Festive Ad Sales

👋 Merry Christmas my ad sales and media friends! This week we ask, how should I think about ad sales while Santa’s in town?

Festivities aside, let’s dive in! 🚀

Festive Ad Sales

🥅 Cold Outreach at Christmas

Firstly, let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room, reply rates WILL be much lower during December, especially in the second half of the month. This begs the question, is cold outreach even worth it?

Yes. Yes, it is. But here’s the nuance…

Definitely keep hitting it in the first two weeks of December, you can start to add a little festive personalisation too. In the back half of the month, I do think it’s still worthwhile. But I could understand it taking a backseat if you have other priorities and limited bandwidth.

As an outreach agency, we power through except for the immediate days surrounding Christmas day. We don’t want to get on the naughty list. But for other media companies, I could empathise with you if you said that you’d prioritise other tasks over outreach with diminishing returns.

If you did want to power through too, then definitely add some festive personalisation. An effective example is: ‘I hope you don’t mind the festive hustle!’

🎯 Closing Deals at Christmas

The end of any quarter or holiday period is always a good opportunity to close up as many deals in your pipeline as possible. There’s two ways you can do this:

📅 Use the EOY

Marketers will have new budgets for 2025, as well as potentially ‘leftover’ 2024 budget that needs to be spent. So use this very real deadline to instill some urgency in your deals.

The earlier you establish any ‘urgency story’ in a deal the better. It reduces the likelihood of coming across as separate or sneaky later on.

🎅 Use the Christmas Break

In addition to EOY budgets, people also just like to have things ‘wrapped up’ before Christmas (pun intended). Use this to get things over the line. You can start to use this in your pitches way before December too.

When discussing timelines, you can naturally start to talk about getting things signed before the Christmas break.

If you’re talking about a January campaign, 100% you should be probing; ‘Are you working over the Christmas break?’ or ‘When do you finish for Christmas? Would you rather have this agreed before you finish?’. Most sane people will say yes.

I’ve intentionally kept today’s issue shorter. I’ll let you get back to eating you bodyweight in brie. 🧀

P.S. Need help selling more sponsorships? My agency Ad Sales as a Service helps media companies do just that.