Comscore's programmatic targeting division, Proximic by Comscore, and the ad tech platform, Nexxen have released data from a new survey highlighting major trends for Holiday ad spending that shows a relatively bullish ad climate.
The survey found that planning starts early, with 61% of marketers planning to spend the majority of their holiday budget in October and November. About three quarters (74%) of marketers finalize holiday marketing campaigns before Q4 begins with 97% finalizing holiday budgets by October.
The Holiday Checklist: A new report from Nexxen and Proximic by Comscore also reports that total consumer digital spend continues to rise – with an increase of 21% in total spend in H1 2023 compared to H1 2022 and that the Q4 spend is likely to set new records for consumer spend.
While there remains a lot of conversation about performance metrics, attention metrics, intent and awareness metrics, at the end of the day 61% of marketers said the most important metric was still ROI, followed by sales lift at 53%, the survey fould.
Other key findings include:
- 86% of marketers plan to spend the same or more on holiday advertising compared to last year, while only 12% plan to decrease.
- Ticket and event sales are now purchased primarily on mobile devices, hitting a peak of 87.6% of sales in this category coming from mobile in Q4 2022. This is likely due to the use of mobile devices as tickets such as QR codes.
- Apparel & Accessories moved up two spots in the digital consumer spend rankings in Q4 2022 to take the #1 spot for desktop digital commerce spend and held steady as the #2 spot on mobile, slightly outranked by consumer packaged goods (baby, food, pet). Digital content & subscriptions made the largest gain in desktop consumer spend moving up 3 spots in the rankings to #6.
- Consumer spend on mobile and digital devices is on a collision course, with Q4 showing consistent peaks each year. The highest peak was in Q4 2022 when mobile spend made up for 42% of total digital spend and desktop made up 58%. Q4 2023 is expected to break that peak, indicating that a mobile advertising and ecommerce strategy is more critical than ever for holiday success.
- Holiday shoppers tend to skew more female (+12.62% more likely to be a female vs. a male) and are more likely to be shopping for him (+19.07% more likely) and the kids (+7.34% more likely)
- Digital remains king for the holidays: 74-79% of marketers plan to incorporate digital, social and connected TV media into their holiday campaigns, whereas only 51% plan to incorporate linear TV ads
- Competition among advertisers will be at an all-time high, resulting in an increase in advertising cost. CPMs are expected to increase significantly as we move into Q4, with last year’s CPMs for CTV up 21.88% in Q4 vs. the rest of the year and Display CPMs up 24.95% compared to Q1-Q3.
- Holiday budgets will be split nearly evenly across programmatic and direct activations with 51% of budgets going towards direct and 49% towards programmatic
- When allocating budget across marketing tactics brand awareness will win the largest share of marketer spend this holiday season with 36.5% of total budgets, followed by new customer acquisition at 33% and existing customer retention/upsell at 30.5% - this aligns with the understanding that it costs more to capture a consumer’s attention at the top of the funnel than it does to re-engage an existing customer
- Contextual targeting’s moment has arrived as a cookie alternative - 68% of marketers plan to use contextual targeting this holiday season, compared to only 18% plan to rely on alternative identifiers
- First party data reliance remains a clear trend – 69% plan to use retargeting from first party data and 66% plan to incorporate first party data modeling approaches
- Customization and scale were the noted as the most important factors for marketers when collecting targeting data for holiday campaigns
- More than half (51%) of marketers plan to use predictive targeting tactics to combat signal loss this holiday season
- A surprising 35% of marketers were planning to use new ad platforms (DMPs, DSPs, SSPs) compared to the platforms they used last year. Cost to use platform and data availability were noted as the leading factors for selecting a platform partner
More information is available here.
