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As low consumer sentiment and tariff pressures continue to squeeze retail margins, brands are approaching Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the holiday shopping season with caution. However, new analysis from measurement platform Fospha suggests that leading retailers remain confident in their ability to grow during peak season.
Analyzing data from its client base, Fospha found that retail brands increased peak-season advertising spend by 22% year over year in 2025, despite expectations of a slowdown across the market.
According to Fospha, the confidence among stronger-performing brands is linked to improved visibility into the impact of upper-funnel marketing. Traditional measurement approaches such as Last Click and pixel-based multi-touch attribution can undervalue demand-generating channels including TikTok, Snapchat and Google Demand Gen.
Top Performers Invest More in Upper-Funnel Marketing
One of the key findings from Fospha’s analysis is that the top 25% of brands based on peak ROAS invested twice as much of their advertising budgets in upper-funnel campaigns compared with the remaining 75% of brands.
By peak week, top-performing brands allocated 24% of their spend to upper-funnel activity, compared with just 10% among other brands.
Fospha said the findings highlight the importance of full-funnel measurement when planning peak-season advertising strategies.
AI-Powered Advertising Gains Momentum
The analysis also found stronger performance from AI-driven advertising formats.
- TikTok Smart+ revenue increased 15x
- Meta Advantage+ revenue grew 94%
- Google Demand Gen peak revenue increased 107% year over year
- RTB House recorded the highest ROAS growth, rising 105% year over year
- Reddit revenue increased 4.2x during peak, while new conversions grew 168%
Fospha also found that top-performing brands allocated approximately 30% of their peak budgets to emerging channels, with Reddit, RTB House, Pinterest and Google Demand Gen among the leading platforms.
Scaling Proven Campaigns Into Peak
Top-performing brands also approached campaign planning differently. During business-as-usual periods, they ran 51% more campaigns than during peak, allowing them to identify and scale proven winners before the holiday shopping period.
Fospha’s Peak Playbook 2026 examines these trends across nine advertising platforms and provides recommendations for pre-peak, peak and post-peak activity.
“Peak period is incredibly important for retail businesses, yet many brands still have little clarity on how to approach it,” said Sam Carter, CEO at Fospha.
Carter added that poor measurement can cause brands to underinvest in demand-building activities that help make demand-capture advertising more profitable during peak periods.
The findings suggest that while economic uncertainty continues to influence retail planning, brands with stronger full-funnel measurement capabilities are using data to maintain or increase investment in demand generation and emerging advertising channels ahead of the 2026 peak season.
