creative liberty and no set rules. Retailers try to do everything in their reach to attract consumers and entice them to spend.
The energy is high, there is cut-throat competition, and millions of dollars in ad spend at stake.
Learning from the trends of the 2018 holiday season, each of the “cyber five” days brought in record-breaking revenue.
- Thanksgiving Day — saw the highest growth rate at nearly 30%
- Black Friday itself brought in a record $6.22 billion in revenue
- Cyber Monday surpassed Black Friday to net a record-breaking $7.9 billion
A Creative Management Platform (CMP) becomes an absolute necessity because…
- Consumers have more access and control than ever before to shop at any time, causing an increase in both in-store and online shopping with mobile being the glue that ties it together.
- Brands need to be prepared to promote consistent offers and discounts across print, display, and social media advertising channels.
- Ads come in many shapes and sizes. Brands have to choose to create one or many banner ads, interstitial ads, interactive rich-media HTML5, and video to attract and engage consumers.
- As part of the seamless in-store experience, brands print drop-down/pull-up banners, flyers, discount coupons, and digital signboards displaying their offer of the day!
Only a CMP can make things possible for brands…
- Produce dynamic display advertising efficiently in-house
- Seamless and user-friendly, code-free, ad production
- Direct publishing to GDN, Ad Exchanges, and Ad Networks through integration
- Live optimization with programmatic and DCO
For example, you can see below how CMP can help a brand to have a Black Friday Ad Campaign. It has various sizes of the same creative produced for social, web, and mobile ads.
Mediawide’s CMP combines a variety of features necessary for efficient advertising and personalized video marketing into one cohesive, cloud-based platform. Our in-built integration with DAMs like AEM, Alfresco, Nuxeo, and OpenText allows you to store, manage, and organize creative assets and collaborate easily across your geographically dispersed retail outlets using our workflow management tools.
So, do you think you’ve got Holiday 2019 figured out?
