‘You don’t want to be discounting so much’: Confessions of a media buyer on the challenges of an extended Black Friday Cyber Monday

Some brands you work with are having to extend some BFCM sales longer than they planned on this year. Tell us what’s going on. 

We got some direction on Amazon’s Black Friday sale [earlier this month]. If you wanted to participate in the deals, you had to run the deal starting on the 21st for the 12 day period. They pulled forward and basically they started their Black Friday sale on the 21st. So then all the brands had to follow so if you wanted to get that elusive Black Friday deals sticker on your products, which by the way has a lot of conversion impact, you had to participate for the full duration, which is the 21st through December 2nd. Not all brands were planning on having their Black Friday discount and go for that long and then on top of it, you have to have a certain threshold [of ad spending].

BFCM in general has extended far beyond the normal few days in recent years.  

The challenge here [for brands] is that it has gone from, you do a Black Friday promo to you’re doing some sort of heavy discounting for a big chunk of December. Now you’re having a promotion that you’re actually calling a Black Friday deal and it’s going on for 12 days [to be part of Amazon’s promotion]. The result is you’re going deeper on the discounting and you train the consumer for these deep discounting opportunities — it’s really hard to un-train them later on.

That extended discount window can’t be easy to navigate for smaller brands. 

The bigger brands, they can make up the volume, but for the smaller brands, they have a limit. Look at the DTC or the beauty space, for example, once you start going beyond 30% on beauty discounts, it’s not profitable, you’re just not gonna make the margins. And so if you’re training the consumer to wait for something beyond 30% and you start offering it [earlier, it’s a difficult spot] for the smaller brands. In some verticals like beauty you as a brand have to decide, Am I willing to win the [customer on] cost or do I want to be profitable? And that’s a dangerous place to be at.

As this longer window of discounts has become normalized for BFCM, how has that changed the media buying process for brands?

From an immediate perspective, we’re spending more. From a media perspective, you want to support the promotional period. So if the performance is there, then you’re investing more before and during sale.

How much more on average are you spending when you’re having this longer discount window?

We’re in the middle of it right now so we’ll see how the data maps out. This holiday season, our Meta budgets are up anywhere from 20% to 30% year-over-year. Closer to 30%, I think.

Our spend is definitely growing and we’re also spending a little bit more on some of the emerging channels. We’ll see where everything knocks out but it’s looking like a pretty healthy holiday spend season. The reason that we spend more is also because we see stronger performance. So yes, you’re spending more and you have the deeper discounts but the volume of conversion that you have justifies it.

Aside from the longer discount cycle and the higher media spend, are marketers having to up the ante for actual Black Friday and Cyber Monday in some way to differentiate from the ongoing sale window? 

In some ways, we’re much more creative. There’s a lot more gifts with purchases (GWP). There’s a lot more conversations about free shipping, a lot more conversations about doing something extra on the specific Black Friday deals, not necessarily as a discount, but as some sort of like either you do a GWP with an actual, full size product or you do a deeper highlight of a discount on one type of category or you do a GWP in one type category. So you’re getting to be much more creative versus just being a blanket. “Hey, we’re 50% off right now.”

How should brands be thinking about this new norm of this longer window for BFCM? 

Most brands want to be kind of in this aspirational place which means you don’t want to be discounting so much. They have to balance between being promotional to stay relevant and being close to the brand roots. I would say planning for unique products that are [only available] for holiday limited times or discounting and doing GWPs is probably the best way to protect the brand. But it requires a fair bit of planning ahead of time. 

What kind of planning?

It took us by surprise that Amazon started their Black Friday, what they call Black Friday discounting, so early. So I would say that as a brand, the takeaway for next year is that I need to have a lead up earlier in November because you don’t wanna be the last one to launch your sale. And you don’t wanna be scrambling to figure out if you need to pull your sale up. With a big retailer like Amazon launching their sale so early, it makes the brand say, “Next year we need to be ready to pull something earlier in case we’re in the same boat.” It doesn’t necessarily always mean discounting. It could be highlighting business products that are launching your holiday collection or discounting your unique holiday exclusives and having different days to highlight different things.

How should brands manage sales continuing to creep earlier and earlier? 

People start selling their Halloween costumes in August now. You go to Target and the Halloween displays are out before the kids go back to school. The holiday season is starting earlier and earlier — and it’s driven by the advertising space. This is where brands have to get creative with talking about holidays earlier in the season, but maybe not necessarily that everything is [discounted] off right. That’s the way to still have a voice but not necessarily have a race to the bottom.