For years, Black Friday and Cyber Monday were treated as the starting gun for holiday advertising. That made sense when the holiday shopping season was concentrated into a few days and marketers could wait for consumers to declare their intent.
That world is gone. In 2026, consumers are researching earlier and moving across channels long before the biggest promotional weekend arrives, which means Labor Day should be treated as the beginning of the holiday season for marketers instead of the last gasp of summer.
The holiday season starts before consumers start searching
The most important change in seasonal marketing is happening before the purchase itself. Consumers do not suddenly wake up on Black Friday and decide what they want to buy. They discover products, form preferences, compare options, and build shortlists over time. By the time they are actively searching for a specific product, marketers are often competing for demand that someone else helped create.
That is why 76% of marketers say reaching consumers before active search or comparison is extremely or very critical.1 It is also why the planning and consideration stage is where marketers say Performance TV provides significant value during seasonal shopping moments.1 The objective is to influence what consumers consider in the first place.
TV is particularly useful in this earlier window because consumers do not experience it in isolation. According to tvScientific by Pinterest's 2026 Consumer Trends Report, 68% percent of consumers say they look up a product they saw in a TV ad while watching TV, while 69% browse online shopping.2 That makes early-season TV about getting into the consideration set before the market becomes crowded.
Why Labor Day is a learning window
Labor Day is certainly not the largest shopping moment of the year. Only 17% of consumers rank it among the shopping moments they pay the most attention to, compared with 65% for Black Friday Cyber Monday and 56% for the November-December holiday season.2 But that does not make Labor Day strategically unimportant. Its value is that it arrives early enough to give marketers time to learn before the highest-pressure moments begin.
The 2026 Holiday & Seasonal Shopping Trends Report data shows that 37% of marketers plan to use Performance TV during Labor Day, while 48% of marketers launching Labor Day campaigns say September is their primary launch month.1 Those campaigns can do more than drive immediate sales. They can reveal which audiences respond, which creative earns attention, which messages create action, and which offers actually move consumers.
The smartest marketers should treat those signals as inputs into the rest of the season. Half of marketers say they intentionally carry campaign themes from one seasonal moment into the next, while 49% carry forward audience strategy or audience learnings. Another 45% carry forward messaging frameworks and budget-allocation learnings.1 In other words, Labor Day does not have to win the holiday season by itself. It can make October, November, and December smarter.
Peak-season economics reward advertisers that have already learned
The reason this matters financially is simple: the closer we get to the biggest shopping moments, the more competition there is for the same consumers. The data shows Performance TV spending in 2025 was 250% above the daily average during October Prime Day, while Black Friday and Cyber Monday spending was roughly 87% and 88% above the daily average, respectively.3 The biggest moments attract the biggest budgets because they attract the most consumer attention, but that also makes them expensive places to discover that your strategy does not work.
This is where the seasonal calendar should be viewed as a sequence rather than a collection of independent tentpoles. Labor Day can provide an early read. October can provide another. By the time Black Friday arrives, the goal should be to scale what the earlier moments have already taught you.
That is also why measurement needs to extend beyond the immediate conversion. 63% of marketers now say sales and revenue are the most important outcomes when evaluating Performance TV during holiday and seasonal shopping moments, up from fourth place in 2025.1 If marketers are serious about using early-season campaigns as a source of intelligence, they need to measure those campaigns against business outcomes and understand how they influence behavior beyond the moment of exposure.
The new seasonal playbook is built around iteration
The old holiday playbook was relatively straightforward: build a campaign, launch it before Black Friday, spend heavily through Cyber Monday, and measure the result. The new playbook looks more like a feedback loop. Reach consumers before intent becomes crowded, measure what happens, identify the audiences and creative that are producing the strongest outcomes, and use those insights to improve the next campaign.
This is one reason Performance TV has become a much larger part of the seasonal media mix. Marketers are increasingly treating TV as a performance channel because they want the same thing from it that they expect from the rest of the performance stack: measurable outcomes and a mechanism for getting better over time.
Sources:
- tvScientific by Pinterest, 2026 Holiday & Seasonal Shopping Trends Report, (N=487) United States, July 2026.
- tvScientific by Pinterest, 2026 Consumer Trends Report, US, February 2026, n=600 people that watch tv
- tvScientific by Pinterest Internal Data, December US, 2025.
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