Media Buying Briefing: Back-to-school brand spending on TikTok rises

The back-to-school sales period, which traditionally runs between late July and early September, is a major sales event. According to PwC, students and families will typically spend $922 on products related to school or college and 47% of households expect to increase their outlay. This year, advertisers began spending and staging promotions earlier than before. 

Hospitality brand Hilton, which is running a campaign promoting its Graduate hotel chain to parents and college students managing cross-country moves, leant heavily into TikTok, alongside Instagram and YouTube, for its activity.

“Spending on TikTok for this campaign was a non-negotiable. It’s a period when consumers are spending significant time on the platform, and brands are competing heavily for attention,” said Geoffrey Goldberg, co-founder and chief creative officer, Movers+Shakers, the agency behind the brand’s campaign; he didn’t share Hilton’s precise media mix.

For some clients, higher spending on TikTok has been prompted by an increase in sales through TikTok Shop.

According to NielsenIQ figures, TikTok Shop sales rose 84% between March 2025 and February of this year; the company placed TikTok Shop as the fourth largest retailer of health and beauty products in the United States, by annual sales. And eMarketer estimates sales will increase 48% over the course of 2026.

David Dweck, president at Go Fish Digital, said that TikTok spending increased 41% year on year among brand clients, while the number of advertisers using the channel during the back-to-school period rose 160%. “In terms of sales volume the last two years, we’re seeing it now right behind Amazon,” he told Digiday. 

The agency’s clients, he said, were moving their budget into TikTok because other e-commerce environments like Walmart and Amazon had become saturated for brands. “Once they max spend on Amazon and Google, they want to start going into TikTok Shop… a lot of our advertisers are trying to find white space,” he said.

Dweck said that clients had been running TikTok Shop Ads using the automated GMV Max format.

Among clients not targeting TikTok Shop sales, mid-funnel ad formats have proven popular. Johnston said that Tinuiti clients had made particular use of Consideration Ads, a campaign format offered by TikTok since last June. “TikTok’s been pushing that pretty hard,” he said.

TikTok isn’t the only channel clients have increased their spend on during recent months. Aynsley Moffitt, director of product management at Open Influence, told Digiday that YouTube spending had risen 6% over the summer months, but did not provide exact figures.

Dweck said that advertisers had also upped their spend on search, by 16% on average, during August. With increased competition between brands, the cost of search advertising on Google also increased by 20%, he estimated.

He credited it to the higher number of advertisers spending on search in general and the introduction of Google AI Overviews decreasing the amount of advertising surface area available to buy, circumstances that would likely last beyond the back-to-school phase. “I don’t expect it to decrease,” he said.

The back-to-school period appears to be evolving into a longer – and broader – event. According to Janine Flaccavento, svp of retail media for the Americas at retail media platform Criteo, advertisers had kicked off back-to-school campaigns about a week earlier than they did in 2025.

Moffitt said Open Influence’s clients began back-to-school spending following Independence Day. “We saw it pick up a little bit earlier this year,” he said.

Cookies, snacks and candy brand sales began rising during the first week of July, increasing by 80% by the first week of September, per Criteo data shared with Digiday. Paid media activity in sponsored products and display inventory within retail media networks like Walmart drove much of that sales activity, she said.  “If you [were] not advertising starting the second week of July, you missed out on a huge ramp up of sales,” added Flaccavento. 

While the calendar itself may be to blame – Labor Day, the traditional bookend to the sales period, falls later than usual in 2026 – advertisers likely spread out activity over a longer period to appeal to shoppers taking longer to make their purchasing decisions.

With the Trump administration’s ongoing tariff policies back on the news agenda thanks to the current U.S.-Canada trade war, Pascal Malotti, global retail strategy lead strategy director at Valtech, said calendar events like back-to-school offered cautious marketers more reliable opportunities for marketing activity amid economic “uncertainty”.

“The calendar is becoming a substitute for the forecast,” he said.

Color by numbers

The data center debate is driving political ad spend going into the November midterm elections in the U.S. The topic has become a leading subject in news media debates and is becoming an important battleground in elections across the U.S, according to AdImpact data. 

• $7.6 million: The amount that’s been spent on ads relating to data center polices so far this year
• 46: The number of advertisers that ran data center ads in July and August (55 in total)
• 73%: The proportion of those ads credited to Democrats
• $2.4 million: Sherrod Brown’s Ohio special election campaign is the biggest spender on the topic 

Takeoff & landing

• The big client news of the week was PepsiCo moving its $3.4 billion ad account from OMD to Publicis Groupe. Details are scant but the French holdco is set to build out a bespoke ‘One PepsiCo’ unit for the sodamaker; it’s also pulled out of the Coca-Cola review, per unconfirmed reports.
• CVS Health, meanwhile, retained Omnicom Media while appointing Dentsu to its creative account.
• Dept was appointed to lead SEO, programmatic and search marketing for urgent care provider American Family Care.
• OMD India won the media account of retail services company Ventura.
• EssenceMediacom picked up Godrej Consumer Products’ media account in Indonesia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, South Africa, Chile and Argentina.
• Personnel moves: Havas’s UK media boss Patrick Affleck was promoted to lead the group’s entire UK and Irish business as CEO, while M+C Saatchi Performance appointed EssenceMediacom planning director Sydney Geller as as senior planning director and Jellyfish hired former IPG Mediabrands investment director Seun Odeneye as its chief media officer.

Direct quote

“It started as everyone going to spend as much as you like because it was costing pennies. But it became a significant item… it became imperative for us, given the total spend. We had to go and build it.”

—Daniel Gilbert, CEO and founder of Brainlabs, discussing how the agency has begun monitoring its AI costs in real time.

Speed reading

Seb Joseph and Krystal Scanlon explained the ins and outs of Google’s great escape from an ad business breakup.

Joseph also found time to dig into the FTC’s suit against Amazon, including what the Commission’s beef reveals about Amazon’s ad auction practices. 

I wrote about Cindy Rose’s first year at the helm of WPP, taking in the decisions with her signature on, the conditions facing the company and perspectives from outside analysts, execs who’d seen her in action, and one of the few people to have occupied the same seat.

Another one from me: I wrote about how different media agencies are attempting to get ahead of AI costs by monitoring what their AI agents are actually doing, and what it’s actually costing them.

Weather-activated ads stand at the far edge of real-time personalisation in digital advertising, as I found out when I looked at Toyota’s strategy back in 2024. Moving the story forward, My Modern Retail colleague Mitchell Parton had an interesting piece about weather-activated programmatic ads being used by Ace Hardware.