Helping You Thrive This Holiday Season with Effective Creative Solutions

The holiday season is high-stakes for marketers. And this year, the potential pot is bigger than ever, with 2024 holiday season sales in the US predicted to increase by 4.8% YoY to $1.353 trillion. 

Nevertheless, many brands head into the pivotal November–December period being dealt a difficult hand when it comes to their creative. 

Traditional creative agencies force brands to contend with slow turnaround times, high costs, and ‌limited creative output. A trio of challenges that make life difficult when you’re looking to maximize holiday campaign performance. Throw into the mix the fact that this year will see a condensed shopping period along with the added noise of a presidential election in the U.S, and these challenges are going to be compounded significantly.  

Given these conditions, it’s easy for marketers to fall into a situation where they’re just trying to scrape by, scrambling to get enough creative out the door and onto the screen. This causes them to sacrifice quality, leading to unoptimized campaigns that deliver subpar results. 

With Shuttlerock, you can flip this script. We offer an agile, streamlined, and scalable solution delivering creative that will enable you to thrive rather than simply survive.

Move fast and stay agile

The holiday season comes hard and fast. Even more so this year with a shortened shopping period with only 27 days between Thanksgiving and Christmas. As a result, shoppers will start their shopping early. In fact, more than 50% of US adults plan to start their 2024 holiday shopping before Thanksgiving. To capture this intent, your comms also need to make an earlier appearance. 

This might sound daunting. From speaking to marketers, we hear that one of their key challenges is the difficulty of getting enough creative produced in the limited time leading up to the holidays. The need to start earlier is only going to add to this difficulty. 

With Shuttlerock, this shortened time frame is no biggie. Even if things go right down to the eleventh hour, we’ve got you covered. How? The answer lies in remixing. Instead of producing creative from scratch, we enable you to remix assets you already have, repurposing and reimagining them through a holiday lens.

Take a look at the Peloton example above. To produce this creative, they didn’t have to shoot anything new. They took a selection of images that had already been produced, gave them to our design team to work their magic – and voilà! An impactful video promoting Peloton’s Black Friday sale. 

Not only does remixing speed up production times, it also allows you to extract more value out of the assets you’ve invested in throughout the year. By the time the holiday season rolls around, your brand will be sitting on a treasure trove of assets that are ripe for repurposing. And given that holiday ads have a short shelf-live, it makes remixing an extra savvy option. 

One other thing worth noting is the agility unlocked by remixing. Being able ‌to turnaround new or updated creative in a matter of days allows you to refresh fatiguing assets, respond to trends, and make optimizations based on live campaign learnings. All of which can prove to be a game-changer when it comes to performance.

Get all the creative you need to succeed

Not only does remixing allow you to move fast and remain agile, it also delivers the high volumes of creative that your holiday campaigns need to see success. 

Many brands go into the holiday period with an insufficient supply of assets. This forces them to run unoptimized or fatigued creative, restricting performance. At Shuttlerock, our remixing approach combined with dedicated creative technology (ShuttlerockCloud) supplies you with all the creative you need – and then some!

This scalability frees you up, allowing you to run your holiday campaigns the way you want to run them, without the creative roadblock. Instead of pining all of your hopes on one concept, you can diversify your creative, testing different approaches within the same ad group to see what resonates. 

It also supplies you with all of the optimizations you need for the different platforms and placements within your holiday promotional mix. No more having to use unoptimized creative across different placements due to a limited supply of assets.

Cut through the noise

It goes without saying that ‌increased consumer spend during the holidays also leads to increased competition among advertisers. You can see this with Q4 CPMs being higher than any other quarter. 

This creates a whole lot of competing noise, all vying for consumer attention. This year, the noise will be turned up to eleven with a presidential election added to the equation. So how do you cut through all of this noise and connect with holiday shoppers? It all comes down to your creative. 

At Shuttlerock, we offer a range of innovative creative solutions that allow you to package your holiday messaging in a way that stands out in a sea of sameness.

Two of these solutions can be seen above in our work with Primark: UGC 3D and UGC Creative. 

• UGC 3D: Transform static images into 3D product models that are then integrated with UGC footage in various impactful ways.

• UGC Creative: Collab with UGC creators to produce platform-native, highly relevant content that consumers connect with.

Turn high-stakes into high-reward, with Shuttlerock

The success of your holiday season campaigns largely comes down to your creative. Shuttlerock has the solutions to ensure your creative delivers maximum results. 

To learn more about these solutions, get in touch with one of our crew members to discuss how we can help your holiday campaigns thrive.