With the Golden Quarter approaching, CPG brands will be gearing up for Christmas. Billions of pounds will be spent on ad campaigns to attract seasonal shoppers.
Despite the high stakes, many advertisers will be heading into the busiest period of the year armed with outdated strategies. Historical tactics, gut-feel decisions, and broad audience segmentation simply won’t cut it in a marketplace defined by complexity. Others, more attuned to the increasingly fragmented customer path to purchase, will still wrestle with where to place their digital bets. Will it be retail media networks, CTV, social media, search, or something new?
No matter the channel chosen, the hard truth is that many of these ads will fail to convert. Sometimes this is the result of wrong placement. Other times it’s bad creative. The truth is that success demands both elements working in unison.
Advertisers need to think back to the golden age of the industry, when ads were not so much about targeting individuals, but about creating engagement with the right campaign in the right environment. Retail media is a prime example of this marriage, which is why the channel is so powerful. It delivers ads at the point of purchase, the moment consumers are most primed to buy. Retail media networks also generate vast amounts of data, which can be harnessed to tailor creatives effectively and scoop up sales.
Retail media is not without its limitations, though. These networks primarily exist to sell products and have little impact on a consumer’s perception of a brand. That emotional connection is built long before the moment of purchase, and brands that want to build loyalty need to influence consumer opinion earlier in the journey.
Christmas is a crucial time for this upper funnel play, with research from last year revealing that 56% of consumers look forward to the big seasonal ads, up from 48% in 2023. The key to turning this positive sentiment into business outcomes stems from creative and media working hand in hand. Yet, achieving this across the full media mix is far from easy, especially given the increasingly fragmented nature of the digital landscape.
Why legacy thinking holds CPG back
CPG brands have always been big spenders on advertising. However, their legacy approaches often treat creative and placement as separate disciplines. One for brand building and another for sales.
Back when offline media channels were all that was available, this made sense. Creative was crafted for broad audiences, and campaigns were booked weeks or months in advance of publication.
That legacy thinking lingers today. Digital ads from CPG brands often remain overly focused on broad-stroke branding, sacrificing the granular placement and relevance that digital can now deliver. During the Golden Quarter, when consumers make high-value, gift-driven purchases, whether it’s a luxury chocolate hamper or a premium bottle of whisky, this lack of relevance is especially costly.
On the performance side, there has been a trend in online CPG advertising to concentrate ad spend across a limited number of major social networks and ecommerce channels, i.e. the so-called “walled gardens”. While the ‘closed-loop’ nature of these major players has proved attractive, over time, the ‘black box’ behaviour and inflexible metrics of the walled gardens have become more frustrating.
Typical walled garden metrics tend to prioritise impressions over attention and focus on audience segmentation at the expense of relevance in the moment. However, the real opportunity in 2025 lies beyond blunt segmentation.
Harnessing signals, not segments
The incredible power of AI in combination with programmatic buying means that CPG ads can now be altered, adjusted and optimised to provide a level of relevance at scale that has never previously been possible.
AI-driven programmatic solutions can analyse signals from placement environments, consumer behaviour, and purchase intent. Whether it’s the time of day, the weather outside, the latest sports score, or some other trending factor. This includes operational concerns, e.g. if a particular item is out of stock, advertising that same item is likely to create a poor experience for any prospective customer. That means media can be bought intelligently, and creative can be tailored dynamically, ensuring they work in lockstep to deliver maximum impact.
At the same time, innovations in shoppable advertising are shortening the path to purchase across the open web, linking ad exposure directly to retailer baskets through live product feeds. Together, these advances enable brands to strengthen their perception and capture sales without being confined to closed ecosystems.
This kind of ‘momentary relevance’ through AI is a key innovation for CPG brands to lean into. Leveraging enriched, impression-level signals helps advertisers to deliver outcomes from premium media at scale. Indeed, moving forward, it already seems clear that relevant messaging in pivotal consumer moments will become the central (and most effective) play for brand communications.
Creative and media in concert
CPG brands must invest in AI-powered tools that bring creative and placement together to drive both immediate sales and long-term brand loyalty. Great media will get your ads seen. Great creativity gets them remembered. But it’s only when the two work in unison, powered by AI and placed in the right context, that brands will drive the outcomes they need this Golden Quarter.
