Most CPG holiday budgets are still built around a single moment: Black Friday. It’s the biggest promotional push of the quarter, the one every retail media plan gets built around, and the one every post-mortem gets measured against. InMarket’s 2026 Holiday Shopping InSights report suggests the focus is misplaced, and the week that decides the quarter for many categories is being treated as an afterthought.
Start with visitation. InMarket’s commerce and visitation data shows that while apparel, department stores and electronics retailers peak the week of Black Friday, most big-box, discount, and specialty retailers, the channels carrying the bulk of CPG volume, don’t hit their highest in-store traffic until the week of December 15, what the report calls the Final Dash. For a lot of CPG categories, that’s the week that actually decides whether the quarter hits plan, and it’s the week getting the least incremental investment.
Gift cards show how sharply that late surge shows up in actual purchase behavior. Purchases roughly doubled over Black Friday weekend, a real lift, though the average card value stayed flat. The week before Christmas, purchase volume jumped to seven times the pre-season baseline, and average card value rose 14% on top of it. That’s not a gradual ramp into the holiday; it’s a second, larger spike that a lot of media plans have already spent down by the time it happens.
It’s worth being precise about what’s actually driving that late surge, because the easy story, that price-pressured shoppers are cutting back or trading down, isn’t quite what the data shows. Seven in ten shoppers say higher prices have changed their holiday plans this year, but only 26% say they’re trading down to store brands. The bigger shifts are in timing and effort: 58% say they’re leaning harder into sales and coupons, and 46% are starting earlier. This shopper is hunting for value, not abandoning categories or brands. The list gets edited; some shoppers are buying fewer gifts (47%) or for fewer people (41%), but the intent to shop, and to shop the categories they’ve always shopped, is largely intact.
That matters for where CPG dollars should actually go. Clothing (65%) and gift cards (57%) remain the top planned purchases this season, well ahead of toys, electronics and beauty, and physical stores remain the widest-reach channel at 77%. A hunting shopper who’s still buying the same categories, still showing up in-store in large numbers and still active through a second peak in mid-December is a shopper worth showing up for after Black Friday, not one to write off once the November promotional calendar wraps.
The bigger problem isn’t the media plan itself; it’s the measurement window built around it. Much Q4 reporting treats the Black Friday period as the read on how the quarter went, with a final tally landing sometime in January. If the Final Dash is actually the bigger, more decisive week for a given category, a brand won’t know it missed that window until the quarter is already closed and the budget already spent. By the time the January recap says the promotional plan underperformed in December, there’s nothing left to do.
The practical shift is measuring in-season, not after. Tracking visitation, purchase behavior and share shifts through the Final Dash in real time, not waiting for a post-season readout, is what lets a team react while the quarter is still open: shifting media weight into mid-December, adjusting in-store promotional support, or catching a share loss early enough to respond to it. Decision Season starts in September, but for many CPG categories, the quarter isn’t decided until three weeks before Christmas.
Measurement needs to catch up to where the real decision is happening, or it will keep explaining, a month too late, why the plan missed it.
Gerry Joyce is the Vice President, Retail Practice Lead at InMarket, bringing 20+ years of leadership and sales experience across retail and digital media. Since joining InMarket in 2022, Gerry has worked closely with our retail clients, agency partners, sales team, marketing, measurement and product team to develop drive-to-store client-based solutions.
