Henry Kelly, Director of eCommerce, Meta ANZ
The year is 2013. Lorde is topping charts with a song about rejecting extravagance and, ironically, Black Friday has just landed in Australia with Apple’s one-day gift card promo. Back then, the seasonal sale spree barely registered here. It was a headline, a curiosity.
Fast-forward to today, and Black Friday is something else entirely. It’s no longer a weekend stunt; it’s the finale of a year-long strategy. November has become a structural peak in the retail calendar, and the best-performing brands no longer just sell on Black Friday – they orchestrate it.
What changed wasn’t simply the size of the sale; it was the way people shop.
Discovery, consideration and purchase no longer happen in a storefront. It’s done on the sofa, on the train or on your lunch break. With the majority of shoppers using Meta platforms to discover and research products, we’ve learnt a lot about how to do it right. Our biggest lesson: the brands that win on Black Friday aren’t the loudest – they run broader creative, start earlier and design for mobile by default. Here are some quick tips to get things ready ahead of the big sales moment.
Don’t skimp on creative
Content has to earn its place in people’s day, and one of the biggest learnings I’ve witnessed with clients over the years is that creative is the single most important factor in determining the audience an advertiser will reach, and the price they’ll pay.
Our system can work with pinpoint accuracy, but it needs both creative volume and diversity to do so. With multiple creative concepts, video cuts, placements and personas, you will reach multiple audiences. The more creatives, the more matches our system will make with people likely to engage and buy.
The most effective teams run structured weekly tests, give each asset enough time to gather signal and scale the winners into the peak window. A simple three-week cadence works well:
Week 1: launch new static and video
Week 2: scale winners while introducing fresh assets
Week 3: double down on proven creatives with last-chance messaging
For Collagen Co, this approach coincided with a 72% lift in conversion rate and a 15% ROAS uplift during peak periods.
Volume and variety keep fresh ideas entering the system while proven workhorse ads do the compounding. It’s the difference between a sale that spikes and a sale that teaches.
Start early, stay present, think mobile
The other levers hiding in plain sight are timing and accessibility.
The retail conversation now stretches well beyond a long weekend. Shoppers are beginning their holiday shopping earlier each year, continuing through December and into January in meaningful numbers.
Ad campaigns need to follow suit – priming in November to capture early shoppers, and staying present throughout December and into January.
Brands that treat Black Friday as a season-long narrative capture audiences who don’t choose to buy on someone else’s deadline.
With most festive-season orders now starting on mobile, brands must prioritise the thumb before the desktop.
Last year, the percentage of orders placed on mobile during Cyber Week rose to nearly 70%.
Simple strategies – using the 9:16 vertical, landing the hook in the first five seconds, and keeping text and logos inside safe zones so UI doesn’t crop your message – can significantly improve performance.
Mobile performance lives and dies on the hand-off.
Wherever possible, make one-tap wallets available, reduce taps from ad to checkout and keep forms short enough to complete on a train ride. The brands that succeed each year make it effortless for users to move from seeing your ad to buying your product.
Automate, automate, automate
If creative and timing are the score and the tempo, automation is the orchestra pit.
We’re seeing more marketers lean into Advantage+ – not as a surrender, but as a way to create more room for human insight and focus. At the same time, automation is delivering real business value. Across recent tests, advertisers using Advantage+ saw a 9% improvement in cost per conversion.
The smartest brands are offloading the heavy lifting of targeting, placements and budget allocation, freeing teams to invest energy where it’s needed most.
Australian teams have translated seasonal stress into structural advantage by maintaining a steady drumbeat of tests, sequencing messages through the month and letting automation amplify what the data proves.
A simple operating rhythm emerges: prime with creative variety, sustain presence throughout the broader window, and make the hand-off from ad to checkout effortless – whether that’s a product detail page, a local store or both.
The competitive reality
All of this adds up to a simple, uncomfortable truth: if your Black Friday approach hasn’t shifted in the past five years, you’re giving competitors space to overtake you.
They’re running creator-led storytelling instead of coupon-led shouting, and turning seasonal surges into structural advantage.
Black Friday has grown up. It now mirrors your marketing maturity more than your markdowns. Brands who embrace that reality come out of November with more than a spike – they emerge with a smarter creative engine and a playbook that still works in the year ahead.