What Black Friday Really Costs This Year

Hi there,

I've spent most of my calls this month with brands finalizing their BFCM plans.

Creative. Promo calendars. Budget splits across Meta, Google, TikTok.

The cost to compete is high. But there is a way to walk into Black Friday ahead, rather than scrambling in the middle of peak season.

Black Friday isn't just competitive. It's the most expensive week of the year to get wrong.

US advertisers are on pace to spend $71.09 billion on retail media in 2026, up from $60.32 billion in 2025, nearly 18% more dollars chasing the same shoppers in a single year [1]. Layer that on top of a week where CPMs climb 50% or more compared to a normal week [2], and CAC runs roughly 2.5 to 3 times higher than it does the rest of the year [3].

Every brand is bidding into the same finite pool of shoppers, on the same handful of platforms, during the same five days, and paying a real premium to do it. And every brand is still slashing prices to win those shoppers away from everyone else doing the exact same thing. More competitors chasing the same audience, plus deeper discounts to win them, is exactly what pushes CAC that high in the first place.

The real prep isn't creative. It's what you feed your ad platforms before the spend even starts.

Every call I'm having this month circles back to the same thing. The brands who feel prepared right now aren't the ones with the boldest creative or the deepest discount. They're the ones who already started feeding Meta, Google, and TikTok verified signal about who their real buyers are, months before Black Friday hits.

Most brands only give their ad platforms one slice of that picture, the DTC buyers who check out on their own site. For most omnichannel brands, that's a minority of total purchases. Everyone who bought at Target, Amazon, Sephora, or anywhere else (generally ~80% of an omnichannel brand's business) never makes it back into the platform at all. The algorithm optimizes off whatever it can see, and if it can't see most of your customers, it's spending your budget against a partial view of your business.

By sending verified offline purchase data back to your ad platforms, they finally see the missing data and understand who your real buyers are. Turning that on isn't a Black Friday task. It's an August task, because the algorithm needs weeks to learn from it before the auction gets this expensive.

Here's what that groundwork delivers once Black Friday hits.

Two things change when you do this early. Your owned list grows first. Every verified purchase becomes a real contact you can remarket to, not a shopper who saw an ad and disappeared into a retail aisle.

Ritual's Laura Brodie told Digiday this week that acquisition cost is so high during the holidays that tapping an audience you already have is simply the more cost-effective move [4]. That's the whole point of turning retail purchases into owned contacts before November, not during or after.

Your paid media gets sharper too, because the algorithm spends the run-up to Q4 learning from your full customer base instead of the sliver that happens to buy on your site.

It's not a one-time lift. Every verified purchase you feed the algorithm in August and September makes the model a little better at recognizing your real buyer by the time Black Friday spend actually ramps. By the time everyone else is bidding into the same expensive week with the same partial data, your platforms already know who to look for.

There's a measurement upside too. Once retail and marketplace purchases start flowing back into Meta, Google, and TikTok, you can finally see how much of that offline buying your paid media was actually driving. Campaigns that used to look like they underperformed because the sale happened at a register instead of on your site start getting credit for what they actually did.

So the question isn't whether Black Friday will be expensive this year. It already is, and it's not getting cheaper. The question is whether your ad platforms are spending that budget against your whole customer base, or just the fraction of it they've ever actually seen.

Talk soon,

Kait

A few extras:

We have a special job opp for you this week. Not even publicly shared yet...

Allison Ellsworth, founder of Poppi, who exited to Pepsi for almost $2 billion, is starting a new brand and hiring: Senior Director, Digital Commerce & Media.

You might be a fit if you're obsessed with:

Building best-in-class websites and lifecycle programs

Scaling Amazon and retailer.com as high-growth revenue engines

Driving commerce through TikTok Shop while staying ahead of emerging platforms, AI advertising, and social commerce

Owning full-funnel paid media and retail media strategy that delivers measurable growth -- with a social-first lens

Scaling high-growth CPG brands and you have 10+ years of experience

Reply to me directly if you'd like to be introduced to Allison.

Sources:

[1] eMarketer, "FAQ on holiday marketing: How marketers can win in a longer, leaner season."

[2] Benly, "Meta Ads Seasonal Campaigns: Q4, Black Friday & Holidays 2026."

[3] UpCounting, "Average eCommerce Customer Acquisition Cost 2025 by Industry."

[4] Digiday, "Digiday+ Research: The 2026 guide to holiday marketing strategies, including A-Frame Brands, Mastercard and Ritual."