This is an excerpt from our Glossy+ Research report The 2026 guide to holiday marketing strategies, including A-Frame Brands, Mastercard and Ritual, which examined which commerce channels are dominating marketers’ holiday strategies. The report is based on a survey of 90 brand and retailer professionals, as well as individual interviews with marketing executives.
Glossy’s survey found that brands and retailers plan to adjust the marketing tactics they’ll use during the 2026 holiday season in comparison to those they used in 2025.
The biggest changes are that CTV/streaming and TV ads are gaining traction in 2026, with year-over-year increases of 22 percentage points and 20 percentage points, respectively.
Forty-five percent of survey respondents said they plan to use CTV/streaming ads this holiday season, in comparison to 23% of respondents who said the same in 2025. The 2026 uptick followed a 14 percentage point dip in usage from 2024 to 2025.
Meanwhile, marketers’ usage of TV ads remained relatively stable between 2024 and 2025, dropping by only 4 percentage points between 2024 and 2025, but grew by a whopping 20 percentage points in 2026. Thirty-three percent of brands and retailers said they plan to use TV ads this holiday season, in comparison to 13% of marketers who said the same in 2025.
“Streaming is a really valid channel to invest in during the holidays because consumption of that media spikes,” said Laura Brodie, chief growth officer at supplement company Ritual. “But participating in streaming is actually a decision for the whole year. Starting to engage just for the holiday would be a risky move, especially for a smaller brand.”
“If you have the data to back it up over the course of the year showing this is a channel that’s proven and the ROI metrics associated, it can make a lot of sense to spike it during holiday,” she added.
Ari Bloom, founder and CEO of brand incubator A-Frame Brands, said that both streaming and TV ads can be effective for targeting specific demographic groups during the holidays. “Streaming and television is an effective audience conversion mechanism, especially with women over 30 years old,” Bloom said. “We’ve done a lot of work on daytime TV and on QVC. We see significantly bigger segments in the holiday time period from November through mid-December, and we always put attention on those times.”
Last year, brands’ and retailers’ most-used holiday marketing tactic was brand experiences, but that strategy fell to second place in 2026 behind streaming/CTV ads. Forty-one percent of marketers said they expect to use brand experiences as a marketing strategy during the 2026 holiday season in comparison to 50% of marketers who said the same in 2025 — a drop of 9 percentage points.
Brands and retailers are also divesting from using gift guides and influencer hauls/unboxing videos this holiday season. Marketers’ usage of gift guides decreased by 19 percentage points in 2026 vs. 2025, while their use of influencer hauls/unboxing videos fell by 14 percentage points this year in comparison to last year.
Although gift guides and brand experiences decreased in marketer usage for the 2026 holidays, they remain brands’ and retailers’ top-performing holiday marketing tactics over time. Thirty-one percent of marketers said gift guides have historically performed the best for their company during the holiday season, while 28% of marketers said the same of brand experiences, putting them in the No. 1 and No. 2 ranking spots, respectively.
Although some marketers are shifting away from using gift guides for the upcoming holiday season, Ritual’s Brodie said gift guides are likely to gain importance in the AI-driven search era because AI-powered search tools often rely on best of lists and curated recommendations to answer consumer queries.
“Gift guides are very interesting in the world of AEO and thinking about LLM optimization,” Brodie said. “Overall, best of lists and gift guides are a close sister to [AI search results]. Gift guides can play an important role in holiday and especially bridging LLM research and AI overviews. So, I’m bullish about gift guides.”
Although brands and retailers are leaning into CTV/streaming ads for the 2026 holidays, those marketing tactics tied in the No. 4 spot for the best-performing holiday marketing tactic over time, while pop-up shops ranked No. 3. Influencer hauls/unboxing videos was the only marketing strategy that fell in both best historic performance and marketers’ intended use during the 2026 holiday season.
A-Frame Brands’ Bloom said brands and retailers should also consider investing in catalogs for the 2026 holiday. “Catalogs have always been very successful, and they’re heavily conversion-focused,” Bloom explained. “When they’re discount-driven and when people’s attention is on buying, you can do offers that you can only get via physical paper, and it does drive people into stores.”
