Every year, someone predicts a soft holiday season. Every year, consumers prove them wrong.
That’s the reality unpacked in a recent episode of AdLab, including what brands should be doing to get ready for Q4, and what’s on deck at this year’s LP Connect.
The data backs it up. Adobe reported $257 billion in online holiday spend last year, the highest total on record and a 7% increase year-over-year. Advertising costs climbed. Mobile spend climbed. Consumers kept buying anyway, and there’s no sign that pattern breaks in 2026.
Which means the real risk this Q4 isn’t a soft season. It’s brands that spend the summer hoping for one instead of preparing for the record-breaking one that’s actually coming. Here’s what separates the brands that pull ahead from the ones that get left behind.
The Advertisers Who Won Didn’t Play It Safe
Rising costs of goods squeezed margins hard last year. That pressure pushed some brands toward shorter sales cycles, smaller discounts, and fewer promotions.
Those brands didn’t come out ahead.
The advertisers who saw the strongest results either matched last year’s promotional structure or pushed further, extending sale windows and increasing discounts. Pulling back cost more than it saved.
Expect that pattern to repeat this year: brands that compete on offer and timing will outperform brands that hedge on it.
Four Months Out: What to Fix Before Q4 Hits
The checklist starts well before the holiday rush, not during it.
- Go back through last year’s data. Strongest days, weakest days, when shipping cutoffs hit, and how spend behaved afterward. Most brands run this analysis once in January and shelve it.
- Check what competitors did. The Wayback Machine makes it possible to see exactly what discount structures and sale timing competitors used last year. There’s no time to react once the season is underway.
- Get the tech stack holiday-ready. Clean attribution and conversion tracking across every PPC platform, digital wallets live, and a Buy Now, Pay Later option in place. BNPL alone accounted for $20 billion in holiday spend last year.
- Shore up Amazon now, not in November. For brands selling on the platform, Amazon Prime Day already offered a preview of how early holiday shopping is starting. Listings, inventory buffers, and Amazon Advertising campaigns should be holiday-ready well before Q4 traffic hits.
- Get post-purchase flows in shape. Abandoned cart, shipping confirmation, and win-back sequences carry more weight during the holiday rush than any other time of year. Email and SMS marketing both deserve a review now, especially as AI-driven tools reshape what’s possible in lifecycle marketing.
- Clear out site issues now. Speed problems and broken pages should be resolved months before volume hits, not discovered during it.
Summer Is for Testing, Not Q4
Any channel a brand has been considering but hasn’t launched, Pinterest, TikTok, CTV through MNTN, even newer platforms like OpenAI’s ad offering, should be live and testing now.
Launching something untested close to holiday means walking in blind. Testing now means brands already know how a channel performs before the volume that matters most arrives.
Pinterest vs. TikTok: Not the Same Play
Pinterest works well for visual categories like clothing, furniture, and jewelry, and it skews female, though that doesn’t rule out brands selling to men. It behaves more like a demand-generation channel than a demand-capture one, so brands need to be comfortable with halo effect and full-funnel attribution before leaning in. Pinterest’s role in a broader paid social strategy is worth a closer look before committing budget.
TikTok comes with different friction. There’s no in-app browser, users resist being advertised to, and the audience runs young. Fit depends heavily on whether a brand’s customer base overlaps with that demographic, something Google Analytics or Triple Whale data can confirm before spend goes out the door.
Last year’s performance data is the deciding factor either way.
LP Connect Turns Prep Into Strategy
LP Connect returns August 20th, and what sets it apart from bigger industry conferences is scale, or the lack of it. No five-thousand-person crowd. Just direct, one-on-one time between advertisers and the platforms and tech partners built to solve their problems.
One moment from last year captures it well: two speakers meeting for the first time on stage, and an advertiser in the audience signing up with one of them on the spot after hearing the fit. That kind of connection isn’t limited to the stage. It happens all day, booth to booth, conversation to conversation.
This year’s confirmed brands include Portland Gear, a flagship Pacific Northwest name attendees can talk to directly about what’s driven their growth. Topics range from CRO to data analysis with Triple Whale to feed optimization, all in a single day, all with partners who are open about what’s actually working.
Bigger Isn’t Slowing Down
Holiday spend has grown every year for as long as anyone’s been tracking it, and nothing about 2026 points to that changing.
The brands that come out ahead will be the ones that reviewed what happened last year, tested new channels early, tightened up their tech stack, and showed up ready to compete rather than hedge. LP Connect is built to be part of that process, not a footnote to it.
Want to hear the full conversation? Catch this episode of AdLab, LP’s podcast, on the LP YouTube channel and across social @adlabpod.
