Holidays 2026: Strong Spending + Twitchy Confidence = A Case for Creative Agility in Connected TV.
Consumers are still spending. But when, where and why they spend is becoming considerably harder to predict. For brands heading into the most important shopping period of the year, that might be the most useful insight of all.
If you wanted a single forecast to tell you exactly what the 2026 holiday season will look like, you may be disappointed.
Mastercard Economics Institute expects U.S. retail sales, excluding autos and gas, to rise 5.5% year over year between November 1 and December 24, which would make this the strongest holiday growth since 2022. Deloitte, using a different measurement period and methodology, expects November-through-January retail sales to increase between 4.0% and 4.8%. PwC's consumer research, meanwhile, suggests average gift spending could actually decline slightly.
Different forecasts, different methodologies, different answers.
And that may be the most take-away from all this.
Because beneath the top line numbers is a consumer who appears perfectly capable of spending, but increasingly selective about when, where and why they do it.
Consumers are spending, even while confidence sinks
September's Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index fell to 81.9, its lowest level in more than 12 years. The labor market is also showing signs of cooling: U.S. payrolls increased by just 29,000 in September, while average hourly earnings were up 3.0% from a year earlier. August inflation, meanwhile, was running at 3.4%.
Yet consumers haven't exactly stopped reaching for their wallets.
Personal consumption expenditure rose 0.9% in August, even though personal income increased only 0.2%. The personal saving rate stood at 4.1%.
Even Mastercard's bullish 5.5% holiday growth forecast contains an important caveat: it estimates that 2.8 percentage points of that growth will come from inflation.
So perhaps the useful takeaway isn't that consumers are spending or that consumers are struggling.
It's that both things can be true at once.
KEY TAKEAWAY: For brands, that makes relevance, timing and perceived value much more important. Consumers may still want the gift, the party, the trip, the family dinner or the little indulgence. They may simply need a better reason to say yes.
The holiday shopping season no longer waits for the holidays
Adobe expects U.S. consumers to spend $95.8 billion online in October alone, up 8% year over year, with an estimated $9.9 billion landing during the October 6-7 Prime Day period.
Ibotta's consumer research goes even earlier. Two-thirds of shoppers surveyed said they were already in the holiday market before Labor Day, while 30% expected to begin shopping earlier than they did last year.
For marketers, this stretches the traditional holiday calendar considerably.
It also suggests that a campaign planned around a handful of fixed milestones, October launch, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, risks overlooking all the behavior happening between them.
KEY TAKEAWAY: The opportunity is not simply to start advertising earlier. It is to have more things worth saying as the season develops.
Value is changing behavior, not necessarily reducing desire
Ibotta found that 72% of consumers say saving money is important this holiday season. Promotions were cited as the biggest influence on holiday purchases by 37% of shoppers, ahead of gift lists, family recommendations and even brand reputation.
More revealingly, when faced with price pressure, 40% said they look for deals and promotions before resorting to reducing the number of gifts they buy or switching to a cheaper brand.
That distinction matters.
A cautious consumer is not necessarily an inactive consumer. They may instead become a more deliberate one.
KEY TAKEAWAY: The creative implication is that value doesn't always need to mean shouting a discount louder. It might mean highlighting an offer to the household most likely to care about it, surfacing a relevant product category at the right moment, reminding someone about a nearby store, or changing the message as a delivery deadline approaches.
Ecommerce keeps growing. So do stores.
The annual prediction of the death of physical retail will once again have to wait.
Mastercard expects online holiday sales to grow 11% this year, but it also expects in-store sales to rise 3.6%, the strongest growth rate for physical retail since 2022. Census Bureau data tells a similar story: ecommerce grew 12.2% year over year in the second quarter of 2026, but still represented 17.1% of total retail sales.
What changes is the role each channel plays.
As Christmas approaches, immediacy becomes increasingly valuable. Mastercard found that during the 2025 holiday season, more than 35% of in-store spending on jewelry, handbags, cosmetics and department stores between November 22 and December 25 happened in the final week before Christmas. More than 6% of an entire year's spending at U.S. malls occurred during that same week.
The same shopper can therefore be an ecommerce shopper in November and a "where can I get this today?" shopper on December 23.
KEY TAKEAWAY: Brands don't necessarily need separate strategies for those consumers. They need creative capable of recognizing when the story has changed.
Holiday spending isn't only about presents
This matters particularly for CPG brands.
Adobe expects online grocery sales to grow 10.3% this holiday season and cosmetics 9.5%, while specifically anticipating consumers using major promotional periods to stock up on household and personal-care essentials.
Ibotta sees the same behavior from another angle. Around one in three consumers say they stock up on everyday items during major holiday deal events, while nine in ten report buying more of at least one everyday category between Thanksgiving and New Year's.
Christmas, in other words, doesn't just create gift missions. It changes household behavior.
People host. Travel. Cook more. Clean more. Get sick. Run out of things. Buy things they normally buy in larger quantities. People discover brands while hunting for savings.
That dramatically broadens the number of brands with a legitimate reason to participate in the season.
Plan what you can. Build for what you can't.
None of these signals tells a retailer, CPG brand, travel company or automaker exactly what will happen between now and December 25.
That's precisely why they're useful.
Brands can plan audiences, offers, priority products, major moments and broader creative territories well in advance.
What they cannot perfectly plan is the weather, inventory, competitor activity, local demand, category performance, consumer sentiment, shopping urgency or exactly when an individual market will suddenly start behaving differently.
Increasingly, the smartest holiday creative strategies should account for both.
Origin's Slingshot can help brands build planned variations around audiences, locations, occasions and shopper mindsets before a campaign begins, turning one core ad into different stories depending on who is watching and what might matter to them.
Aperture can provide another layer of agility around the core creative, allowing relevant information such as changing offers, weather conditions, proximity, timing, local messaging and other available signals to influence what a viewer sees while the campaign is live.
Importantly, that agility doesn't have to be reserved for an "incremental budget" that suddenly appears in December.
It can be designed into the original campaign.
Then, if incremental dollars do become available, brands already have the creative infrastructure to act on what they've learned rather than starting again from scratch.
Holiday 2026 may turn out to be exceptionally strong. It may prove more cautious than the bullish forecasts suggest. Online could outperform. Stores could surprise. Consumers may buy earlier, later, or both.
A brand doesn't need to predict every one of those outcomes correctly.
It needs a creative strategy capable of responding when one of them happens.
If you find this topic interesting and would like to know more, you can schedule a consultation with one of Origin's CTV specialists by clicking here.
ABOUT ORIGIN
Origin is a creative tailor for brands and agencies looking to transform conventional CTV campaigns into personally relevant, emotionally resonant moments at the household level.
Blending human expertise with real-time data signals and objective-led logic models, Origin’s creative technology layers dynamic, audience-specific narratives into a single brand ad - tailoring the message based on the household, the context, and the moment. The result is proven lifts in engagement, intent, and ROAS that consistently outperform category benchmarks.
Founded by media veterans Stephen Strong and Fred Godfrey, Origin is guided by one simple mantra: to win the modern living room, your message needs to say, “we recognize you.”
Learn more at: originmedia.tv
