Thousands of retailers across the country and around the globe rely on strong 4th Quarters to make their year. But problems abound and this year brings even more potential issues. Everybody knows that the holiday season is the most noisy time to break through, but layer on top of that supply chain, product, and labor shortages and we have the makings of a veritable holiday shut down.

Smart holiday shoppers are already in the market, and if they are in the market, smart marketers need to be there to greet them. Now is not the time to stubbornly obsess with content calendars and existing schedules. Now is the time to get ahead of an already flattening curve and beat the competition to the best holiday season yet.

“I’ve been doing this for 43 years and never seen it this bad,” said Isaac Larian, founder and CEO of MGA Entertainment, one of the world’s largest toymakers. “Everything that can go wrong is going wrong at the same time.”

Where the Goliaths go broad, savvy marketers target

WTA has the money to dominate large channel advertising. From heart-warming commercials spotlighting a warehouse workers dream of moving into the healthcare field (by the way, how did Amazon help with that?), to the even more hard-to-believe commercials of warehouse workers being proud to work to pull down boxes for their “work family”, the triad of Goliaths really know how to turn in on thick during the holiday season. But where they go broad, savvy marketers still have the ability to compete with targeted ads across programmatic, social, and CTV.

As previously mentioned, no one can compete on scale, but smaller retailers can win with focus. It obviously starts with targeting. The first step for many can be creating tight audience definitions that can then be scaled around key product opportunities giving retailers the ability to avoid the noise of “buy holiday shopping”. Yes. But even savvier marketers can go deeper.

People buy brands not interests

Brand-level data avoids the “interest chasm” and more efficiently directs marketer spend to brand-intent audiences vs. dumping people into category interests. A person interested in “apparel” can span from someone who rocks Adidas kicks to someone who buys Louis Vuitton bags. Brand-level data can make the difference between stalking any shopper to finding the right shopper. Look at the same data from a competitive lens and you can use brand-level data to target your closest competitors customer with your best offer.