What does a tactical, no-fluff holiday marketing strategy for CTV actually look like heading into the busiest ad season of the year? Look no further. Our VP of Marketing Kira Federer joined Nik Sharma (“The DTC Guy”) and Jessica Pelligra (CEO & Founder of The Marketing Sanctum) for a live conversation on holiday marketing strategy, ideal timing, and real CTV performance metrics from one of our own customers.
Watch the full conversation here:
Short on time? Read on for six takeaways worth adding to your nice list while you’re planning your holiday marketing campaigns this season.
1. Build Your Holiday Workback Schedule Now
"This holiday season, consumers are going to spend just under one and a half trillion dollars across retail, dining, entertainment, and gifting. It's going to be the biggest window of the year, and most people are just prepping for BFCM (Black Friday / Cyber Monday), which is essentially a week or two of it." - Nik Sharma
If you're wondering when to start holiday advertising, the short answer is now, not after Thanksgiving (when 83% of shoppers will have already started their holiday shopping). The group agreed that this is a more realistic holiday marketing timeline:
- Strategy (about 2 weeks): Lock your campaign goal, audience, and BFCM offers and promotions
- Creative (1 day to 1 month, depending on approach): Repurpose your best-performing social assets for TV and/or build net-new CTV assets
- Launch (1 day): Go live with at least 30 days of runway before BFCM, or more if you can manage it
That timing matters because of how early shoppers are already moving. A Black Friday marketing strategy built entirely around one blowout week will miss most of the shoppers who've already started before Black Friday even arrives. Spreading your campaign across the full quarter catches shoppers on both sides of the rush.
Plus, Paramount's fall lineup gives brands a natural head start. Fall sports, Mobland Season 2, Tulsa King Season 4, Survivor Season 51, plus a wave of new and returning shows that dropped during CBS Premiere Week. That's a lot of attention already locked onto TV's biggest shows, right as shoppers start building their lists.
Download the 2026 CTV Guide to find out exactly when to show up for TV's biggest Q4 moments, and how to build a media plan around them.
2. CTV Costs Less Than You Think (Even in Q4)
The biggest misconception about CTV advertising cost is that it's only for brands with big TV budgets. The reality runs the opposite direction on two fronts.
First, Paramount Ads Manager starts at a $7 CPM, a rate that's already competitive with paid social. And that affordability extends to how much budget you actually need to test it. Jessica's guidance for brands already spending on paid social:
"If someone was spending between 30 and 50k on paid social, cut it in half for a CTV. Do 25 as your first run."
And for brands starting from scratch, the floor is even lower:
"You can launch your first CTV campaign at five. You don't have to do $25,000. You can do a small run."
Second, because CTV inventory is pre-bought, prices don't spike the way Meta and Google do once every brand ramps up Q4 advertising at the same time:
"It's actually pre-bought inventory. So when CPMs on Meta triple, when CPMs on Google double, we've got all the competition coming to buy up this inventory, the prices spike. But on CTV, it does not. The amount of spend you have in July and the reach you get for it matches in November and December, which is the most expensive time of year." - Jessica Pelligra
3. Give CTV Time to Prove Itself
A common mistake brands make with any new holiday ad campaign is expecting an immediate verdict. Jessica's rule of thumb:
"I usually tell clientele to give it 60 days, and then I usually have my early indicators at 45."
When that patience pays off, the results can be substantial. Kira highlighted an ecommerce business’s success story after they ran a 30-day campaign on Paramount Ads Manager and drove:
- 4X ROAS
- 90,000 site visits
- $1.17 cost per visit
With the platform’s real-time measurement dashboards, they could also see exactly where their ads ran: next to Landman, UFC, and CBS Sports, a level of detail that's rare on other CTV platforms.
As Nik summed it up:
"Most, or really any other TV platform, it's like, 'Give me the brand safety tools. Tell me how I can not be next to certain things.' With Paramount, it's like, 'What can I be next to?'" - Nik Sharma
For more CTV advertising examples like this one, explore our Paramount Ads Manager Success Stories >
4. CTV Works Best as Your Second Channel, and Lifts the First
CTV pays off most once a brand's paid social and paid search are already working on their own.
"I think that what I know is that no brand decides to start their advertising strategy with CTV, and I would never advise you to." - Kira Federer
Jessica and Nik agreed: once those channels are proven and you trust the data coming out of them, CTV becomes the next lever to pull, adding a new layer of reach while improving performance across your existing channels.
As Nik put it:
"CTV and paid social are, a lot of times, in the market you see them as one or the other, but I believe that they should coexist and one should really help the other. CTV ads reach beyond paid social, into audiences you might otherwise not be able to crack with just paid social. It feels like a very premium, upper-funnel, billboard-style placement, except inside somebody's house." - Nik Sharma
He backed that up with a result from an agency partner's holdout test to see whether CTV spend was actually helping the rest of their funnel:
"The TLDR was essentially that social campaign then resulted in a 14% higher CTR, 300% lift in form completions for those CTV-exposed audiences." - Nik Sharma
If you want to measure that kind of cross-channel lift for your own brand, Jessica pointed to Northbeam's Metrics Explorer as her go-to tool. FYI: Northbeam also happens to be one of Paramount Ads Manager’s measurement partners, helping advertisers pair CTV's storytelling power with clearer, more transparent ways to prove cross-channel and incremental impact.
5. What Actually Makes Holiday Creative Work on CTV
Branded Beats UGC
If you're already running holiday social media campaigns built around UGC, don't assume the same creative will perform the same way on CTV. Jessica has tested both directly:
"I've done these tests between UGC and branded, and branded wins every time, at least in my own experience." - Jessica Pelligra
Kira's explanation of why ties back to how differently people experience a 30-second unskippable spot on a 60-inch screen versus a few seconds of a social feed:
"The maturity, the validity, the believability of your brand and message are elevated when you are seen on a 60-inch screen for a 30-second unskippable ad." Kira Federer
Stick to Broader Seasonal Messaging
If you only have the budget or resources for one piece of creative this quarter, a broad, evergreen message is a safer bet than something built around a single sale date.
"I like Q4 for gifting both to yourself and to others. I think that's sort of like a really good overarching theme. If you can only go for one campaign, maybe it wouldn't be necessarily just Black Friday, but it would be something more evergreen." - Jessica Pelligra
"If you have one shot, I would keep it wide. Holiday, gifting for yourself and others, so you can run that all the way through December." - Kira Federer
Reuse and Recycle Top Performers
The same logic applies to reusing creative. Asked whether last year's top-performing Black Friday and Cyber Monday creative still holds up, Jessica's answer was yes, mostly: keep running what worked, and layer new variations on top of it rather than starting from a blank page every year.
"I do tend to rinse and repeat something that works. What I like to do is take the top one or two, depending on budget, and then throw in other variations on top of that. I'm building on something that I knew worked really well previously, and then adding new variations to it in case I can outperform." Jessica Pelligra
Use In-Platform Creative Solutions
If you don't have a TV-ready ad yet, you can use Paramount Ads Manager’s creative tools to create one for free, or work with our Creative Plus service to have Paramount’s team create one for you:
"I would say that first round will come back to you in 72 hours. The modifications from there can depend based on the customer, but we're talking days, not weeks." Kira Federer
For a full breakdown of what makes holiday creative land (plus some fun holiday marketing ideas), see CTV Ad Creative Best Practices: How to Make Ads That Sleigh >
More Holiday Resources
Explore our Holiday Hub for everything else you need to plan a successful holiday season, including:
- [INFOGRAPHIC] 2026 Holiday Shopping Trends: How To Sleigh Your Holiday Sales with CTV
- Holiday Viewership on Paramount: Why Now Is the Time to Plan Your Holiday CTV Campaign
Ready to advertise on CTV this holiday season?
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