The Great Holiday Marketing Pivot of 2026: Brands and Retailers Trade Influencers for CTV, TV, and AI Search Strategy
The landscape of retail holiday marketing is undergoing a seismic transformation, as major brands and independent merchants alike discard traditional playbook staples in favor of big-screen media and future-proof digital strategies. According to a comprehensive new industry survey conducted by Modern Retail, marketing executives are sharply recalibrating their promotional spending for the 2026 holiday shopping season, stepping away from saturated digital trends to embrace a mix of traditional broadcasting, connected television (CTV), and unexpected legacy formats.
The data reveals a dramatic reversal of fortunes for media channels that once dominated festive campaigns. As consumer habits evolve and the digital advertising ecosystem faces rising customer acquisition costs, brands are reallocating millions of dollars to chase high-intent holiday shoppers where attention is most concentrated. This strategic shift underscores a broader maturation in retail marketing, balancing immediate conversion goals with long-term ecosystem optimization.
The Ascendancy of CTV and Traditional Television
The most striking revelation from the Modern Retail survey is the massive resurgence of television advertising, both through linear broadcast and Connected TV (CTV) streaming platforms. For the 2026 holiday season, CTV and streaming ads have surged to the top of marketers’ planned strategies, capturing a 45% adoption rate among respondents. This represents a remarkable 22 percentage point increase year-over-year compared to the 23% of brands that planned to use the medium in 2025.
This dramatic uptick in 2026 follows a period of temporary cooling. Between 2024 and 2025, usage of CTV and streaming ads experienced a 14 percentage point dip as brands experimented with tighter performance-marketing budgets. However, the medium has roared back, driven by surging holiday viewership and sophisticated audience-targeting capabilities.
Linear television has experienced an even more improbable renaissance. After holding relatively steady with only a minor 4 percentage point drop between 2024 and 2025, brand and retailer adoption of traditional TV ads skyrocketed by 20 percentage points for the 2026 season. Thirty-three percent of surveyed merchants now plan to leverage TV ads this holiday, up sharply from just 13% in 2025.
Industry experts emphasize that while holiday media consumption spikes significantly, jumping into television or streaming without year-round foundational data can be a perilous gamble. Laura Brodie, chief growth officer at supplement brand Ritual, notes that streaming is undeniably a valid channel to invest in during the festive rush due to high viewer engagement, but warns against treating it as a seasonal afterthought.
Participating in streaming is actually a decision for the whole year, Brodie explains. 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 the holiday.
Demographic Targeting and the Power of the Screen
The pivot back to television and streaming is not merely about broad brand awareness; it is deeply rooted in precise demographic conversion. Ari Bloom, founder and CEO of consumer brand incubator A-Frame Brands, points out that the medium serves as an exceptionally powerful conversion funnel for specific consumer segments that dominate holiday purchasing decisions.
Streaming and television is an effective audience conversion mechanism, especially with women over 30 years old, Bloom notes. 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.
By aligning visual storytelling with proven day-parting strategies, brands are finding that older, highly solvent demographic groups respond strongly to broadcast advertising during the compressed holiday shopping window. This realization has prompted marketing teams to divert capital away from tactics that have begun to yield diminishing returns.
The Retreat from Influencers and Gift Guides
While broadcast screens are enjoying a golden moment, other once-ubiquitous holiday marketing tactics are experiencing steep declines. Influencer hauls, unboxing videos, and curated gift guides—staples of social media-driven commerce over the past half-decade—are losing favor among budget-conscious marketing directors.
According to the survey, the usage of gift guides by brands and retailers dropped by 19 percentage points for the 2026 holiday season compared to the previous year. Simultaneously, reliance on influencer hauls and unboxing videos fell by 14 percentage points.
This retrenchment reflects growing consumer fatigue with hyper-commercialized social media content and the escalating costs of securing top-tier influencer partnerships during the fourth quarter. Furthermore, brands are re-evaluating the direct return on investment (ROI) delivered by sprawling creator campaigns, prompting a flight toward measurable media channels.
Paradoxically, however, consumer research habits and historical performance data suggest that the burial of the gift guide may be premature. Despite the drop in intended usage for 2026, historical metrics place gift guides firmly at the pinnacle of past holiday success. Thirty-1 percent of surveyed marketers identified gift guides as their company’s historically best-performing holiday marketing tactic, ranking them No. 1 overall. Brand experiences followed closely behind at 28%, securing the No. 2 spot.
The Intersection of Gift Guides and AI Search Optimization
To understand the future of retail marketing, industry leaders are looking past temporary budget allocations and examining structural shifts in how consumers discover products. Chief among these structural shifts is the rise of artificial intelligence-driven search engines and Large Language Models (LLMs).
Ritual’s Laura Brodie offers a counterintuitive perspective on gift guides, arguing that their utility is actually evolving rather than expiring. In the era of AI-powered search, Brodie suggests that curated lists and gift guides will become vital anchors for brand discovery.
Gift guides are very interesting in the world of AEO [Answer Engine Optimization] and thinking about LLM optimization, Brodie explains. 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.
As consumers increasingly bypass traditional search engine results pages in favor of synthesized conversational AI answers, AI tools frequently pull from structured, authoritative roundups, product roundups, and editorial gift guides. Brands that abandon these formats entirely risk becoming invisible to AI-driven recommendation engines.
Brand Experiences Step Aside for CTV
The evolution of experiential marketing is another notable trend in the 2026 data. In 2025, brand experiences—ranging from pop-up shops and immersive installations to experiential retail activations—reigned supreme as the single most utilized holiday marketing tactic, deployed by 50% of marketers.
For the 2026 holiday season, brand experiences have slipped into second place, with 41% of marketers planning to use them, representing a 9 percentage point decline. While pop-up shops maintain a strong historical performance ranking at No. 3, brands are clearly tightening their experiential budgets in favor of scalable digital formats like CTV and targeted television spots.
Yet, despite the trimming of digital creator budgets and experiential footprints, retail strategists caution against completely abandoning tactile, physical formats. A-Frame Brands’ Ari Bloom advocates for a surprising analog channel that continues to defy digital-first dogma: the printed catalog.
Catalogs have always been very successful, and they’re heavily conversion-focused, Bloom points out. 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.
Chronology of the Holiday Marketing Shift: 2024 to 2026
To contextualize the current landscape, industry analysts trace the trajectory of retail marketing over the past three years through three distinct phases:
- The Post-Pandemic Digital Peak (2024): Retailers heavily favored social media collaborations, creator unboxings, and digital-first spending. CTV usage was beginning to scale, but linear TV budgets remained conservative as brands chased hyper-targeted performance metrics on social platforms.
- The Fragmentation and Fatigue Era (2025): Brand experiences peaked, capturing 50% of the market as merchants sought physical touchpoints to combat digital ad fatigue. Meanwhile, CTV usage suffered a temporary 14 percentage point dip due to rising platform costs and attribution challenges, while gift guides and influencer partnerships remained near their saturation peak.
- The Screen-Centric and AI-Optimized Realignment (2026): Facing intense competition and rising customer acquisition costs on social media, brands executed a massive pivot back to the living room. CTV/streaming and traditional TV surged by 22 and 20 percentage points, respectively. Simultaneously, brands began trimming influencer hauls and traditional gift guides, even as forward-thinking executives recognized the critical importance of gift guides for AI search engine optimization.
Broader Implications for the Retail Industry
The 2026 holiday marketing data signals a maturation of direct-to-consumer (DTC) and legacy retail strategies alike. For years, the prevailing wisdom dictated a headlong rush into performance marketing, social commerce, and influencer-led virality. However, diminishing returns, ad fatigue, and the shifting dynamics of digital discovery have forced brands to rethink their playbooks.
The convergence of television broadcasting and programmatic streaming highlights a desire for high-impact, brand-building storytelling combined with sophisticated household targeting. At the same time, the discourse surrounding AI search optimization and legacy physical media like catalogs proves that modern retail marketing is no longer a binary choice between digital and analog.
As brands finalize their campaigns for the fast-approaching 2026 holiday shopping season, success will likely belong to those who can master this complex matrix—balancing the immediate reach of the big screen with the foundational necessity of being discoverable by the artificial intelligence tools shaping the future of consumer search.
