Retailers are still building holiday media plans around a single curve: slow build in October, ramp through November, peak at Black Friday and Cyber Monday, tail off in December. That curve doesn’t exist anymore.
Holiday shopping in 2025 split into two distinct peaks with a soft middle between them. Nearly a quarter of holiday budgets, 24%, were already spent before November 1, the highest share in five years. At the same time, 60% of shoppers didn’t expect to finish their holiday shopping until December. Consideration isn’t a Black Friday problem. It’s an October problem for one group of shoppers and a December problem for another, and a single undifferentiated November plan misses both.
Why this happened
Wish lists are being built earlier. Consumers are narrowing consideration sets for larger purchases well ahead of peak shopping windows, with many of those decisions locked in by October. Brands that show up only in November are showing up after a meaningful share of shoppers has already decided.
At the same time, a growing share of shoppers are deliberately waiting. NRF projected 158.9 million consumers would shop on the last Saturday before Christmas alone, evidence that the late window isn’t shrinking, it’s intensifying.
What this means for budget allocation
A plan that spends evenly across October through December is optimizing for an audience that doesn’t exist. The early-window shopper and the late-window shopper are different people with different intent signals, and they need to be reached with different timing, different messaging, and in many cases different channels entirely.
The practical shift: front-load consideration-stage investment into September and October, when value-driven shoppers are locking in decisions, and maintain a strong last-mile presence through December for the shoppers who haven’t finished yet. The middle of November, the period most Q4 plans over-invest in by habit, is actually the least differentiated moment in the entire season.
The cost of waiting
There’s a pricing penalty to treating Q4 as a single peak, too. Waiting until the traditional “peak” window to activate means competing for inventory after prices have already climbed, a dynamic worth its own conversation in our next post on Q4 CPM pressure.
This isn’t just a consumer behavior shift, either. It’s showing up in how advertisers themselves are buying. According to Perion’s own Q4 2026 Holiday Tentpole analysis, roughly a third of Q4 insertion orders now close in July through September, the real advance-booking window, rather than in the traditional October-to-November rush. Part of that is simple math: with an average 54-day sales cycle from RFP to close, per that same analysis, a campaign that needs to be live in October has to have its paperwork in by mid-August, or it’s chasing inventory that’s already been claimed.
That same analysis found retail alone sees close to 60% of its Q4 media business wrap up in this July-through-November window. The advertisers moving fastest aren’t reacting to a forecast, they’re reacting to the same reality this piece opened with: the consideration window starts earlier than the campaign calendar assumes, and the budget is following it there.
For now, the operating principle is simple: stop planning for a bell curve. Plan for a barbell, one budget strategy for the early consideration window, another for the late surge, and build in the flexibility to shift between them as the season actually unfolds rather than as originally forecast.
Planning for two peaks instead of one is the first shift. The next is knowing how to manage the budget once the campaign is live, shifting spend daily, adjusting creative in flight, reacting to inventory and demand signals as they change.
If you want to talk through how your Q4 plan handles that, contact us today.
