By Billboard Media
Every November, brands pile into the same few days with the same message: prices are down. It is one of the most heavily advertised moments of the year, so it’s fair to ask what all that advertising achieves.
The evidence is more mixed than the noise suggests. With Black Friday on 27 November this year, here’s what recent UK data and research say.
Last year’s Black Friday was quieter than expected
Retailers reported an underwhelming Black Friday period in 2025. According to the British Retail Consortium (BRC) and KPMG, total retail sales grew just 1.4% year on year in November, the weakest growth in six months. Non-food sales rose only 0.1%. In-store non-food sales fell 0.3%, while online non-food sales rose 0.5%, taking the online share of non-food purchases to 44%, its highest level since 2022 (Retail Insight Network, December 2025).
The BRC’s chief executive said many shoppers took advantage of promotions but stayed cautious about wider spending, and BRC and KPMG pointed to nerves ahead of the Budget. A fair reading is that the economic backdrop can matter as much as the advertising itself. The same sale lands differently on a confident shopper and a cautious one.
The question many marketers can’t answer
A study presented at the IPA Effectiveness Conference on 7 October 2026 looked at how UK consumer goods businesses use price promotions, the discounts at the heart of Black Friday. Les Binet and Kantar’s Dom Boyd commissioned a Censuswide survey of 250 marketing and insight leaders (Marketing Week, 7 October 2026). It found:
- Brands spend around twice as much on price promotions as on paid media advertising
- 75% of marketers can’t estimate what proportion of their promotions are profitable
- 80% believe many promotional buyers would have bought anyway
- 81% judge promotions over periods of less than 13 weeks
- 75% believe repeated promotions increase price sensitivity
- 68% say they would prefer to run fewer promotions
Two things are worth keeping in mind. This is a survey of what marketers believe, not a measure of sales, and it covers consumer goods rather than every sector. It is best read as a picture of how the industry thinks.
The authors also don’t argue for scrapping discounts. They call for each promotion to be measured, and for money from the ones that lose money to be moved into brand advertising.
Two clocks: quick sales and slow brand
Part of the problem is timing. IPA research by Binet and Peter Field examined the business effects of around 1,000 campaigns across more than 30 years of IPA Effectiveness Awards data, covering over 700 brands in 83 categories. It challenged an over-reliance on short-term metrics as a guide to long-term business success (Advertising Week Europe 2013).
Black Friday is a short window, which makes it easy to measure. But a short window only captures one of the two clocks that advertising runs on. The effects on profit and price sensitivity play out over a longer period than a weekend of sales figures can show.
What happens before the sale
Advertising seen earlier can change how later advertising lands. Two pieces of industry-published research point that way, although neither is about Black Friday:
- Lumen Research, working with JCDecaux, used eye-tracking and found social ad engagement rose by 52% among people who had already seen an outdoor ad with similar content.
- Peter Field’s analysis of IPA case studies from 2014 to 2024 found that heavy users of outdoor advertising boosted the effect of search by 129%, among cases with very large business effects.
Both are published by Outsmart, the outdoor industry’s trade body (The Superpowers of OOH), so they should be read as industry evidence rather than independent proof. Taken together, they suggest that familiarity built in advance shows up when people respond later.
So does it work?So does it work?
It depends what you mean by ‘work’.
Activity: Black Friday clearly moves people. Shoppers use promotions, and brands compete hard for their attention.
Extra sales: This is where it gets less certain. Marketers themselves doubt how much of the promotional volume would have happened anyway, and most measure it over a short period.
Context: The 2025 figures show how much depends on the mood of the market, not just the message.
Time: The longer you look, the more the picture shifts from discounts towards the brand-building that makes people receptive in the first place.
In short, Black Friday advertising isn’t one thing. A discount ad and an ad that builds familiarity are doing different jobs, and both have a role to play.
For businesses planning seasonal promotions, the takeaway is simple: don’t wait until the sale starts to get noticed. Building brand awareness ahead of time can help ensure your business is already familiar to potential customers when they’re ready to buy.
Planning your next seasonal campaign? At Billboard Media, we help businesses build local visibility through strategically placed billboard advertising.
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