Planning Holiday Campaigns in a Strange Year

Every holiday season claims to be unprecedented, but 2023 has a real case. The actors' strike ran until this very week, scrambling celebrity talent and cultural tentpoles all autumn. Consumers are spending, but anxiously, trading down in some categories while splurging in others with no consistent logic. One major social platform renamed itself mid-year and another one is four months old. And every retail brand suddenly has AI personalization tools it acquired faster than it developed opinions about.

We locked holiday campaigns for three clients over the past six weeks. Here is the thinking that shaped them, offered while it is still testable rather than in a February retrospective.

Emotional register: warmth without denial

The perennial holiday question is tone, and this year's consumer research is unusually consistent: people are tired, price-aware, and allergic to both luxury fantasy and recession pandering. The register that tests well is what we have been calling competent warmth: acknowledging that people are being careful, then celebrating what the care is for. Gift-giving as attention, not extravagance.

For Northwind, that translated into a campaign built entirely around the moment of getting it right: the specific gift for the specific person, with the product cast as evidence of how well you know someone. It let us talk value without saying cheap, which is the tightrope every retail brief walked this year.

Structure: fewer heroes, more ammunition

The bigger shift is structural. The classic holiday architecture, one anthem film plus cutdowns, assumes an attention pattern that barely exists anymore. Our Q4 plans this year inverted the ratio: a modest hero to establish the idea, and then a deep magazine of channel-native executions, built to be reactive. Concretely:

• Creative shot in modular components, so offers, products, and end-cards can be recut in days as inventory and pricing move.
• A standing weekly creative sprint through December, budgeted up front, instead of pretending the campaign is finished at launch.
• Platform-native production for Reels, Shorts, and TikTok, made by people fluent in those grammars, not cropped from the film.
• Retail media and email treated as creative surfaces with the same idea running through them, because that is where the conversion actually happens.

The strike settlement arriving this week ends a strange chapter, but talent-led work takes months to spin up, so the ambient celebrity vacuum will persist through this season. Brands that built around ideas rather than faces lost nothing.

The AI personalization question

Every client asked about it, and our position ended up conservative in an unfashionable way. Personalization is logistics, not voice. Using the models to sequence products, timing, and offers per customer: yes, aggressively, it is working and the early email numbers are strong. Using them to generate the copy and imagery each customer sees: carefully and narrowly, inside templates a human wrote, with hard rails. A brand voice individually rephrased a million times stops being a voice. The value of a campaign line is partly that everyone heard the same one.

The honest summary of our 2023 holiday doctrine: commit hard to one idea, hold the brand voice steady, and make everything else, the offers, the formats, the sequencing, ruthlessly adaptive. Campaigns used to be ships you launched. This season they are more like kitchens you run nightly through January 1. Staff accordingly, budget accordingly, and write the idea strong enough to survive being served ten thousand ways.