Advertising at Christmas

 

Absolutely not.

Every year we find many clients finish their campaigns the Friday or Sunday before Christmas. We urge you not to for these reasons:

You may be going offline but your potential customers are not

In the era of smart phones your target audience are less likely to disconnect. They probably should … but they probably do not.

Cost

Our friends at Xandr agree, but for a slightly different reason: “While this time is generally devoted to rest and relaxation, the days between Christmas and New Year’s are a huge opportunity for the savvy [advertising] buyer. While prices dip and competition subsides, there are big performance gains to be had.” Indeed.

New Year is an important temporal landmark

New Year’s Resolutions are made at New Year: many users resolve to change their lives (and often their finances) in the coming year and they do it over the holidays when they have some time to think and in preparation for the “new” year. We would strongly suggest it is better that your ad is in front of them when they do this. Katy Milkman from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and other academics agree:

Put Your Imperfections behind You: Temporal Landmarks Spur Goal Initiation When They Signal New Beginnings

Dai, Milkman & Rees 2015

“People often fail to muster the motivation needed to initiate goal pursuit. Across five laboratory experiments, we explore when people naturally experience enhanced motivation to take actions that facilitate goal pursuit and why certain days are more likely to spur goal initiation than others. We provide causal evidence that emphasizing a temporal landmark marking the beginning of a new time period increases people’s intentions to initiate goal pursuit. In addition, we propose and show that people’s strengthened motivation to begin pursuing their aspirations following such temporal landmarks originates in part from the psychological disassociation these landmarks induce from a person’s past, imperfect self.”

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