November’s Black Friday is won in October

Picture this, your ideal customer scrolls their feed and advertisers compete in a split-second auction for that one view. Only now it’s Black Friday week, and far more brands join that auction than usual. 

If you want to win that moment this November, then you need to start in October. Let me explain why. 

I see the same pattern every autumn. The product offer gets signed off early but the ads get made late. And the plan for which ads to run is often a gut feeling about what "did well last year". 

With Black Friday landing on 27 November this year, and Cyber Monday on the 30^th - that gives most brands a few weeks to prepare, with smart organisations using those weeks to plan their creatives, not just their discounts.

Let me explain:

1. why the ads themselves matter more than ever in peak week, 

2. the three questions worth answering before anyone opens a design tool, and 

3. how we built Spirea to answer them using your own data.

Why the ads themselves decide the week

In short, attention gets more expensive, and the platforms favour the ads people actually stop for.

In this environment two things quietly drain budget:

• Creative fatigue. Show the same ad to the same people too often and they stop noticing it, then results drop and each sale begins to cost more. In an intense week an ad can tire far faster than it would in a normal month.

• Too little variety. Platforms like Meta now use the creative itself to work out who to show it to. They’re looking for different messages, visuals and formats so they can offer something to different kinds of buyers - the gift shopper, the bargain hunter, the person who's been eyeing your product since September. One ad resized three times simply isn't enough for these platforms to show your ad.

  
  

Think of it like a shop window on the busiest street of the year. A great window draws people in, but if it never changes, the same passers-by stop looking. The brands that do well refresh the window on purpose, based on what actually brought people through the door.

Three questions to answer before you brief anyone

Before a single new ad is designed, every team should be able to answer these with evidence, not memory:

1. What worked last time - and why? Not just "the red video did well", but what about it worked. Was it the message (a sharp price, a gifting angle, a deadline), the opening seconds, or the format?

2. What didn't work - and what will we stop doing? Dropping weak ideas frees up budget and design time for the strong ones. It's the least glamorous decision and one of the most valuable.

3. How many new ads do we actually need? Too few, and your ads tire halfway through the week/month. Too many, and you waste production time and spread budget so thin that nothing gets a fair chance.

   
   

Most teams try to answer these the week before, from a spreadsheet pulled in a hurry. That's exactly the gap we set out to close.

How Spirea turns last year into this year's brief

Spirea's ideation feature starts with a simple choice: pick a time period. For Black Friday, that's usually last year's peak window - or the weeks running up to it. Spirea reads how every creative performed in that window and hands back a brief built on what really happened.

The brief answers the three questions above:

• What worked. Your top performers, and the ingredients behind them - the message, the opening hook, the visual style, the format. These become ideas to scale up, not just ads to rerun.

• What didn't. Your underperformers, with a clear call on each: rework it, or replace it with something new.

• How many. A recommended number of new creatives for the period. It weighs your budget, how quickly ads have tired in your account and how often new ads tend to win - then keeps the number within reach of what your team has recently produced, because a plan you can't execute isn't a plan.

The result is a brief your designers, agency or in-house creative team can pick up straight away. It also makes the creative budget conversation much easier: instead of "we think we need more ads", it's "here's what worked, here's what didn't, and here's how many we need to cover the week".

Two things we were deliberate about. First, learnings stay per platform. What makes a TikTok video work is different from what makes a Google banner work, so Spirea doesn't blur them together. Second, the brief stays grounded in your own results, backed by more than a decade of GAIN experience - over 2.5 million creatives and more than £1.5 billion in ad spend. The recommendation supports your team's judgement; it doesn't replace it. 

So what next for your team?

Work backwards from 27 November. Get the brief done in advance, and new ads can go live in early November - giving the platforms time to learn what works before costs peak and giving you time to back the winners and swap out tired ads before the big day.

Once Cyber Monday is over, you can repeat the same winning formula - run a brief on last year's festive period to plan your Christmas gifting campaign, then do the same for Boxing Day and the January sales. Each period gets its own evidence-based plan. This year's Black Friday brief becomes the starting point for next year's.

Start with what you already know

The best Black Friday plan isn't a bigger discount or a louder ad. It's knowing what your customers responded to last time, letting go of what they ignored, and making enough fresh creatives to stay interesting all week.

You already have that evidence - it's sitting in last year's ad accounts. Spirea's job is to turn it into a brief your team can act on this week, not the week before Black Friday.

If you'd like to see what your own peak-season brief looks like, you can try Spirea free for 30 days.

Maria Bestard has over 10 years’ experience running ad campaigns on Meta, Google and TikTok for some of the world’s biggest brands. She is also the Product Owner of GAIN’s Spirea.