Retail brands don’t have enough content for Black Friday – they just don’t know it yet
With Black Friday month officially underway and inboxes already flooded with sales campaigns, Vonnimedia director Sam Boardman believes most Australian retail brands are about to hit a wall, and they don’t even know it yet.
Sam Boardman implores marketers not to be silly this silly season
It is not news to anyone that November and December are the make-or-break moments for retail brands in Australia.
Since 2021, Black Friday has effectively become Black Friday Month, or BFCM (Black Friday Cyber Monday). You have already seen this. I am writing this at the start of November and my inbox is already getting slammed with Black Friday sales offers.
I am not here to debate whether this is good or bad, that is a whole other conversation. What I do know, though, is that this year is going to be different – and not the good different – for a lot of retail brands. They just do not know it yet.
Right now, general managers are crossing their fingers that they have built enough funnel to meet their targets. They are praying to the advertising algorithms that their creative winners and offers do not fatigue before their budget runs out.
And the reason it is going to be different is simple. Most brands are entering the most expensive media month of the year with the same volume of content they had last year, but the game has shifted.
You need content. A lot of content. And it all needs to be different if you want to win in retail in 2025. And it is only going one way in 2026.
It would come as no surprise (after years of your media buying team asking for new creative) that creative variability is now the number one lever driving lower CPA. Not interest targeting. Not audiences. Creative. Platforms like Pinterest and Tiktok are even more volatile. Discovery platforms reward recency. They reward volume. They reward signal density. This is why a single piece of creative can spike for 48 hours and then fall off a cliff.
The brands winning right now are not the brands with the best single ad. They are the brands that can ship new content every day and not run out.
Take Comfrt, the fastest growing fashion brand in the world. It publishes thousands of content variations per week. Thousands. Most brands will not publish that volume in a year. Don’t believe me? Here’s a link to their ads library that is running right now. There is a reason Comfrt is now the fourth largest fashion brand in the United States. There is a reason they sell out hoodies in the middle of summer. They have built a content pipeline that outpaces their own media spend. They never rely on one creative winner. They manufacture new winners every week.
That is the new game.
And if you’re walking into the busiest shopping season of the year with 100 pieces of content (of which 90 are graphic-designed tiles of the same 50 photos you took three months ago) and hope they last, you are in for a world of pain.
Still don’t believe me? Myer — one of the largest retail chains in Australia — has less than 100 ads live on social. A tough pill to swallow that no one is immune. I could go on and on.
Myer may miss out on the benefits of Black Friday if it doesn’t prepare
But let’s dive into why this keeps happening.
It keeps happening because most retailers still treat creative like a static campaign asset rather than a living performance input.
Creative pipelines in most marketing teams were built for quarterly launches. They were not built for a market where audiences shift weekly, formats evolve monthly, and algorithms reward novelty over consistency.
So while the platforms have become optimised for freshness, recency and rapid iteration, most brands are still structured for set-piece moments.
That is the fundamental mismatch.
The brands losing in Q4 are not losing because they do not understand media. They are losing because their creative engines are still built for the 2018 reality.
And that operational lag compounds every single year.
And yes, it is too late to correct this for 2025. You cannot rebuild your content pipeline in November.
So here is my ask to every CMO reading this.
Re-cut your budget. Not the campaign budget – the creative production budget.
Start putting at least 20% of your media allocation into actually making the weekly content that your media needs to perform.
Not the hero brand campaign that doesn’t get watched on TV. Not the seasonal campaign graphic design asset you’re hoping to slam in everyone’s faces and pray they click on it. Create content people want to see every day, scroll-stopping, platform-native assets that your ad account can rotate through to keep costs down.
If your team can ship new creative every seven days, you will win.
Anyway, see you on the other side of the silly season! Let’s hope we’ve all done enough.
SUBSCRIBE
Sign up to our free daily update to get the latest in media and marketing.
