Tips Every Marketer Needs This Holiday Season

Every year around this time, marketers collectively lose their minds — in the best way possible. The Q4 plans we've been polishing since July finally go live. Budgets get unlocked. Creative gets shipped. And somewhere, a media buyer is refreshing a dashboard with the intensity of a day trader.

Then reality taps us on the shoulder: everyone else is doing the exact same thing. Every brand on earth is flooding every channel at the exact same moment, and this year they've got an army of AI tools cranking out infinite variations of it all. The average consumer is now wading through more promotional content in a single December afternoon than a 1990s consumer saw in a year. And they've adapted. Their inbox gets pre-sorted by an assistant. Their gift research happens inside a chatbot. Their skepticism toward anything that feels manufactured has never been more intense.

All of this to say: your doorbuster on wireless earbuds is not the main character of anyone's holiday season.

None of this means the season doesn't matter. It's still the Super Bowl of our industry, and great campaigns do break through. It just means breaking through requires us to remember that the people on the receiving end have lives, filters and, increasingly, AI agents.

So before you hit launch, here are 10 campaign tips worth considering.

1. The moment someone converts, stop advertising to them. 

Nothing makes a happy new customer hate your brand faster than being followed around the internet by the espresso machine they bought last Tuesday. 

Pipe your purchase data back into every platform you're running — fast — and exclude these buyers immediately. It's the most basic hygiene in marketing, and somehow half the industry flunks it every single year. Frankly, it should be a fireable offense.

2. Frequency caps are a group project. 

Each platform grades its own homework. Meta says you're fine. YouTube says you're fine. Your three retail media networks say you're fine. Stack those "fines" on top of each other and your prospect has now watched the same spot a dozen times before their second coffee. 

Think in terms of total exposure across your whole mix, vary the creative so repeat impressions at least feel different and cap aggressively wherever the levers exist. And don’t forget the inbox. Your ESP may happily let three different campaigns hit the same subscriber in one day because, technically, each one is doing exactly what it was told to do. 

Pro tip: For platforms without frequency-cap controls, create short-term exclusion audiences based on recent ad exposure or engagement as a workaround.

3. AI is a collaborator, not a ghostwriter. 

We use these tools every day and love them. But a campaign that was prompted into existence, approved by nobody in particular and pushed live at scale reads exactly like what it is — and audiences clock it instantly. Machine-made mediocrity is the most abundant resource of 2026. Perspective is the scarcest one. Bring a take, an opinion, a reason this campaign exists. Then let the tools help you make it faster and better.

4. If the chatbots don't know you, the shoppers might not either. 

An enormous share of product discovery has migrated from search results pages to AI-generated answers. When someone asks their assistant for "a great gift for a father-in-law who claims he wants nothing," a shortlist comes back — and being on it is everything. 

The fundamentals haven’t changed as much as the interface has: structured product information, genuinely useful content, accurate specs, real reviews. Those are what earn you a spot. Treat visibility in AI answers the way you treated organic rankings a decade ago, because that's exactly what it's become.

5. Some of your shoppers this year are not actually human. 

Buying agents are placing real orders now, and they are ruthless about friction. Inaccurate feeds, phantom inventory, prices that don't match across platforms, checkout flows that assume a human is squinting at them. It all gets you silently skipped.

Clean up the plumbing so the machines can transact with you. Then remember the machine isn't your customer; it's a middleman. A person still opens the box, and the box is where loyalty is actually won or lost.

6. Relevance is welcome. Surveillance is not. 

Modern tech stacks let you know an amazing amount of information about the person you're emailing. Resist the urge. There's a difference between a well-timed recommendation and a message that essentially says "we watched you hesitate on the checkout page at 11:47 p.m." Use what you know to send fewer, better messages, not to make people wonder what else you know.

7. Cute still wins, as long as it's real. 

Dogs in Santa hats, toddlers in reindeer pajamas. This stuff works because we're biologically defenseless against it. But generate that dog with AI and get one detail wrong — an extra paw, dead eyes, fur that behaves like liquid — and you've traded warmth for the uncanny valley. Hire the animal. Pay the pet talent fee. It’ll be the best line item in your budget.

8. Confidence sells. Panic doesn't. 

When week one underperforms, the temptation is to escalate: deeper discounts, louder subject lines, a "FINAL HOURS” email sent for the fifth consecutive day, a countdown clock that quietly starts over at midnight. Shoppers see through all of it and, worse, learn from it. Specifically, they learn to never buy from you at full price again. 

Hold your pricing logic, trust your plan and, while we're at it, let Christmas morning be Christmas morning. A promo email sent while people are opening presents helps exactly no one, and your auto-scheduled "season's greetings" isn't fooling anybody about how heartfelt it is.

9. The sale is the midpoint, not the finish line. 

Your brand gets judged in January, when the gift is the wrong size, the return label won't generate and support is quoting hour-long wait times. A huge portion of your December buyers have never purchased from you before, which means the post-purchase experience is their entire first impression. Easy returns, honest shipping updates, humans who answer — that's what converts a one-time gift buyer into a customer. Fund it like a campaign, because it performs like one.

10. Run everything through the "would this annoy me?" test. 

Strip away the targeting parameters and attribution models for a second. You're a consumer too. You know instantly when an ad respects your time and when it's wasting it, when an email helps and when it's noise. If you wouldn't want it landing in your own life, don't ship it into anyone else's. In a season drowning in automated everything, being recognizably, thoughtfully human isn't a soft skill — it's the whole competitive advantage.

Now go make something worth someone's attention. Happy holidays :-)