We had been planning for Black Friday and Cyber Monday for weeks – my team at Mediatative and client teams who look after websites and their marketing.
We’d been talking about how to execute the promotion, which products needed to be part of it, how long to run the promotion, and how to present the deals on websites.
Our approach in paid media ensured that we needed to support all these initiatives and make sure the message, visual creative, and promotion details would reach the right audience during the short period of promotion.
Of course, such a push in digital advertising also needs to have financial back-up. So, together with the clients, we also planned for strategic investment of media budget across the board and to increase the coverage with more paid media activation.
Having plans of execution ready we then spent days to create new campaigns across new platforms and update the BAU activity with new promotions details, all being ready to launch on a specific day.
A lot of effort and time went into thinking, planning, implementing, and managing the whole activation, not only before and during Black Friday promotion period, but also afterwards to make sure our BAU messaging was back live correctly, replacing promotion details in a timely manner.
Now, any thriving business should then reflect on their sales stats to see how successful this period was for them and if, after all the effort, there was any meaningful real return on investment.
Realistically the businesses’ internal and external resources are focused on this period of promotion for half a month, energy that could be spent on working on other medium to long term goals of the business. There is also the extra media investment that is spent in this period on top of the fact that products are sold at lower rates than usual.
Over the years I have seen a real mix of behaviour from brands. Some choose to go in fully and embrace the period of high consumers demands at any cost. Others choose to stay out of it all and focus on their BAU and their talents. And, why is that?
One of the main reasons is simply because of the inflated cost of reaching consumers during this period. The market competition increases massively, and not always at the rate that consumer demand increases. And that can only inflate the cost of buying inventory online. If brands compare their investment vs sales in November with the previous month/s, in some cases the number of sales may not improve sufficiently to justify all the effort and investment that have gone into this period.