Somewhere around mid-October, South African advertisers all start planning their Black Friday ads at roughly the same time. Budgets get topped up. Campaigns get built. A broad audience labelled something close to “shoppers, 25 to 54, interested in retail” goes live against everyone else’s broad audience labelled almost exactly the same thing.
And then everybody competes to be heard by the same people.
Peak season is the loudest trading window of the year, and volume is the default response to it. Spend more, reach wider, run longer. The problem is that volume is what every competitor is also buying, which means it is the one lever guaranteed not to differentiate you.
Precision is the lever that does. And precision is not something you can switch on during Black Friday week. It is a planning decision, made weeks earlier, about which behaviours you are actually going to target.
The season is getting louder and longer
The headline numbers make peak season look like an expanding opportunity. They are worth reading more carefully than that.
Online retail spending during South Africa's 2025 festive season rose 49.9% year-on-year, with e-commerce accounting for 11.5% of total retail spend over the period. By comparison, in-store spend grew 4.1%.
Additionally, the timing has shifted. Black Friday and early Christmas promotions have pulled spend forward out of December and into October and November.
Read those together and the picture is clear. The window is longer, the competition for it is heavier, and the spend is spread thinner across it. More advertisers, spending more, over more weeks, chasing a consumer who is buying selectively.
Shouting louder into that is an expensive way to be ignored.
What Black Friday ads actually cost you
Peak season does not only make media more expensive. It makes it repetitive. When every advertiser buys broad, and all those broad audiences overlap, the same people get served the same kind of message over and over. Flow Platform has seen standard targeting push frequency as high as 36 in a single campaign.
That is not reach. That is one shout, repeated three dozen times, at a group of people who had already made up their minds by the fourth.
We advise running first-party data audiences at a frequency of 3 to 4. When you are reaching the right people, you do not need to tell them 36 times.
KEY INSIGHT 💡
Wasted spend during peak season rarely looks like waste. It looks like a healthy impression count delivered to a small group of people who stopped noticing you three weeks ago.
Precision starts with three questions, not a bigger budget
Here is the strategy, and it is deliberately simple. Before the budget conversation, answer three things.
What behaviour proves someone actually buys in your category?
Not what they say they are interested in. What they have bought. A verified wine and spirits shopper at a premium retailer is a different proposition to someone whose profile suggests they might enjoy wine. This is the mechanism behind retail media in South Africa: advertising built on a retailer’s own first-party shopper data rather than inferred interest. Flow’s audiences are tiered by how close they sit to a confirmed purchase, and during peak season, when everyone is bidding on the maybes, the confirmed buyers are where the margin lives.
When in the season does that behaviour actually happen?
Peak season is not one moment. Deal-hunting behaviour clusters around the last week of November. Gifting research runs through early December. Hosting and entertaining spend lands in the final ten days. Travel and dining intent sit somewhere in the middle. Targeting a hosting audience on 25 November is not early. It is wrong.
How many people do you actually need?
This is the question most peak season plans skip. A smaller audience of proven buyers, reached three or four times, will almost always beat a large audience reached until it is numb. Size and reach are not the same thing, and repetition past a point stops being persuasion.
Answer those three and the media plan mostly writes itself. Skip them and you are back to buying volume and hoping.
What precision looks like when it lands
Peak season rewards the brands that decide early. Here is what that looked like.
Over the celebratory season, RGBC ran Moët & Chandon and Veuve Clicquot through Woolworths’ first-party data. Rather than buying broad interest audiences, they targeted known Woolworths wine and bubbly shoppers and sent them straight to the product pages.
Sales value rose 53%.
Units rose 54%.
Value growth can be price. Unit growth is real demand.
The campaign reached over 100,000 unique Woolworths shoppers, beat link click benchmarks by 32%, and generated 74% of all Moët & Chandon landing page traffic and 92% of all Veuve Clicquot landing page traffic during the period. Veuve Clicquot Yellow doubled its sales value year-on-year.
Tess Mackeurton, National Key Account Manager at RGBC, put the before-and-after plainly:
Usually, during a peak retail period you're just hoping your message cuts through all the noise. But by activating a campaign with Woolworths, we were able to talk directly to the people who actually buy our products.
@home is a smaller campaign but the best illustration of question one. Instead of a generic homeware shopper segment, it retargeted an audience of active property buyers and tenants looking at properties at specific price points. The signal was not “likes homeware.” It was “is moving house.” That returned a 9.78 ROAS during peak shopping season at a lower cost per click than the retargeting it replaced.
And if your addressable market is genuinely small, the Johnnie Walker Blue Label campaign is worth reading in full: 39% festive revenue growth year-on-year against a buyer pool most brands would consider too narrow to bother with. We unpacked it in The smaller the market, the less room there is to guess.
The pattern across all three is the same. The winning decision was made at the audience selection stage, not the bidding stage.
Plan the signal before you plan the spend
Peak season punishes late decisions. By the time Black Friday week arrives, the only lever left is bidding, and bidding is the most expensive way to buy relevance.
Flow’s Audience Marketplace gives brands access to first-party commerce audiences built from real purchase behaviour at South Africa’s leading retailers and platforms, available to browse and book before the season starts.
Explore the Audience Marketplace or book a demo to work through your peak season audience plan with the Flow team.
Frequently asked questions
How should brands advertise during Black Friday in South Africa?
Start with audience selection rather than budget. The South African peak window now runs from late October through December, with Black Friday and early Christmas promotions pulling spend forward out of December. Decide which purchase behaviours identify a real buyer in your category, when in that window those behaviours occur, and how many people you actually need to reach. Broad targeting during peak means competing for the same impressions as everyone else, at the season’s highest prices.
When should I start planning Black Friday and festive audiences?
Earlier than most plans allow for. South African spend has been shifting out of December and into October and November, so audience selection needs to be settled before the promotional window opens. Booking audiences in advance also means the campaign is not competing for setup time during the busiest fortnight of the year.
Why do CPMs and campaign costs rise so sharply during peak season?
Because demand for ad inventory spikes while the available audience stays the same size. When every advertiser targets broadly, they are bidding against each other for identical impressions. Targeting a narrower, behaviour-verified audience reduces how much of that bidding war you are actually in.
Should I use a broad or narrow audience during Black Friday?
Narrower than instinct suggests. Peak season pushes advertisers toward reach because the moment feels big, but a large audience reached until it is numb performs worse than a smaller audience of proven buyers reached three or four times. Flow has seen standard targeting push frequency as high as 36 in a single campaign, which is spend going to people who stopped registering the ad long before the last impression.
Which behaviours matter most during South African peak season?
It depends on the category, which is why signal selection has to come first. Deal-hunting, gifting research, travel booking, dining reservations and hosting purchases all peak at different points across November and December. The strongest signal is often an adjacent one rather than an obvious one: @home reached homeware buyers by targeting people who had recently moved, not people who browse homeware.
What frequency should I run during peak season?
Flow advises a frequency of 3 to 4 when running first-party data audiences. The logic is simple: if the audience is built from confirmed purchase behaviour, the message does not need repeating a dozen times to land. High frequency is usually a symptom of an audience that is too small for the budget, or too broad to convert, rather than a deliberate choice.
Can I still improve a peak season campaign once it is already running?
Partly. Creative, budget pacing and bidding can all be adjusted mid-flight. Audience quality mostly cannot, because the audience you selected determines who is available to optimise against. That is why the useful work happens in October.
