A Few Interesting Ways to Allocate Incremental CTV Budgets In The Run Up To Christmas.
Every year, somewhere between Halloween and Christmas, a beautiful phrase starts appearing in media conversations: “We found some incremental budget that we need to spend.”
Maybe an existing vendor is underperforming. Maybe you only just learnt that tailored messaging on Connected TV is outperforming generic creative (hint). Maybe somebody discovered $87,000 hiding behind the marketing sofa cushions. Who knows?
Whatever the reason, the question becomes: what can we actually do with it?
For the purposes of this exercise, let’s call an incremental CTV budget somewhere between $50,000 and $150,000, with roughly three to six weeks to put it to work between late October and Christmas.
That is not necessarily enough time or money to reinvent the entire media strategy. But it is absolutely enough to test something useful, latch onto something valuable, or make an existing campaign substantially more productive.
Here are a few thought starters.
Retail: make national creative feel local
Holiday retail is unusually well suited to creative personalization because the reasons to visit a store can change dramatically by market:
One region may have different products available.
Another may have extended store hours.
A third may be experiencing weather that suddenly makes coats, boots or snow blowers considerably more interesting.
Instead of simply adding more weight behind the same national commercial, incremental budget could be used to create a layer of local relevance around it.
Think nearby store messaging. Regional product priorities. Local promotions. Different creative treatments for existing customers versus prospective ones.
You are not replacing the brand campaign. You are giving it a reason to feel more useful wherever it happens to appear.
Media planners who represent retail brands might also consider ways they can use the calendar harder, because Halloween to Christmas is not one shopping season. It is a collection of very different moments. There is Halloween itself. Early gifting. Black Friday. Cyber Monday. Shipping cutoffs. Last-minute gifting. Christmas Eve panic.
A modest incremental budget could create a succession of creative messages that evolve with those moments rather than asking one piece of creative to survive unchanged for six weeks.
The interesting question becomes less, “What should our holiday ad say?” and more, “What should it say today?”
That distinction can become very powerful on television.
CPG: stop targeting the household as though everyone wants the same thing
Holiday CPG buying is wonderfully messy. The person buying the product may not be the person consuming it. Someone shopping for a party behaves differently from someone stocking the house for visiting family. Parents, hosts, gift-givers and everyday loyalists may all be watching the same core commercial for completely different reasons.
If audience data is already helping decide who receives the ad, incremental budget could be used to explore whether the creative should acknowledge why they are seeing it.
Same brand. Same campaign. Different story within the story.
The opportunity is not personalization for personalization’s sake. It is recognizing that the product can mean something different depending on who is sitting on the sofa.
Media planners who represent build around occasions, not demographics.
There is also a more human way to think about holiday segmentation.
Forget age and income for a second.
Think movie night. Hosting Thanksgiving. Friends coming over. Football Sunday. School holidays. The office party. New Year’s Eve.
Those are occasions with very obvious emotional and practical needs attached to them.
An incremental campaign could test whether messaging built around those moments creates more resonance than simply changing creative according to traditional demographic groups.
Sometimes the most useful piece of data is not who somebody is. It is what they might be doing next.
Winter travel: sell the reason to go now
Winter travel creates another interesting opportunity because urgency can be enormously variable - and highly enticing:
A ski destination may suddenly have excellent snow.
A Caribbean destination may look particularly attractive to somebody currently staring out at sleet.
A hotel may have availability over a particular weekend.
An airline may have direct service from one market but not another.
Rather than spending incremental dollars simply telling more people that a destination exists, use them to surface the thing that makes booking feel sensible right now.
That might mean:
Highlighting direct flights by origin market.
Showing different experiences to families and couples.
Calling out proximity.
Surfacing seasonal events.
Reminding somebody buried in a freezing Northeast winter that there is another option.
The media finds the audience. The creative gives them the reason.
Education: Use the money to learn something
Incremental budget does not have to be judged entirely by incremental reach.
It can also buy information.
Take an existing campaign and create two or three meaningful (possibly even risky) creative approaches around it. Change the message by audience. Change it by geography. Change it by occasion. Then measure what actually moved.
Did store visits change? Did bookings respond? Did one audience react disproportionately well? Did personalized creative outperform the standard version?
Suddenly that $50,000 - $150,000 is not merely an end-of-year budget being “used up.”
It becomes a relatively contained experiment capable of making next year’s much larger budget smarter. And perhaps that is the most interesting way to think about incremental CTV dollars in the first place.
Don’t ask where you can spend them.
Ask what you can learn, prove or improve while you have them.
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
