The Christmas campaign is already around the corner. Vigo, that early peninsular Christmas adopter, has, in fact, already started the countdown to the lighting of its Christmas lights. Retail, although it has yet to go through the Halloween campaign, is already positioning itself to sell as much as possible at Christmas, a Christmas that can be much more similar to those of pre-covid life than to the pandemic of 2020.
The marketing and advertising strategies for the Christmas campaign are already more than fine-tuned and marketers are already very clear about what they want to do. Projections invite optimism. The conclusions of the latest Digiday + Research analysis allow us to outline how things will be and what companies will work on during the Christmas campaign. In general, this year’s Christmas campaign will be much more important. The media and advertising media have very positive expectations and expect that the 2021 Christmas campaign will be better than that of 2020.
Their expectations in advertising revenue are much more positive. In fact, the general sentiment is optimistic. According to the conclusions of the study, the number of those who say that the income derived from advertising this year will be “significantly higher” is much higher than that of those who expect that this Christmas campaign will be worse.
Thus, 25% of those surveyed bet on the fact that investment will increase significantly and 41.27% that it will do so to a certain degree. Only 3.17% see a potential significant drop and only 6.35% one to some degree. 23.81% expect everything to remain the same.
The type of ads that will succeed
The media and advertising media are not only waiting for ads to rise, they are also beginning to speculate on the type of content and advertising format that marketers will seek the most. Last year, they recall from Digiday , the most popular were branded content actions, promotions linked to newsletters, social media marketing actions and thematic editorial packages linked to Christmas.
This year there will not be many differences, although videos and events will grow significantly. If last year only 23% of marketers bought events and activations based on experiences, this year it is expected to be 35%. It makes sense.
Last year, at this point in the year in 2020 there were still no vaccines against the coronavirus and companies were trying to minimize everything that involved bringing consumers together. The other big growth is the one seen in video activations. They go from 37% in 2020 to 45% in 2021.
In general, all formats will go up in this Christmas campaign, or at least that is what the industry expects. The gift guides were 44% in the campaign last year and are expected to be 50% this year. Christmas editorial packages will go from 53% to 55, activations via email from 61% to 65% and brand content from 61 to 68%.
The only downfall will be on social media. In 2020, social activations were 55%. This year, the media expects it to be 51%. In addition, Digiday believes that even things may be better than the media expects them to be, as they still do not fully trust what may happen, a lesson learned in the spring.
At the time, optimism was through the roof, but the delta variant of the coronavirus broke in and sank everything. Now, they might be being optimistic, but moderate. If things continue as they are in terms of covid, things could be better than expected.