Black Friday advertising starts earlier every year, and the shopping window now stretches through Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday. New AppLovin research on the 2025 Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) window — built on e-commerce checkout and revenue data plus AppLovin campaign data — suggests the winners weren’t simply the brands with the deepest discounts or biggest weekend budgets. They were the ones that managed Black Friday ad creative most actively. Last November, 63% of advertisers refreshed their creative in at least three weeks of the month.
Advertisers that launched new creative almost every week in November 2025 saw 23% higher return on ad spend seven days after first interaction than those that refreshed once or twice. Creative age mattered too:
AppLovin’s advice: start early to give campaigns time to learn and scale, but don’t run the same message all season. Build interest first, then release promotions as Black Friday approaches.
The goal isn’t to be the first brand to announce a sale — it’s to connect early product interest to a promotion when shoppers are ready to buy.
Against a June–September non-promotional baseline, first-interaction ROAS lift was 83% for the shortest BFCM videos, 39% for 16–29-second videos and 24% for videos of 30 seconds or more. Short video creates urgency; longer video still has a job in product education.
What appears after the video matters as well:
Lock in a weekly creative production calendar for November before the season starts, pair evergreen product assets with a promotion swap-in plan, test at least two video lengths, and replace static endcards with interactive ones where your inventory allows it.
If you can’t produce new creative every week, predicting performance before launch is an alternative — see how Kroger predicted e-commerce conversions with 81% accuracy before launch. For new holiday inventory beyond creative, read why checkout belongs in your holiday media plan.
In AppLovin’s data, advertisers that launched new creative almost every week in November 2025 saw 23% higher day-7 ROAS than those that refreshed once or twice.
Both. Evergreen product messaging made up 58.2% of creative, but promotional messaging drove 64.2% of day-7 attributed revenue. Build interest with product ads, then shift to promotions closer to the event.
Yes, in this dataset. Interactive HTML endcards lifted day-7 ROAS 40% versus a non-promotional baseline, while static-image endcards fell 5%. Among new customers the lift was 48%.
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