Before you finalise your Black Friday and Christmas campaigns, read this

Summer is here and your plans for Black Friday and the holiday season are taking shape. Creative briefs, media bookings, products going into production — this is the moment when everything comes together.

The easiest trap at this stage is to build this year's campaign on last year's audience. It is understandable: the results are in, the reports are on file, and the safest move looks like running it back. But kids do not stand still for minutes, let alone months, and neither do their parents. What earned attention last holiday will not earn it this one, and you tend to find out only when it is too late.

The decisions you are locking now are the ones that matter most. Which message to lead with. Which platforms to invest in. Which creators to work with. Get them right and you set yourself up. Get them wrong and no amount of optimisation in December rescues a plan pointed at where kids were last year.

If there is one thing we have learned tracking family behaviour every day since 2017, it is that the signals shaping a family's choices shift long before they surface in any sales report. So before you finalise anything, three questions are worth asking: how kids discover what they want, what makes it worth choosing, and what families are really buying.

People still trust people

It starts with discovery. How do kids first come across the things they end up asking for?

For all the noise about platforms and algorithms, the most common answer kids give us is not a feed. It is a friend.

Media still matters, but it works harder when it follows the influence. Recommendation, advocacy and the things that get kids talking deserve more weight in the plan. By the time a child asks for something for Christmas, the choice has usually been shaped by a handful of small moments: a friend raving about something at school, a brand collaboration their favourite creator posted, an older sibling's recommendation, a character they loved from a film.

That is why the smartest kids and family brands rarely treat the child as the only target. They market to the household: earning parents' trust, staying visible to older siblings, and showing up through the creators and communities the family already follows. The child may be who the product is for, but the people around them shape what gets noticed, talked about and asked for.

The practical question for your plan is where your influence sits. Knowing which people, platforms and moments move your audience is what lets you put budget behind the ones that do the work, rather than the ones that simply deliver impressions.

Families are looking for more than a product

Knowing where influence sits tells you how to reach families. The next question is what will make them choose you once you have.

Brands often focus on what they are selling, when parents are thinking about something else entirely: what does this add to our lives? That question feels particularly relevant this year. Deloitte's latest Consumer Tracker puts discretionary spending at a three-year low, with households cutting back on non-essentials. It would be easy to read that as a story about budgets, and to compete on discount alone.

We ask parents every day what most influences their decision to buy a toy or game for their child, and price is not top of the list. Educational value (12%), whether the child will find it fun (11%) and product quality (11%) all rank above the product being affordable (10%).

And when money is tight, children are the last thing families cut.

Even as budgets tighten everywhere else, spend on the kids is protected and growing. Families are being more deliberate, not simply more frugal. They are asking how a purchase enriches their lives, and they are willing to back the thing that keeps earning its place: the toy still being played with in February, the video game that keeps friends coming round, the board game that brings everyone to the table.

For your plan, what your audience values when making a purchase should shape the message you lead with. The strongest campaigns this year will not just communicate price; they will make the case for why something is worth choosing in the first place.

Connection is becoming part of the value

So if it is not price that decides it, what does? Often, it is what the product lets a child be part of.

Kids increasingly see entertainment, gaming and content as social spaces.

This is about far more than the game itself. It tells us what younger audiences value: connection, participation, belonging. Gaming is a way into a community, a way of being part of something with other people. The brands that understand this build campaigns bigger than the product, because they are offering a shared experience rather than an object.

At a moment when families are weighing every purchase, that becomes a powerful differentiator. Our data can show you the communities, creators, platforms and moments that genuinely matter to your audience, so you can show up in them with authenticity.

The window is now, not November

Discovery, value, connection: these are the signals worth planning around. The catch is timing, because the moment to act on them is now, not when the season arrives.

Holiday retail remains one of the biggest commercial moments of the year, with millions of families shopping, gifting and spending across the season. UK ad spend is forecast to pass £50bn for the first time in 2026, up 7.5% year on year, according to the Advertising Association and WARC. For many brands, it is the moment the whole year pins on.

What is changing is how those decisions get made. More planning. More consideration. More scrutiny. And more influence coming from the people families already trust. As Think with Google's holiday research puts it, families move into a deliberate, planning frame of mind early, long before the tills get busy.

The most useful signals are not buried in last year's sales figures. They show up much earlier, in how kids discover brands, who they listen to, and what families value before a purchase is ever made.

That is why the next few weeks matter. Whether you are refining a media plan, testing messaging, identifying the channels that deserve investment or understanding the behaviours shaping family purchasing, starting with your audience lets you build campaigns on evidence rather than assumptions.

Because the brands that perform best in peak season are not simply the ones spending the most. They are the ones making smarter decisions long before Black Friday begins.