There’s still time to get your Christmas campaign up
By October, it can feel like Christmas advertising is already done and dusted. The big TV spots are in production, premium placements have been booked, and somewhere a brand is putting the finishing touches to an emotional 90-second film involving a lonely woodland creature and an acoustic cover of an ’80s song.
So if your Christmas campaign still exists mainly as a conversation in a meeting room, you might assume you’ve missed your chance.
You haven’t. You may have missed the point where you can behave like John Lewis, but there are still plenty of ways to get in front of people between now and Christmas. And in some cases, being later can actually force you to be more focused.
Go lo-ho-ho-cal
The instinct with Christmas is usually to think big. Big audiences, big national campaigns, big media spends. But Christmas itself is made up of thousands of very local moments. For instance, people leaving work drinks, doing the big shop, panic-buying presents, sitting in traffic outside a retail park or suddenly realising at 4pm on Christmas Eve that they haven’t bought anything for Auntie Bev.
That creates plenty of opportunities for brands that can be in the right place, rather than everywhere at once.
Digital Out-of-Home makes that considerably easier. A restaurant could concentrate spend around nearby offices. A retailer could target screens close to stores. A drinks brand could focus on nightlife areas on Thursday and Friday evenings. A local business could own the handful of postcodes that actually matter to it.
Less “Merry Christmas, Britain.” More “Merry Christmas, people currently 600 metres from our shop.”
Make your media earn its Christmas bonus
Digital media also means your campaign doesn’t have to sit there repeating the same festive message for six weeks.
Programmatic OOH can react to location, time of day, weather and other contextual signals, making the creative more useful. You could push coffee in the morning, lunch offers at midday, gifting after work and delivery deadlines as Christmas gets closer.
And because the creative can change by location, there’s no reason Manchester has to see exactly the same thing as Maidstone. Local references, nearby stores, stock availability, journey times or simple directional messaging can make an ordinary Christmas ad feel much more relevant.
The person calmly browsing gift ideas in early December is very different from the person searching “Christmas gifts delivered tomorrow” on the 22nd. Your advertising should be able to change with them.
Follow the festive footfall
The same logic applies online. Paid social, search, display, online video and retail media can all be activated quickly and targeted much more tightly than a traditional national campaign.
Instead of asking, “How do we reach everyone this Christmas?”, a better question is: “Where are the people most likely to buy from us, and when and where are they most receptive to engaging with us?”
That might mean someone searching for last-minute gifts, walking through the shopping centre containing your store, living within your delivery radius or visiting your website after abandoning a basket.
It starts to look less like a media plan built around broad demographic assumptions and more like one built around actual behaviour.
A little late can be a gift
There’s also something to be said for making a Christmas campaign now rather than signing it off in March.
You know what people are talking about, what’s selling, what your competitors are doing and what your customers currently need. A campaign planned nine months ago might have scale, but one made now can have context.
That doesn’t mean throwing strategy out of the window and chasing every passing trend. It means having an idea flexible enough to respond to the world it appears in.
For smaller brands in particular, that can be a much more useful way to spend a Christmas budget.
Have you missed the sleigh?
If you’re hoping to book every poster on Oxford Street and make a three-minute spectacular starring David Beckham, then possibly.
But if you want to reach a defined audience, in particular places, at useful moments, with creative that can change as Christmas approaches, there’s still plenty you can do.
Think local OOH, programmatic DOOH, paid social, search, retail media, local publishers, hyper-local creators, store proximity and short bursts of activity around the moments that actually matter.
You don’t necessarily need six months and an enormous media budget. You need a good idea, a clear audience and a better understanding of where they’ll be doing their Christmas shopping.
Preferably before Auntie Bev gets another pair of socks.
Let’s do something Cheeky together
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