Is Your Black Friday Ad Spend Actually Driving More Sales

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 types? Specifically, we're focused on folks

in a Black Friday, Saturday, Monday, and it's sort of like, this microcosm right now. So what based on all these signals, what are the activities that produce the highest leverage and impact the most growth for brands ever seen?

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I'm your host, Richard Gaff, and director of Digital Product Strategy here at Common Threat Collective. And I'm joined again, back in the studio by Mr. Luke Austin, who was a president here at Common Threat Collective. We're going to dig in 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 we'll 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,

“but first off, as always, Luke, how are you doing today?”

- Yeah, I'm doing great. - Yeah, I'm doing great. We live in this environment, I think, we're 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, 7.30 or 8 pm, we had someone doing a TikTok live in here, and we had another conversation going on. And then we have a Black Friday, so our Monday,

sort of Q4 Bootcamp, playing workshop happening tomorrow. And so it's interesting to see these things converge in real time, and then look out if you turn try to think, okay, what does this, what does this mean for brands out there?

So we got some semi-oiled 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 in a couple steps ahead and see what could come to fruition or these coming weeks.

- 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 look broke down for us. The entry day offer, let me call phenomenon, I guess,

which is the idea that 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, BSM weekend. So what we want to unpack 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 entry day offer phenomena I'm gonna have. - So, well, we talked about sort of the three, there are the two maybe prongs that come off of this, are clarity on incrementality. So overall, 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 entry day offer thing.

So let's start with the first one,

talking about the impact of sort of the broad understanding of the incrementality on 2026.

“- Yeah, so I think 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 timers, specifically we're focused on focusing on Black Friday,

Cyber Monday is the sort of like, this microcosm right now. So what, 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? And I think, so part of this is connected, and we chat about this in the previous episode, so you like, you have creative output, you have media spending, 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? I think, so first thing, I think this year, we're going to see more and more brands running conversion left and or incrementality tests over the course

of the Black Friday ceremony period, we're seeing this more and more over the course of a sale period so far, July or Labor Day, and to understand what is the incrementality you might be to spend in a specific moment in time

that is a very different consumer than a normal time period. We ran some of these tests for a handful

There's a apprehension, I think, from most folks

about doing any sort of holdout, whether it be geo or user-based during time period like this. What I would just contend is, and especially in a conversion left study, it's a user-based holdout,

“and it's, you need to hold out a much lower percentage”

than you would in a geo holdout in terms of the total impact. And what we've seen from the handful of tests that we've run during these time period is you get a really different read on your incrementality factor

than you would in a normal time period, which directly influences the raw story, you need to run your media spend at, and the amount of the true incremental impact to be a media spend that can have really consequential impacts

on how much media spend you decide to allocate to each plot during this time period. So we're going to see, we're doing more and more that this year, we're going to see that done more and more,

and we're going to see this idea of like the how we understand

incrementality in these specific time periods, influencing the raw targets and the media spend, just get more, just get more normalized in that way. Head as a result of that, what that's going to lead to for most brands is not, okay, great, I can spend,

let's say I get a much lower incrementality factor than my meta media spend. So my raw story needs to be twice as high, so I'm going to go pocket that media spend, right? Like what we're all going to think about,

how do we redeploy those dollars to be able to drive more growth for the business,

“which then gets us into, I think, some of these other areas.”

So what, okay, what are the higher highest impact levers that we can redeploy that media spend in? But we're going to see more and more brands run these tests, get much clearer views of incrementality in these provotional periods, especially a time period

like Brock, Friday, Saturday, Monday,

where the impact of media spend is drastically different

than it is of it. - Man, right. - If you're a D to C brand and you're only running ads on social, you're fighting for the same crowded feed as everyone else.

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One is, so for brands, let's say, who are, you spoke to this a little bit, the brands who are hesitant about running something like geohold.tests during a period like Black Friday. What's your pitch for why it's important

to potentially give up some of that revenue? - So if what we have been seeing across the test that we've run is that there's marginal or incremental differences. Like, oh yeah, running mortality tests and like the I-Row-Ass read or the incrementality factor

is like five, 10% different, even like I would say potentially not worth the risk, but that's not what we're seeing. We're seeing like it's 30, 40, 50% variation and in some direction it gets your normal, your normal, read of that channel.

And in that case there's so much opportunity in either direction if you're getting that wide of an error bar that it's going to make up. That's going to make up for any potential impact of holding out.

And the user base hold out and a conversion of mechanism, like there isn't really a lot of opportunity. - Yeah. - To be honest, 'cause there's a lot of users on this. - Right.

- Yeah, of course. - And then so it's not a huge sacrifice, but the potential upside of it is huge, like an understanding that like let's say it's like a 50% or whatever, I mean like a point five, let's say,

a lift and a timetality, then that means that you're returning a lot more than the platform.

“Says it is, you should be pushing more spend”

or potentially in the other direction. Is that something that, yes, exactly. - Yeah, is Black Friday, is your metaspin on Black Friday ceremony? Many Google spend on Black Friday ceremony.

The most incremental spend or the least incremental spend have the right and so there's a pretty wide, wide range. - Yeah. - Okay, so one then broader question on that, which is, do you, so we talk about like,

okay, this is what we're doing with our brands, this is what we expect brands to be doing generally or at least more sophisticated brands. For, do you think that there's going to be any sort of broad macro impact to brands understanding

that this is how they should be allocating dollars on over BFCM? - Yeah, macro impact in terms of like, it lowers the CPM's on metal. - That's absolutely awesome.

- But overall behavior is somehow different and that's something to think about. Until, until more of the majority catches up, no. Like it's going to be the pretty similar, similar auction dynamics, similar, like,

high level of media spend and such big players that like for most brands, the I would count on the auction dynamics are going to stay pretty consistent. And so it's not something where like this year,

“next year I think we're going to see wide variations”

in terms of folks pulling back, spend meaningfully on Black Friday or it's spending twice as much they would otherwise, it'll work its way there next to three, four years. - No, we got a lot of time to get there.

- But then, but broadly that is something that potentially could happen just not right now. - Yeah, for sure. In the same way that like launching your Black Friday sale in early November was like hack, like,

oh, you got your early bird sale. CPM's are so much lower and you catch a lot of the demand and now it's like, okay, everyone does that, right? So, all right, okay.

So then let's move to sort of our second application here,

which is the way that content is going to work around these specific moments. So again, last time, or last episode that we were on together, we talked a little bit about how there was going to be these micro moments throughout the Black Friday period.

So let's say, on the morning of Black Friday, it's pre-gift with purchase and then a different gift with purchase by noon and then a different one by three o'clock, whatever. So, how do you think content production

and creative is going to shift to accommodate for that sort of rapidity of change in the offer? - Yeah, so maybe we, maybe we sort of call this the decentralizedization of Black Friday sale money 'cause this connects to the creative,

the creative piece we'll talk about here in a second too. So the intraday offer and messaging, so to give a couple other examples, you brought up a couple, but what we saw last year is more brands pivoting their offer

“and messaging strategy intraday during these days, right?”

So where it used, maybe it was like,

we have a cyber weekend sale. It's 30% off site wide, the whole cyber weekend. To like, oh, we do a 30% off site wide on Friday, then we do five, two, get one free on server. Monday, right, and you have some cadence.

To now, during each of those days, pivoting the offer to create new ways to speak to consumers all the time and keep them engaged. A couple examples, so on Black Friday last year, we had a brand running their core offer

and they would do these flash sale refund hours where they blast out email and SMS and then on their site and they refund a defined number of orders. Anyone who buys only the next hour, you're just gonna get full refund on it.

And so you just get people like buying more, right? And you refunded 10 orders and you made way more money, right? On Saturday they did one hour flash sale with a gift with purchase. They circled in a few different gift with purchases

or that's that baseline, right?

And then over the next hour, anyone who buys is also gonna get this gift with purchase up to X amount of orders. Another example, an apparel brand was doing a different hero product on the flash sale every day.

It's a starting like the week of leading up to Black Friday. So that Monday Tuesday, there's a different core hero product that's flash saleing that day. And then you have the rest of your assortment on sale to some extent.

And you have, again, more communications around this. Now you can send emails and SMS and you could have messages on the website. That's not just, hey, our 30% off site white sale is going, hey, our 30% off site white deals extended, right?

It's 30% off site white for the week and then every hour, 30% off site white plus gift with purchase with the next hour plus refunds for the next hour, plus blah, blah, blah, blah, and you just have it. And you're engaging people more and more in different ways

that also brings value to consumers. So we can go through more examples. We're gonna see that more and more this year. 'Cause it's really effective. And when you think about like, yeah,

the read on the income mentality of your media spend and then how that, you know, where you can read to play some of those dollars or where should those dollars be redeployed, this is an idea, right? It's like, okay, cool.

We're gonna give some more gift purchase. So let's account for it in the inventory cost.

“The other phenomenon we're seeing generally, right?”

Going on with TikTok Shop Creative and Tribe is brands are launching more and more ads than ever, thousands of ads a month. And the way that that's happening is they're outsourcing to create a production to creators, right?

You're seeing out product, you're having creators post it and then getting paid to percentage of GMV on that. So you don't have to go and fork over 200 grand that much to make 2000 UGC videos from whatever vendor, right? So we're all seeing this phenomenon happening.

More and more brands, launching a thousand, two thousand, three thousand net new ads a month is a norm now in this construct. What it's doing is it's outsourcing the creative your creative production, right? So maybe you have some general guidelines

but the creators have a lot more say and are driving their individual expression of your brand in your product and then doing it in a way where they're incentivizing it's the sale of it on the back end. I think it's interesting to think about the intraday offer

as it relates to the creative mechanism in this way, where if we take a couple of those examples where you have, let's say the founder of the brand doing these intraday offers and hey, I'm gonna do a flash sale from the next hour and they send out a plain text email, right?

Or hey, over the next, this hour I'm gonna do a gift with purchase so it's one person in the brand's still doing this. What if you had 50 creators doing that throughout the day, right?

and there's a defined set of parameters around the offers

and a messaging that they can use, right? Based on so you could have like a offer that you can run over the course of these days. Now, by two, get one free, you can do gift with purchase with these products as long as they're in stock.

Keep you guys updated within our discord or within whatever communication is, you can do refunds for two people over the next hour, whatever it is, right? You like some offer constructs and within that,

you create optionality for the creator to be able to create messaging uniqueness over the course of these days as well and higher volume of content output. So while the founder is going, okay, it's Black Friday, I'm going to do a flash sale refund over this hour.

You have one of your top creators who's been posting content all day and maybe they're even going live on behalf of your brand and they're doing, hey, using my code, you can get a gift with purchase

over the next hour, right?

Like they have, everyone is expressing the brand within the defined constructs that have been agreed

“on expressing the brand in more and more ways you need to them.”

And so you have similar to create, create of his outsource via TikTok shop, drive to all the creators, you have your creative and your messaging and your offer orientation are all getting a higher volume of distribution points

and unique messaging through all these end nodes of these sort of decentralized spokesperson on spokespeople on behalf of the, on behalf of the brand. That's going to similar to competitions on TikTok shops and blitz or blitzes, you're just gonna,

I think we're gonna see more and more of this like the idea that you have a block Friday offered 3% off site wide and like you send in a VIP email out and that's how it gets announced to the world. Go more creator lead where you have block Friday offer,

you have hundreds of creators posting on behalf.

Their block Friday offers live

and then you're incentivizing them to continue to push your brand with novel messaging equipping them with what they need to be able to express unique offers, gift approaches, et cetera, throughout the course of those days

to be able to create novelty new messaging and newness over the course of these days and a decentralized creator lead fashion for the brand, rather than it being stagnant and centralized. - Yeah, right.

And I think that's overall the theme of all of this is that decentralization is coming

“because it's the only way essentially to handle”

the scale required to compete. And so we've been preaching that message with creative just generally for the last, maybe year or so. And so this is no different.

The idea and like, okay, if having this sort of variant offers across the course of the day is something that you want to pursue, then it would make sense to actually farm that out as well across a vast sort of swathens

the creators they've given. So, yeah. So, yeah, it's an interesting idea is something to definitely consider. I mean, is this something that we've seen

or is this something that we're just sort of that's off the top of Luke's Dome right now? - We've seen it done with like some brands with just a couple, like one or two creators, especially if there's, you know, the founding team,

there's like a high profile influencer that was part of the founding team. They're doing stuff like this all during the day, right? It's somewhat of like what the founder would be doing. So, we've seen this done when there's like one or two

influencer/creators, like people with social following that are sizable that are directly connected to the brand. We haven't seen this done in the same way that you would have like a blitz coordinated through Luke on TikTok shop.

Or you have 40, 50 creators all going launching the product, blasting out multiple pieces of content, even going live during that day. And it being a really creator-led, launching and clipping those folks in that way

at this level of scale, which I think is, which I think is interesting to see. But it makes a lot of sense. Like if there's the incentive there, some of the like, if you have, let's say a brand

is started by a founder and then like an influencer, like the operator and the influencer or the founding team, they're both gonna be doing stuff during the day. Maybe the operators like sending out these flash-stale emails SMS and the influencers like going live on their Instagram

right. So it, because that, because the incentive is there, if that's happening instead of two or three people, of course the day 20, 30, 40, 50 people, and then multiple pieces of content and live content

and rotating offers and messaging. I just think there's like, there's more, more competition for us all in terms of our attention and the interest and the way that content is being pursued. That like, yeah, even like Black Friday

and waiting in line at Best Buy or whatever, like is it, like there's so much, there's so many ideas for a way that a brand can express itself by you have a creator that's in line at Best Buy and talking to people and, hey, for the next hour,

we're doing, you know, like there's just so many ways that the bars being raised for the content that exists out in the world and how to make it interesting,

“that's I think the only way to be able to solve for that”

is like how we think about creative diversities, you have a diversity of production sources.

from the single or the group note at the center

to find new ways of expressing yourself and interesting and an interesting fashion. Now, cool. Well, I mean to think that kind of covers those two. The anything else that comes to mind

that feels like an important implication of disobey or off an album that we're talking about. It hasn't been defined in a way that we've seen very clearly but there's a tension in all this of like being true to your brand and having to bring guidelines

“and messaging that for many, like I think a good example”

this is with the tribe, the guys that run tribe,

Lucas and with his brand and like what those days like don't,

you can put a brief into tribe when you do a campaign and like give all these details and they're like don't. Like, you know, maybe add a sentence or two if you have like health claims about the product but like it's not, they're not really gonna read it.

Like you have like a 10 page Google doc about all these things and like you don't really want that. Like it's going to result in a much more narrow expression of that thing. So I think that's gonna be the challenge

and the opportunity for brands is being able to relinquish some of the, this is how I see myself and my brand to like, okay, I've really good product

“and that's like the core of what this is, right?”

And there's some, there's primarily financial guidelines in terms of what makes sense of how we make money on that, right? That like the incentives that we pay out and the raw story we operate out, et cetera.

But outside of that, how do I equip people who are really, really good at creating content and selling product to do so and really unique and interesting ways that could be very different than anything you have

in your mind or have expected or seen before. And so I think in all of this, the simplifying down as much as possible to the essence of the thing. This is our product, this is the core of the thing.

How do we get that in the world and let other people sell that and bring it to life in really, really unique ways and their individual communities is the challenge and the opportunity to come.

- Indeed, well, I did, it came to mind as I like the struggle between branded content and UGC has been a thing forever. Since I've been here, it's been like nine year. And the issue of brands not wanting to relinquish creative control of how their brand presents in the world,

but it feels like this year, more than any, like the rubbers really hitting the road and people are going to have to embrace it

because ultimately the reason UGC works

is that you are relinquishing your control of the brand message and you are giving people a chance to see what your product quote unquote really looks like in the real world and that's the power of it and I feel like this now more than ever,

that's exactly where you're going to have to do to win.

“- So cool, unless there's anything else you want to hit?”

- No, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm the big we need anymore. - Wow, wow, that idea is here. - That's right, that's right. - Good to have you out, all right, cool. Well, thanks for joining us, Luke, of course,

and thanks to all of you for listening. Of course, Black Friday's coming up. If you're interested in having somebody help build this out for you, of course, we are there. Commentswork.com, hit that high wrist button,

let us know you're interested in talking about creative or our full service offering and even that stuff. We would love to have a challenge. All right, folks, thank you for listening. Take care.

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