Lessons for Brands to Win the 2026 Holiday Season, From the Advertisers Already Doing It

Don't look now, but the holidays are right around the corner. You may not have even taken your summer vacation yet, and the idea of digging winter jackets out of storage feels deeply depressing. But advertisers? They're already in a jolly, holly holiday mood, and it seems to start a little earlier every year, and 2026 is no exception.

So we asked our customers how they're getting ready. We surveyed a diverse mix of brands, from BYLT and Tecovas to MANSCAPED and Bearbottom Clothing, and more, about their holiday planning, creative strategy, and how TV fits into their biggest sales season of the year.

Here's what we found, and what it means for your holiday strategy.

Holiday Ad Budgets Are Rising (Again)

TV ad budgets are growing heading into Black Friday. Nearly 6 in 10 advertisers say they'll increase their BFCM TV spend compared to last year. In fact, those planning a significant increase jumped from 16% in 2025 to 22% this year. That's not just more brands spending on TV, it’s existing advertisers betting bigger with greater conviction. Only 7% of brands surveyed are cutting budgets, meaning more than 9 in 10 brands are growing or holding steady heading into the holiday stretch.

Lesson: More competition means timing and efficiency matter more than ever before.

With budgets rising across the board, competition for quality TV inventory is intensifying. The brands that pace their spend strategically, building toward peak BFCM moments rather than front-loading or waiting until the last minute, consistently see stronger clearance and efficiency. Use your historical performance data to identify when demand and conversion rates spike, then structure your buys around those windows. Starting early also gives you leverage on inventory that will be gone by the time late planners come to market.

TV Is Driving Digital Sales, Not Door Busters

Black Friday once meant bundling up at 4am to wait in line for the mall to open. For the TV advertisers planning this year's campaigns, that world no longer exists, at least not as a primary goal. When asked which sales channels they're prioritizing for the holidays, not a single advertiser cited in-store. Amazon registered at just 3%. Instead, 58% are focused squarely on their DTC website, with 39% taking an omni-channel approach that still prioritizes digital. TV has evolved beyond just a brand awareness play into a performance channel engineered to drive consumers directly to a checkout page.

Lesson: Build your ad creative and measurement around the digital checkout.

Make sure your attribution is set up to capture the full funnel impact from TV impression to site visit to purchase. Consider retargeting website visitors on TV to re-engage the audiences your digital channels are already driving to your site. And make your BFCM offer clear and direct in your creative. Viewers who respond to TV ads during the holidays are ready to buy. Make it easy for them.

October Is the New November

The traditional Black Friday window has expanded dramatically. More than half of advertisers (54%) plan to be in-market with holiday messaging before mid-November, with 17% launching their BFCM TV campaigns as early as October. This makes sense since this aligns with shoppers who have been hunting for deals as early as the fall. The largest single group (37%) is going live in early November, weeks before the shopping weekend actually begins. Only 1 in 4 are waiting until Thanksgiving week.

Lesson: The earlier you plan, the better your inventory options.

BFCM is no longer a weekend sprint. It's a multi-week campaign requiring earlier creative production, earlier media commitments, and faster optimization cycles. Brands that lock in placements and build audience familiarity before the holiday noise peaks tend to see stronger performance and pay less for it. Premium inventory goes fast. The brands that are already planning in July are the same ones who won't be scrambling in October.

The More Screens the Merrier: Brands Will Use Linear and Streaming Together

When asked which channels they're prioritizing, linear TV and streaming/CTV were separated by just 5 percentage points. The era of "linear vs. streaming" is effectively over. Today's TV advertiser runs both, and the data reflects it.

Lesson: Linear and streaming amplify each other. Run them together.

What's equally striking is that Paid Social tied linear TV at the top, with 77.5% of advertisers running both TV and social simultaneously. That's not a coincidence. TV and social are most powerful when they work together. TV creates the brand familiarity and emotional resonance that makes your paid social ads more efficient. Viewers who've already seen your TV spot are far more likely to click when they encounter your brand again on Instagram or facebook. It's what we call the halo effect, and the advertisers in this survey are clearly building their holiday mix around it.

One emerging finding worth watching: 1 in 5 advertisers are already buying inventory on LLM platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity, a nascent but fast-moving signal that AI-powered search is becoming a paid media channel in its own right. And we believe TV will work side-by-side with this new channel as well.

Linear still delivers unmatched reach, particularly during Q4 when holiday programming draws some of the year's largest audiences. Streaming gives you precision targeting, frequency control, and the ability to reach cord-cutters who aren't reachable on linear. Together they create a full-funnel TV presence that neither channel can achieve alone. If you're only running one, you're leaving reach or efficiency on the table — and probably both.

Marketers Are Unwrapping AI This Holiday Season

Artificial intelligence has moved from buzzword to workshop staple. 61% of advertisers are currently using AI tools to support their holiday TV campaigns, whether for creative development, audience targeting, campaign optimization, or all three simultaneously. Think of it like having a team of tireless elves handling the repetitive, time-consuming work, so your team can focus on the big strategic decisions. An additional 12% plan to adopt AI tools in the near future, bringing the share of AI-engaged advertisers to nearly 3 in 4. Only 27% have no current or near-term AI plans.

Lesson: The question is no longer whether to use AI in your TV workflow. It's how and when you’ll use it.

The advertisers already using AI aren't just saving time. They're making faster decisions, testing more creative variants, and optimizing campaigns with a speed and precision that manual workflows can't match. If you haven't started experimenting with AI tools in your TV workflow, whether for script ideation, audience segmentation, or performance reporting, the leadup to BFCM is a high-stakes moment to start. The gap between AI-enabled and AI-absent advertisers will only widen heading into future holiday seasons.

Performance Over Presence: Every Holiday Dollar Has to Earn its Place

Not every TV campaign lives or dies by the numbers, but for the critical holiday season, TV campaigns increasingly do. 70% of advertisers are using pixel-based attribution to measure their TV campaigns. More than half run incrementality testing, and 45% use media mix modeling, often in combination to triangulate TV's true impact. Only 13% have no formal measurement approach in place.

Perhaps most telling is how advertisers prioritized spend and budget delivery for their BFCM campaigns. 83% chose maximized performance over budget clearance. During the holidays, when media costs spike and every dollar is under a microscope, the instinct might be to just get the spend out the door and check the box. But that's not what these advertisers are doing. They're holding their holiday campaigns to an outcomes standard, ensuring that their campaigns actually drive sales during the most important shopping weekend of the year.

Lesson: Measurement is what turns holiday TV spend from a leap of faith into a confident bet.

If you're still running TV without a clear measurement framework, you're making decisions in the dark during the most expensive period of the year. Tatari's pixel-based attribution helps advertisers understand the impact TV is actually driving versus what would have happened anyway.

Advertisers Aren't Giving Themselves a Holiday Pass on Performance

Here's a counter-intuitive finding: despite BFCM being the most expensive, most competitive advertising period of the year, nearly 4 in 10 advertisers are holding their CPA and CPM thresholds completely steady. Only 34% have adjusted their targets to account for higher holiday costs. TV measurement has matured to the point where advertisers trust the channel to perform at standard benchmarks even when media costs spike.

Lesson: The seasonal lift in consumer intent often justifies the cost, if you're measuring it correctly.

Tatari data consistently shows that brands running BFCM TV spots see a meaningful boost in conversion rates during Black Friday week compared to a typical week. That lift often offsets the higher CPMs that come with peak-season inventory. The key is having the measurement infrastructure to see it clearly. Brands that relax their performance standards during the holidays without understanding their true baseline often overpay. Brands that hold the line and trust their measurement tend to come out ahead.

Most Brands Are Going Back to Their Holiday Hits

Only 1 in 5 advertisers are producing net-new, BFCM-specific TV spots this year. The majority are repurposing existing creative, either holiday or non-holiday, and nearly 30% haven't decided yet. That means roughly 4 in 5 TV advertisers will be running recycled spots during the most cluttered advertising period of the year.

Lesson: Repurposing existing content is still a strong strategy but if you have the opportunity to create net-new creative, it could wind up being an advantage.

Repurposing strong creative isn't a shortcut. It's a smart, efficient strategy, and the data confirms it's common practice among sophisticated TV advertisers. Start by identifying what performed well in previous campaigns and bring it back with refreshed offers or updated messaging. At the same time, if you have the capacity to produce even one holiday-specific spot, the competitive landscape for original creative is wide open. Standing out on TV during the holidays is harder than ever, but most of your competition isn't even trying.

Marketers aren’t Pushing Play on Interactive Ads for the Holidays

Despite significant industry buzz around shoppable TV, pause ads, and interactive formats, 3 in 4 advertisers are not incorporating them into their BFCM campaigns. And honestly? That makes a lot of sense. The holidays are the highest-stakes, fastest-moving period of the advertising calendar. Most brands want their campaigns bulletproof and operational from day one, not in a testing phase when every day counts. The 24% who are running interactive formats represent an early-adopter cohort willing to experiment during peak season. The majority are playing it smart, keeping execution lean and focused.

Lesson: New formats reward early testers, but only when you have the runway to learn.

If you have the bandwidth and the creative infrastructure to run interactive ad formats, BFCM is a high-intent moment where shoppable ads could shine. But if you're already stretched thin managing a multi-week holiday campaign across linear and streaming, this is not the season to add new variables. Build your foundation first. Test interactive formats in a lower-stakes period, prove out the workflow, and come into next holiday season ready to scale what you've learned.

The Creator-TV Convergence Is Coming — Just Not in Time for the Holidays

The blurring of creator content and television advertising is one of 2026's defining media trends, but most advertisers haven't made the leap for the holidays. The majority are keeping their TV and influencer strategies in separate lanes this holiday. That said, the pipeline is growing. 15% are already repurposing creator content as TV or CTV ads, and nearly 1 in 4 are actively exploring the convergence even if they haven't committed to this cycle. In total, roughly 4 in 10 advertisers are either blending creator and TV or planning to.

Lesson: Trust your holiday playbook for what’s worked, but don’t shy away from experimenting with broadening your approach as you head into the new year.

The barriers between creator content and TV advertising are falling. Streaming platforms are actively building ad formats designed for creator-style video, and audiences increasingly expect the same authenticity on TV that they get on social. Brands that start experimenting now, even just by repurposing high-performing creator content as CTV pre-rolls, will have a meaningful head start by the time this convergence reaches critical mass.

‘Tis the Season for TV. And Now You Should be Ready.

As the holiday season approaches, the TV advertisers in this survey share a common thread: they're moving earlier, measuring more rigorously, and treating TV as a performance channel that needs to earn every dollar. Following their lead, and applying the lessons above, can help your BFCM campaigns cut through when it counts most.