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Episode 185

Your Holiday Campaign is Already Late

By October, a quarter of shoppers are already hunting for gifts. That's 15 million more people than two years ago. If you wait until Q4 to launch your holiday campaign, you're late to the race.

This week, Elena, Angela, and Rob unpack our 2026 holiday shopper trends report. They explore why trust can't be built in six weeks, how B2B brands should approach stretched year-end buyers, and what AI shopping means for this season. Plus, learn how to measure always-on investment and hear the team's favorite holiday commercials.

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Topics Covered

• [00:30] Holiday anticipation now starts in June

• [03:45] Why trust can't be manufactured in six weeks

• [06:45] B2B buyers are holiday shoppers too

• [09:15] ChatGPT's conversion rate and AI shopping agents

• [14:50] Share of voice when the room is quiet

• [16:00] Measuring the impact of always-on investment

• [21:45] The team's favorite holiday commercials

Resources:

2026 Marketing Architects Report

Today's Hosts

Elena Jasper

Chief Marketing Officer

Rob DeMars

Chief Misfit

Angela Voss

Chief Executive Officer

Transcript

Elena: I'm Elena Jasper. I run the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co-hosts, Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects, and Rob DeMars, the Chief Misfit at Misfits & Machines.

Rob: Hello.

Angela: Hello.

Elena: Hello. We're back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news, always trying to root our opinions in data, research, and what drives business results. And today we're gonna talk about holiday marketing and why the brands that win this season probably started engaging their buyers months ago. I'll kick us off, as I always do, with some research, and today we have a report from our own strategy team.

They put together a 2026 holiday shopper trends report, and the big finding is that holiday anticipation isn't just a Q4 event. June sees a "halfway to Christmas" spike, and people celebrate "half Christmas" in June, and July sees "Christmas in July" content peak across social. And by the time we hit October, a full quarter of shoppers are already actively looking for gifts.

That's about 15 million more people than just two years ago. So to get us started here, does it surprise us that we're seeing holiday anticipation as early as June?

Angela: Rob, is this like, do you still celebrate your half birthday like you did maybe as a kid?

Rob: Right? Like, half Christmas. That almost sounds official. Well, we need to make that a thing. Yeah. Wow. I kinda feel bad, though. I have to just quickly say I feel bad for Halloween. Definitely, Christmas is creeping up on Halloween's territory here. Like, when are we supposed to be celebrating Halloween in, like, February? Like a Valentine's Day Halloween mashup. That actually might be kinda cool.

Angela: That might be kind of cool. No, this does not surprise me. I think marketers tend to organize the world in our heads around campaigns, and consumers don't. As marketers, we think, holiday campaigns start in November. Consumers think, "I just saw something that would be perfect for my daughter, and it happens to be July."

And I think this gets back to something we talk about a fair amount, which is it's surprising, I think, to us as marketers that advertising is a weak force. You know, you don't usually change someone's mind or create a purchase with one exposure. You just build this familiarity and this memory over time.

So if you wait until someone is actively shopping for a gift, you're entering the race really late. Ideally, you were in their head before they started looking.

Rob: I agree. It's like the 95/5 rule's playing out in real time, right? Like, how do marketers seed it? The weirdos are shopping for Christmas gifts in June, right? Can we just say that? They're the weird people. But those weird people are also kind of the trendsetters, and ultimately, you know, when that buying occasion occurs, it's gonna be the people that were rewarding the weirdos early on that are gonna be top of mind when all of us guys are waiting until the last minute to go buy, right?

Elena: Right. I think it's interesting, too, that this is all like data that we can see. To what Ang was saying, there's a lot of just, like, mental availability being built, too. So there's lots of people who are saying, like, "Oh, I'm so excited for Christmas. I'm starting to look for gifts." But there's also probably half or more, maybe all shoppers, being seeded with gift ideas. I don't know about you, but it's nice when you go to shop and you actually have something in mind for someone versus having to, like, brainstorm all at once. So if your brand only exists in people's lives for about six weeks a year, if you're, like, a very holiday-focused brand, you could be absent for the months where a lot of that mental availability, relationship building happens.

And one other thing the report noted is that consumer sentiment is fairly low right now, and when we're feeling stretched, we tend to gravitate more towards brands that we feel are reliable, familiar. So Ang, what does it look like for a brand to earn that kind of trust versus just running a nice holiday ad around that time of year?

Angela: Yeah, I think sometimes brands confuse saying, "You can trust us," with actually being trustworthy. You know, trust is accumulated. It's showing up consistently. It's being recognizable. It's delivering what you promised. It's the package arriving when you said it would, the return being easy, even just things like answering the phone when something goes wrong.

And advertising plays an important role because consistent presence itself is a signal. You're familiar, and especially in television, you're established. We talk about signaling. You know, you're gonna be there tomorrow. A beautiful holiday ad, I think, can create emotion, but trust is really the sum of all of those little promises that a brand makes and keeps over time, and that ad should reinforce that reality, not try to manufacture it for six weeks out of the year.

Elena: So it's also interesting to see, like, right now consumers are looking for brands that are reliable, familiar, and it feels like every year around the holidays there's, like, different creative executions that tend to do well. One that was interesting is last year, gift wrapping tutorials pulled over 66 million engagements in a single month, and that was just organic.

That was zero brand spend. I should have watched those. I'm horrible at wrapping presents. But I think the feeling there, at least from the report, is when things feel out of control, it's, like, those little details that people like and that can really make a difference. So Rob, how do you think brands should think about creative this holiday season, given consumers are maybe feeling a little bit squeezed financially?

Rob: Well, first of all, I would say I don't know why gift wrapping tutorials are so popular, 'cause you just take the gift and you stick it in the bag, right? And then put a little tissue paper in there.

Elena: That is my preferred way to wrap gifts. Yes.

Rob: All right. Just to be clear. But no, I mean, you know, absolutely, as the pocketbook gets tight, creative has to make sure we're respecting where consumers are at, right?

And you guys remember the lipstick effect? You guys remember hearing about the lipstick effect at all?

Angela: I don't know if I remember the lipstick...

Rob: Yeah. So during the recession or any time where people have to trade down the size of their treat, right? So maybe they're not making those huge luxury purchases, but they're treating themselves to the good lipstick, right?

So how can your creative not, you know, go with the economy and start screaming "discount," but just kinda celebrate the reward that's baked into it, right? Just bring out that, give them a little bit of peace and calm and warmth and reliability and that little bit of luxury that your product offers at a price point that they can still feel good about.

Elena: Yeah. So it's not that we're not gonna buy treats and gifts like that. It's just you have to really stand out to be one of those that's chosen. I think it's worth mentioning that we've been kind of retail focused so far, and I think it's easy when you talk about holiday campaigns to focus on retail, but the report talks about how whoever is buying your product or service is also a holiday shopper at the end of the year this year.

They're gonna be managing year-end to feel in control the same way that a consumer is managing Christmas gifting. And they're pretty stretched right now. So on the services side of things, things like open enrollment, FSA deadlines, and tax cutoffs are all sort of around the same weeks as the holidays.

So paperwork deadlines are competing for attention at the same time everything is feeling holiday related. I don't know about you, but I'd rather think about Christmas cookies than taxes on any given day. What do we think that means for B2B or service brands? Like, should they think about year-end, like, their outreach or their advertising, differently than they usually do?

Angela: Yeah, I think there's a tendency in B2B to say, "It's year-end, we need to get the deal closed." And suddenly the customer gets 17 emails. But I think to your point, thinking about the human on the other side of that inbox, they're closing their year, they're planning next year, they're dealing with budgets, they're probably short-staffed because people are taking PTO, they're buying presents, there's back-to-school programs, blah, blah, blah.

I think that's probably the worst possible moment to make your marketing more complicated. So I think about the delivery really landing if you're going to deliver something. Try to reduce the cognitive load, be incredibly clear about the problem you're looking to solve, give people something useful, make the next step easy, and, maybe most importantly, build the relationship before December, 'cause that's when you're gonna need that relationship.

B2B buyers are, of course, still people, and mental availability matters there, too. So when the budget becomes available or the contract comes up for renewal, you know, if a problem suddenly becomes more urgent, you want to already be one of the brands that comes to mind for those people.

Rob: I'm gonna double down on what you said about the human being factor. I mean, the person signing that invoice at the end of the day forgot to buy their mother-in-law a gift, right? They're stressed out. They're like, "What in the world?" And on top of that, you know, you buy the wrong gift for your mother-in-law, that's not the end of the world.

You make the wrong buying decision in terms of your business, you lose your job. So, you know, how do you approach them with some empathy during this time of year? Approach them with some warmth and some understanding. Don't make it a complicated, feature-rich brain dump that they have to discern while they're still on Amazon trying to get that last deal covered for their kiddo.

So just some compassion, some humanity goes a long way.

Elena: I also think maybe B2B brands could learn a bit from consumer brands and how they do holiday campaigns. Like, you are just advertising to people, so there's no reason you couldn't do a holiday-themed spot. You know, bring some delight to us at the end of the year. Right. Yeah, no reason you can't do that.

So the report also talked about AI because we can't not, but it is playing a much bigger role than it used to in holiday shopping. More people are turning to tools like ChatGPT for gift ideas and product research, but also now to make purchases. So Rob, I wasn't sure if this stat surprised me or not. ChatGPT's conversion rate as of right now is about 7.1%, which is just a hair behind paid search's 7.8%. And I spent some time thinking about this. I'm like, I can't decide if I'm surprised by that or not. I actually have no idea what I would've guessed. But could you — I'm curious what you think about that.

And also I'm curious, how do you think AI agents are gonna change the shopper journey this holiday season, and should brands really be taking that into account this year, even more than any other year?

Rob: I think we're all learning right now. I mean, I think just even how do you really calculate a conversion rate off of an LLM is kind of a confusing question that I'd love to unpack in general. So I think it's a whole new era. We're all in it. We're all trying to figure it out. But I think we all agree we can't treat it like a normal website marketing experience, right?

The whole backlink strategy doesn't work with these large language models. How do you feed these models cleanly, right? You front-load them with important words because these agents read sequentially, and the first few words carry all the crazy weight, right?

So very different than what we see with web crawling. And then I think the other part that we're all still trying to figure out is the memory side of it. How do you get these models to understand the context of the buyers that are searching them so they can see the relationships between your products and the context that already exists within the large language models?

How are you able to tap into the family members that the LLM already knows about? That's an opportunity all marketers are trying to figure out right now, because these models are powerful, but they're a little bit cryptic in terms of how do you get them to understand your brand and how that brand fits within their lifestyle.

Elena: You make a good point about the conversion rate, 'cause I used Claude recently for a whole bunch of stuff for a baby registry, and I didn't actually click any link. I just, like, listened to it and then went off and bought it. So maybe the conversion rate is actually a lot higher than 7%. Because yeah, how do you track something like that?

Rob: When the statistic that you quoted, was that just for ChatGPT?

Elena: Yes.

Rob: And is that correlated with their shopping experience that they've been experimenting with?

Elena: You know, I don't know.

Rob: 'Cause I bet you that's how they're calculating that 7%, and then I would agree with you, it's definitely a lot higher than that. All of us are using Gemini and Claude and ChatGPT a lot more for shopping, but they have no way to do last-click attribution on something like that.

Elena: Just something kinda interesting. I'm sure we'll learn more about that in the days and years to come. So people can probably tell by now, based on this episode, that we are advocates of kind of showing up all year. But the obvious pushback is gonna be budget with advertising year-round. Especially for holiday advertisers, a lot of them wanna concentrate all their spend in Q4, and no one's saying to skip that. That time still matters a lot. So Ang, how do you think brands should think about splitting their investment between being always-on and then having that big Q4 push?

Angela: Yeah, I think some of this is channel strategy, too. Even beyond a percentage, it's hard to start with a universal percentage. There isn't one. You know, what category do you play in? How many competitors? What does your share of voice potentially look like outside of the holiday period versus inside of the holiday period?

So I think it's looking at those elements and trying to figure out how to best compete. But at the point of holiday shopping, we are all in bottom-of-funnel mode. So I think being in television can have a strategic advantage to provide that top-of-funnel awareness. But I think probably more important would be, how are we building that memory and familiarity with our consumers throughout the year?

That's where the always-on investment in a top-of-funnel channel, I think, makes a lot of sense. If you still have budget to play with during the holiday period in a way that can, you know, strategically allow you to compete with some of the brands that are out there, great. But I also think there are a lot of other ways to push some of the promotion that goes on during that period as well.

Elena: So yeah, you mentioned share of voice, and I'm wondering, like, is there an opportunity for brands to look at, like you said, like, "What's my share of voice in June and July versus my share of voice in November and December?"

And you also had me thinking, a lot of brands that do holiday TV only air in, like, November and December. Judging by this report, that's not saying that's not helpful, that's still probably useful, but you're missing out on all these previous times people are shopping. So if you are advertising outside of the end of the year, is that really just about cost savings, or do you think the bigger win is that share of voice and, like, being around when your competitors aren't? Like, if you were a brand, which one of those would you value the most?

Angela: I think, to your point, it's potentially both, but I think the visibility point is strategically interesting. There's a concept that I love. We talk about share of voice a lot, but it's like share of voice when the room is quiet. Everyone wants to shout when the consumer raises their hand, but there can be enormous value in showing up before that, when there are fewer competing messages and the consumer isn't being bombarded with, "Buy now, 40% off, ends tonight, Black Friday, Cyber Monday." And you don't necessarily need holiday creative in July.

You know, that's important. An evergreen strategy isn't "run Christmas for 12 months." It's just building those distinctive assets and those associations and the familiarity that you want available to someone's memory when Christmas eventually arrives. So by Q4, you're saying, "Hey, remember us?" You know, not, "Hi, nice to meet you."

Elena: So if you are a brand, say your year is made in November and December, it's made in Q4, but you decide we're gonna have an always-on presence, we're gonna invest in other months of the year, but that big sales spike is probably harder to measure. How would you recommend brands think about it working? Like, how could they measure the impact of that kind of investment versus something that's way more immediate, like a Black Friday promotion?

Angela: This is where I think measurement can accidentally train marketers to make bad decisions. You know, if I judge every advertising dollar by whether somebody purchased immediately afterward, I will naturally move more money towards people who are already closest to purchasing, and eventually I'm measuring my ability to harvest demand rather than my ability to create future demand.

The measurement has to match the job. For a Black Friday offer, absolutely, we have to look at immediate response, incremental sales, ROAS, et cetera. But for the investment you're making months earlier, I'd also wanna understand things like incremental reach and how is that moving share of search, awareness, consideration, mental availability, and ultimately whether exposed audiences are more likely to convert when the buying window arrives.

And then I think where possible, using experimentation to connect the two. So we've talked about holdout groups, geo tests, incrementality studies to help us answer the bigger question, which is, did the people or the markets that we were airing in, where we invested, actually perform differently than the others? And what was that impact of whatever that marketing was, not just directly and immediately, but also long-term over time to other channels, the halo impact, what happens to the sales team, what happens to brand awareness, but taking that incremental view.

Elena: Yes, that's a fun idea. Like, if you don't wanna do a national always-on test, could you pick some markets and then see if they perform better in the holiday season? I don't know why you wouldn't try something like that.

Well, to wrap us up here, question for both of you. Rob, you're on mute, so I'm sure it's clever, whatever you...

Rob: I have a spicy question first. One that you will probably wanna cut out of this, so I'm just gonna throw this out there. But I'm actually just curious, so I'm just gonna ask on the fly 'cause, you know, time is cheap. Let's pretend we as an agency decided to get into the product business, and let's pretend it was a stuffed animal.

And let's pretend that we just saw amazing response during a certain time of the year, and then the rest of the year is dead because you're in the toy business. How would you advise that particular person? Just not that this is close to home to our own history, but I'm actually just curious to go, okay, let's put our money where our experience is here and go, how would we do it differently today?

Angela: Than when we did it?

Rob: Than when we did it. Yes. So we did this, brought to market Stuffies, and it was a massive hit, and we exited it rather quickly. But we saw huge, huge sales during the holiday season, and we ran media during the holiday season just like everyone else on the planet did, 'cause we followed that playbook. Now, we're a lot smarter today, so how would...

Elena: Are you calling us hypocrites, Rob, or what are you...?

Rob: I'm saying we've been there. I mean, this is real. It's just like we have been there. We had a very seasonal item. It was extremely successful, but we fell into the exact scenario that we're now talking about again. So I'm just curious how we would maybe do it differently in hindsight.

Angela: Well, I was planning the media, so I feel a direct shot coming over the bow at this point. I will defend us because we weren't only in the holiday, we were airing all year. So we were doing exactly what we talk about here. And, interestingly, we were doing it without the marketing effectiveness playbook as we think about it today. Like, when we think about long and short, and we were DR, just we grew...

Rob: Measuring every penny...

Angela: Measuring every penny. But things like distinctive assets, that wasn't a part of our language at that point, and yet what did we develop?

Elena: A jingle.

Angela: A jingle. We were big believers in audio, and we were very distinctive. I think we could have been more distinctive, but I think we were pretty distinctive considering what we were marketing.

I think we believed that holiday would perform better if people knew who Stuffies was, and we believed that especially grandmas will buy toys for their grandkids all year, not just during the holidays.

Rob: So I stand corrected is what you're saying, is we actually were using an always-on strategy. I just was over in the creative department, didn't know what you were doing on the media keyboard over there.

Angela: Yeah. I mean, I think we were in test-and-learn mode, you know, and definitely trying to figure out where can the economics work, at what levels of spend, et cetera, you're trying to consider, you know, profit and things like that. So we were dealing with what everyone deals with, and what is that right level of always-on investment?

Rob: That is true. We also launched perhaps the world's greatest blanket called Sofa Socks, and we launched it in July. So that would say we believe in an always-on strategy as...

Elena: Right. That's definitely what that says and nothing else. If anyone wants to laugh, they should go look up Sofa Socks commercials on YouTube and look at some of the comments. People really didn't like our spots for Sofa Socks.

Angela: I still think that was a great idea.

Elena: I honestly, like, we used to have a bunch of those at my parents' house. Like, I wish I had a Sofa Sock right now. It's a good invention. But I guess, Rob, we did follow the principles more than is probably typical, but also if we were to launch a toy today, I think it'd be a lot more sophisticated in how we measure, you know, approaching it with that strategy in mind. But, okay.

Before we end, I want to ask both of you, do you have a favorite sort of holiday campaign or holiday commercial?

Angela: I do. I wonder if any of ours would be the same, but mine is the Campbell's Soup snowman. I love that one. You know, he's outside in the cold, and I watched it again this morning, and it's a category entry point. You know? When I used to watch that, I would never think category entry point, but with the lens of marketing effectiveness, you're like, "That's when you're chilly and you're outside playing in the snow, think Campbell's Soup."

Rob: Yeah, mine is an OG holiday spot as well, and I can't even tell you it's a good one, but I remember it, and it's the Norelco, the Santa sleighing across the landscape. I mean, that thing went from the 1960s all the way into the '90s. They kept remaking it, and it's funny 'cause it's a, it was attractive to a kid, but it was a shaver.

So I mean, there's a lot of weirdness about it, but it looked just like the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer animation. It was so delightful. And they even went so far — I actually had to watch it again this morning myself. I'm like, "Man, that was bold." They actually removed the R from the name of the product. So at the end it said Noelco, and then it said, "Even our name says Merry Christmas." And I'm like, "Wow, that was pretty bold." I had forgotten about that.

Elena: That's fun. So mine, I was struggling to remember, like, one from childhood, but one I really liked, I think it was last year, was when Apple did the Critter Carol commercial, and it was all — do you remember those, like, hand puppets that they had? It was really beautiful, and the guy dropped his iPhone, and the puppets took it and, like, did a little...

Are you remembering...

Rob: I don't know if I remember that, but I like...

Elena: Oh my gosh. Yeah, so this was last year. It was all over the place. But yeah, it's called A Critter Carol, and you should watch it. It's kind of fun. It's like, I guess they used handcrafted physical puppets. It's cute. They, like, take the person's phone and... It sort of stood out to me, I think.

A really beautiful set and stuff like that, but...

Angela: Nobody went with the obvious.

Rob: Oh...

Angela: Were we worried that we were gonna have overlapping answers?

Rob: I thought mine was obvious.

Angela: It's somewhat obvious. Mine's somewhat obvious, too. But there's another one that is even more...

Rob: Oh, is it the, is it the coffee commercial where the soldier shows up and, uh, what was it? The Folgers? No?

Angela: This is probably for my age. Like, Elena, I don't know if you would call this one obvious, but I guess there's two that stand out to me. There's the Coca-Cola polar bears...

Elena: Oh, yeah.

Angela: ...and then the Hershey's Kisses bells.

Rob: I don't see those as commercials. I see those as icons used in campaigns more than... But I'm with you on that.

Angela: Hershey's was running the bells last year. Like, they've run that...

Rob: Was it? Okay, okay. No, I think it was... okay. No, I'm with you on that. It totally resonates. Yep.

Elena: Yeah. I was gonna say, and Coca-Cola, they had the polar bears in their AI spot, didn't they? Weren't they a part of the spot?

Angela: Yep. I think they haven't done it every year, but they bring them back, and I think... But yeah, it's nostalgic for me.

Elena: Yeah, I was thinking Budweiser has some fun, like, Clydesdales, snowball fights and stuff like that, too. So those are always classics. I would just keep running those back if I was their brand manager every year. Just, like, just keep...

Angela: Never have to worry about holiday, just do...

Elena: Just keep it coming every year. Perfect. All right, I think that wraps us up.