Early in my career, I worked with a drive-through coffee chain that allocated 70% of their annual budget towards radio advertising during the Christmas shutdown period.

At a time when there’s no survey data, regular shows are off, and revenue historically falls off a cliff, promoting a non-seasonal product like coffee might seem counterintuitive.

However, their approach was very clever and offered some great tactical thinking which can be applied across a number of categories.

Advertiser demand is low, but audience reach is not.

Put simply, they could stretch their investment much further which (despite any declines) still allowed them to reach a far broader audience than other times of the year.  With no other competitors live in market, they could dominate their share of voice and sound like a much bigger brand.

The Year’s Biggest Routine Disruption

Annual leave, café closures, and changes in daily routines created an excellent opportunity to capture new caffeine addicts while their usual supply was restricted.  The idea being that if they could build a new daily coffee habit over those few weeks, it would be an entrenched behaviour that carries over into the new year.

No Ratings Data = No Worries

This brand sponsored summer breakfast programming, receiving deep integration, custom benchmarks, song tags— or as I liked to call them “caffeine hits”—discounted live reads, random giveaways, and countless other benefits that would have been nearly impossible to secure during a typical survey period.  With a usually tyrannical Content Director off sunning himself on a beach somewhere, they turned a non-ratings period from an advertiser deterrent into a competitive advantage.

The Takeaway

While the advertising market goes to sleep for 6 weeks, your audience is reflecting on the year gone by and planning for their health, wealth, and future self.

If so much of growing market share hinges on increasing a clients share of voice, maximizing their ROI, and overcoming consumer inertia by targeting them in the right mindset, then I’m yet to be convinced there’s a better time to advertise than the six weeks between late December and the end of January.

Jamie Wood is the Global Sales Director of Boost Media International, Boost provides revenue solutions and advisory services to media companies globally.  Jamie also hosts Media Sales Mastery, a top rated podcast showcasing best practice from some of the industry’s thought-leaders.