Late to Xmas programmatic party? Get a move on…

Putting up a Christmas tree in late August would probably earn a few funny looks. But planning your festive advertising well before the season really begins in earnest should be a different matter.

Each year, you can hear the communal groans as the first Christmas ad appears. Yet, for programmatic marketers, the festive season should already be well underway. In fact, the best prepared will have been planning for the year’s great sales event for months.

Christmas creep is becoming an increasingly early phenomenon. Retailers are stretching promotions while shoppers begin researching potential purchases earlier, meaning that advertisers need to consider when they want to enter that journey. August or September might still feel too warm to be thinking about Christmas, but that is precisely when the preparation should have started.

A campaign that is briefed in late November will allow time to produce an ad, but leave a brand very little time to understand which audiences, messages and placements deserve spend. Ideally, marketers should begin planning their programmatic Christmas activities in late summer, because August and September provide time to produce and test creative, analyse audience response and refine bidding rules before demand begins to build. However, it’s never too late.

If that preparation hasn’t happened, there’s still time to get ready for Christmas, but brands must act fast. The priority should be to focus the time and budget available on the decisions that will make the biggest difference.

Brands often treat Black Friday as a one-off event. In reality, Q4 is an extended retail season that reaches a crescendo at Christmas. A buying plan must reflect when and how demand develops within a particular category, rather than spreading budget evenly across the whole period.

This is especially the case for marketers with moderate budgets who can’t compete everywhere at once. An offer-led campaign in November, for example, may need a different approach from one focused on gifting and delivery in December.

Smaller advertisers can also be tempted to push budget across as many environments as possible, in the hope of capturing more intent and gathering more information. The danger is that the budget becomes too thinly spread to produce a clear answer. Identifying which environments and messages resonate with an audience, then putting more investment behind what works, is likely to produce more useful results.

Creative also needs to reflect how consumers move through the marketing funnel. Someone doing their initial research is looking for different information from someone comparing offers, while a shopper facing a delivery deadline has another set of priorities. Showing all of them the same message risks missing an opportunity to help them make a decision.

Developing creative in late summer gives a brand time to consider those differences and produce a range of assets for different stages of the journey. For those starting in October, identifying and testing the most important messages now needs to be a priority.

Native ad formats can support that earlier consideration when they are clearly labelled and relevant to the surrounding content. A kitchenware advert alongside advice about entertaining, for example, can play a useful role before delivery deadlines become the main concern. But placement and creative need to work together, and marketers should examine whether interest continues beyond the click.

Alongside those tests, brands must agree on the rules that determine how the programmatic budget will be spent. What makes an impression worth buying? Which signals suggest genuine interest? How often should someone see the advertising? And what happens once they have purchased? Defining those rules now gives a campaign a firmer basis for scaling when demand builds.

Planning must also take into account how increasing volume over the festive period will reveal weaknesses in a campaign’s pacing, frequency control and bidding logic. As they scale, campaigns can decrease in efficiency as setup issues are exacerbated by increased size. A campaign that works reasonably well at modest scale can become considerably less efficient when more budget is pushed through it.

Maintaining the quality of the decisions that shape a campaign requires close attention. Simply buying more impressions may increase reach, but it does not necessarily improve performance.

Campaigns also need enough flexibility to respond to changes in consumer behaviour. That means deciding in advance how bids should change if media costs rise, which products can support promotional spend and how budgets should move as the season progresses. Making those decisions before investment increases is considerably easier than trying to resolve them while demand is peaking.

Starting while it’s still sunny outside leaves more time for that critical work. But if early November has arrived and the plans haven’t, there is still an opportunity – albeit in a narrowing window. The answer isn’t to try to do everything at once. Instead, focus on the decisions that can still improve performance: check measurement, test the most important creative assumptions and agree the bidding rules before increasing investment.

Nisha Eapen is head of accounts and client relationship at Preciso