Is Your Black Friday Ad Spend Actually Driving More Sales

Luke Austin (0:00)

The whole idea here is like, based on all of our understandings of what's most impactful to altering the trajectory of the business, right? What are the set of activities and investments to focus on over the course of these time periods? And specifically, we're focusing on focusing on Black Friday, Cyber Monday as this sort of microcosm right now. So, based on all these signals, what are the activities that produce the highest leverage and impact, the most growth for brands that we're seeing?

Richard Gaffin (0:28)

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Hey folks, welcome to the Ecommerce Playbook Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Gaffin, Director of Digital Product Strategy here at Common Thread Collective. And I'm joined again back in the studio by Mr. Luke Austin, who is our president here at Common Thread Collective. We're going to be digging a little bit deeper into some of the stuff we talked about yesterday around the new kind of paradigm of the intraday offer that we sort of predict is going, or we know will sort of be kind of the main event in this upcoming BFCM period here. So we're going to dig into that a little bit more. First off, as always, Luke, how are you doing today?

Luke Austin (1:58)

I'm doing great. Yeah, I'm doing great.

We live in this environment, I think. We were just talking before the podcast a bit about some of these predictions and ideas that we're chatting through. And last night until, I don't know, 7.3 or 8 p.m., we had someone doing a TikTok live in here, and we had another conversation going on. And then we have a Black Friday, Saturday, Monday, sort of Q4 boot camp planning workshop happening tomorrow. And so it's interesting to see these things converge in real time and then look out at the future and try to think, okay, what does this mean for brands out there? So we've got some semi-wild ideas, I guess I won't oversell it, but some of the things that we see are converging, and it's fun to try to live a couple steps ahead and see what could come to fruition over these coming weeks.

Richard Gaffin (2:42)

Yeah, and that's basically what we're going to talk about today, which is staying a couple steps ahead of a world that is rapidly changing and ground that is constantly shifting. And that's kind of the theme of what we discussed yesterday, which was kind of what broke down for us. The intraday offer, we call it phenomenon, I guess, which is the idea that like across the course of the day, you're changing your offer so that there's a new marketing moment, these sort of micro marketing moments as you would do with a broader calendar within the course of just the Cyber Monday weekend or sorry, BFCM weekend. So what we want to impact here is a little bit more about what we think the implications of that are or the potential things to be aware of as we move into BFCM and kind of the impact that the intraday offer phenomenon is going to have. So well, we talked about sort of the three or the two maybe prongs that come off of this are clarity on incrementality.

So overall, like the broader awareness amongst sophisticated brands, at least of incrementality and how that's going to affect the weekend, but then also what content might look like given this sort of intraday offer thing. So let's start with the first one talking about the impact of the broad understanding of incrementality on 2026

Luke Austin (3:52)

Yeah. So I think the whole idea here is based on all of our understandings of what's most impactful to altering the trajectory of the business.

What are the set of activities and investments to focus on over the course of these time periods? Specifically, we're focusing on Black Friday, Cyber Monday as this microcosm right now. So based on all these signals, what are the activities that produce the highest leverage and impact, the most growth for brands that we're seeing? I think part of this is connected, and we chatted about this in the previous episode, to you have creative output, you have media spend, you have your marketing calendar, you have your offer design, and how do all these things rank in terms of impacting the outcome of the business? So first thing, I think this year we're going to see more and more brands running conversion lifts and more incrementality tests over the course of the Black Friday, Cyber Monday period. We're seeing this more and more over the course of a sale period, so for July or Labor Day, and to understand what is the incrementality of my media spend in a specific moment in time that is very different consumer behavior than a normal time period. We ran some of these tests for a handful of our brands last year.