Stay cool when holiday chaos hits.

76% of Gen Z used social media for holiday gift inspiration and shopping. Can you reach them at any point from ad to site to store? Are you able to tie performance to investment? Is it hot in here?

We’ve got you covered with our Holiday Strategy Playbook. Get the full story behind the stats, including spending trends, channel influence, optimal timing and AI behavior.

A woman relaxes in a pool, surrounded by overlays of a successful holiday ad campaign on a mobile phone, a completed launch checklist, and an upward-trending revenue forecast graph.

Holiday success is decided before Q4.

Use these insights to make sense of holiday purchasing before the seasonal rush:

spent more than they expected during the 2025 holiday season.

said a holiday ad influenced a purchase.

used AI to help with holiday shopping.

Solve your biggest holiday challenges with smarter strategy.

Not sure where to begin? Start with your challenges. Learn from key pain points and common obstacles that brands face during the holiday season.

A smiling man sits by a pool, looking at his smartphone.

You have data—but it’s not giving you confidence.

Rather than working from a single, clear view of your customers, most brands are dealing with incomplete or outdated data.

Our industry-leading data can help you:

Identify your highest-value customers.
Understand what drives their purchases.
Focus your holiday strategy where it’ll have the greatest impact.

You’re missing your best customers.

Holiday strategies often focus on acquisition, while existing customers are largely neglected. Holiday acquisition costs skyrocket, so existing customers are often your best growth lever. By optimizing your loyalty strategy, you can:

Strengthen engagement with your most valuable customers.
Increase basket size and repeat purchases during peak moments.
Drive higher customer lifetime value.
Create hyper-relevant, personalized experiences.
Avoid over-reliance on discounts.

Your systems aren’t connected.

Customer data is fragmented across platforms, teams and environments, making it difficult to activate consistently. And campaign execution breaks down if data isn’t connected throughout. When you bring all of your data together for a better view of in-market customers, you can:

Unite fragmented data into enriched customer profiles.
Build audiences ready for cross-channel activation during the holidays.
Deliver more consistent, relevant messaging at the right time during each customer’s journey.

You’re spending more—but proving less.

As media costs rise and measurement becomes more complex, it’s getting harder to understand what drives performance, where to invest and how to prove incrementality.

Implementing a full-service programmatic media platform allows you to:

Identify what influences your best customers.
Optimize your channel mix before cost ramps up.
Improve efficiency and reduce wasted spend.
Align media strategies to consumer behavior.

Your must-read for summer

The Holiday Strategy Playbook explores the consumer trends, channel insights and behavioral shifts shaping holiday strategy—and what to do for 2026 planning.

Don’t wait for the chaos. Download the playbook now and plan with confidence.

Cover for Epsilon Pulse's 2026 Holiday Strategy Playbook, showing a man smiling at his phone, with text: "How consumers actually shopped in 2025 and how brands can adapt their marketing in 2026."