There is a woman in a Silver Lake apartment right now with a pumpkin on the stoop, a Halloween costume half-sewn on the couch, and three Christmas gifts already hidden in the hall closet. She bought them in October. Possibly in June. Your brand’s holiday campaign launches in five weeks.
She’s not an outlier. She’s the median.
Deloitte’s annual holiday survey, reported by Modern Retail and published on Digiday on October 21, polled 4,000 US consumers between late August and mid-September. The headline number: shoppers expect to spend 28% of their holiday budgets by the end of October. That’s the highest share in six years. Forty-two percent plan to shop October sales events, up 18% over three years. Twenty-two percent say they’ll start earlier than last year. And one in four already bought holiday gifts during June promotions.
June. While you were still arguing about the summer campaign.
Read that 28% again and do the math backwards. More than a quarter of the money is gone before most brand calendars have even scheduled the kickoff meeting. The “holiday season” most marketers are planning for, the five weeks from Black Friday to the last shipping day, is now the back two-thirds of the season. The front third already happened. You weren’t there.
Brian McCarthy, a principal in Deloitte’s strategy and analytics practice, put the shift politely. Shoppers, he told Modern Retail, are “becoming much savvier and thoughtful about how they maximize their dollars.” Translation: they plan. They watch prices. They know when the good sales hit and they show up for them, which means the brand that shows up only when the doorbusters drop is meeting a customer who already did her homework somewhere else.
Deloitte’s sharpest finding is about who’s doing this. Thirty-eight percent of shoppers fit the profile Deloitte calls “holiday value seekers.” They plan to spend 12% more than everyone else, and 65% of them were already holiday shopping in October. Sit with that. The most valuable shoppers of the season are the earliest ones. The people with the biggest budgets are spending them while your creative is still in revisions.
Now watch the feed, because the feed knew first.
TikTok told advertisers on October 15 that #holidayshopping content rose 263% month over month in September. Searches for gold jewelry jumped 1,134%. Christmas pajamas, 297%. Before the leaves turned in New England, the holiday aesthetic had already been decided on phones: warm metals, opal, matching sleepwear, the cozy-chaos look of a family photo that’s mostly dog. That’s TikTok’s own data, so season to taste, but it lines up with Deloitte’s survey a little too neatly to dismiss.
Then on October 20, TikTok launched a “Road to Black Friday” series for sellers, reminding everyone that TikTok Shop sales topped $500 million over last year’s Black Friday to Cyber Monday weekend, and that sellers who went live saw 84% growth year over year. The platform isn’t waiting for Thanksgiving. It’s training its sellers to show up in October and stay through December.
So the culture moved. The platforms moved. The shoppers moved. Who didn’t?
Most brands. Because most holiday plans are built backwards from a single date, the Friday after Thanksgiving, this year November 27, and everything before it is treated as “pre-season,” a polite word for “we’ll get to it.” The deck has a teaser week, a launch week, a Cyber Monday push and a last-call email. It’s a drop, not a season. And a drop only works if your customer is waiting for it.
She isn’t. She’s already halfway through her list.
The predictable pushback is that it’s all the same pie. Even McCarthy told Modern Retail he sees a finite amount of holiday spending, so early dollars are just pulled forward. Why chase October when the money comes eventually? And Black Friday still works. TikTok’s $500 million weekend proves it. Isn’t this just a timing tweak?
No. And this is the part that should make every CMO a little sick.
If the pie is finite, then October isn’t extra revenue. It’s the same revenue, claimed by somebody else first. Every dollar a value seeker spends on October 14 is a dollar she doesn’t have on November 27. The brands winning the early window aren’t growing the pie, they’re eating your slice before you sit down. Black Friday still works, sure. It works for whoever’s left, competing against every other brand that also waited, in the most expensive media week of the year. That’s not a strategy. That’s showing up to the party when the kitchen’s out of food and complaining about the line.
The finite-pie argument isn’t a reason to wait. It’s the best damn reason not to.
There’s also a creative cost to the drop model nobody puts on the budget sheet. When you compress a whole season into five weeks, the work gets loud and generic, because loud and generic is what you make under deadline. Every brand ends up in the same red-and-gold palette shouting “up to 40% off” at the same exhausted people. The brands people actually remember from December built a story that started earlier. They had time to be specific. They let a feeling build.
That’s the opportunity. Not “start your Black Friday campaign sooner,” which just moves the yelling up a month, but plan a season instead of a drop. Think of it as a run of moments, each one tied to something people are already living through.
In Los Angeles that runs something like this. Halloween first, the one holiday this city takes more seriously than award season, from Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood to every backyard in Highland Park with a fog machine. Then Día de los Muertos, which in this city is not a theme, it’s a tradition with altars, family and a lot of marigolds, and should be treated like one.
Then the long, strange stretch of November where everyone is “getting ready” for the holidays and nobody admits they’ve already started. Then Small Business Saturday on November 28, the one day of the weekend when the corner shop, the neighborhood studio and the independent spa have the cultural advantage over the big box. Then December, when the gifting gets personal and the last-minute panic sets in.
Each of those is a reason to show up with something to say. A brand that has been in the feed since the costumes went on has earned the right to ask for the sale in December. A brand that appears for the first time on Black Friday is a stranger knocking on the door at dinner.
This isn’t more content, by the way. It’s less content, spread out and made with more care. Four or five moments, shot once and planned together, beat thirty panicked posts in a two-week sprint. Small businesses especially should take notes here. They can’t outspend anyone on Black Friday. They can absolutely outlast them.
If you’re reading this in late October with nothing scheduled, you haven’t lost. You’ve lost the first act. There’s still Día de los Muertos, still the long build of November, still a Small Business Saturday that belongs to whoever shows up for it like they mean it. Start this week. Plan backwards from December, not from Black Friday.
And next year, put the holiday kickoff meeting on the calendar in August.
Your customer will already be shopping.
