Key takeaways:
- Rising media costs, new product launches and reaching high-intent shoppers are the top stressors for marketers heading into the 2026 holiday season, according to tvScientific by Pinterest’s 2026 Holiday & Seasonal Shopping Trends Report.
- Consumer research and purchasing behavior varies significantly by generation, making a one-size-fits-all creative strategy increasingly difficult to justify.
- Social, performance/connected TV and online video will receive the highest share of holiday marketing budgets.
The holiday shopping season doesn’t start when the first ad goes live. For many consumers, it starts well before marketers have even finalized their media plans.
That’s the core challenge laid out in tvScientific by Pinterest’s 2026 Holiday & Seasonal Shopping Trends Report, which surveyed 487 U.S. marketers about their strategies across key seasonal moments: Labor Day, October Prime Day, fall football season, Black Friday/Cyber Monday, the year-end holiday rush and New Year’s.
From misaligned timing, growing budget pressure and audiences that move across screens in ways that defy the traditional funnel, here are insights from the report that deserve attention.
Rising Costs and Proving Return Are Reshaping How Marketers Plan
Marketers are feeling growing financial pressure headed into the holiday season.
Rising media costs rank as the top stressor for 38% of marketers surveyed. New product launches or shifting business priorities follow at 37%, with reaching high-intent shoppers close behind at 30%. The practical result: more marketers are starting campaigns earlier specifically because the pressure to demonstrate return on ad spend or revenue impact has increased.
When ROAS pressure intensifies, teams also spend more time on measurement and justification and less time on experimentation. It also raises the stakes for every creative decision, because fewer dollars can absorb poor performance without drawing scrutiny.
Shoppers Are Already Researching Before Most Campaigns Launch
Most marketers targeting Black Friday and Cyber Monday or the broader November-December holiday season don’t launch TV campaigns until November. But by that point, many consumers have already started narrowing their options.
According to the report’s companion consumer data, 28% of millennials begin purchasing gifts in October in significant numbers. In addition, 28% of Gen X respondents and 24% of baby boomers start in November, but the research phase begins well before the purchase. The window between “I’m starting to think about this” and “I’ve already decided” is shorter than many campaign timelines account for.
Launching in November means entering a market where some consumer decisions are already in motion, and where competing for attention becomes more expensive as peak dates approach. The seasonal moments leading into the holiday rush, from Labor Day through October Prime Day, represent earlier opportunities to reach shoppers while they’re still forming preferences rather than confirming them.
Generational Differences Make a Single Creative Strategy Untenable
Because different generations shop differently, with some audiences being deal-driven and willing to wait and others are planning-driven and act earlier, marketers are creating different campaigns to reach them.
A campaign that launches in November with a single creative approach optimized for peak-moment urgency may resonate with Gen Z but arrive too late for millennial shoppers who’ve already decided. The report notes that marketers are adapting campaigns by audience targeting, offers, creative assets, timing, copy, calls to action, landing pages and measurement criteria. Whether most teams have the operational capacity to execute that level of variation is a separate and more difficult question.
Cross-Channel Coordination Has Moved from Best Practice to Baseline Expectation
The top four channels receiving the largest share of media budgets during holiday 2026 are:
- social (68%)
- performance TV/connected TV (54%)
- online video (44%)
- influencer/creator marketing (32%)
According to the report’s consumer findings, 46% of consumers say they’re more likely to buy from a brand if they’ve seen it on social media before encountering it on TV. The same share say the same about seeing a brand in search before TV. That dual-exposure dynamic means the effectiveness of any single channel depends partly on what consumers have encountered elsewhere.
Read the full report here.
