Holiday Marketing 2026: TV Is Back, Gift Guides Are Out

Holiday marketing reversed direction this year. Modern Retail Research published its 2026 holiday survey today, and the biggest moves are toward television and away from the tactics that dominated the last three seasons. That is a real shift in where the budget goes.

The short answer: streaming and TV ad usage jumped 22 and 20 percentage points year over year, while gift guides fell 19 points and influencer hauls fell 14. Meanwhile 81% of brands plan the same discounts as last year, which means the money is moving to channels rather than to price.

Which tactics grew and which fell?

From Modern Retail's survey of 90 brand and retailer professionals:

The CTV jump is a rebound, not a trend line: usage fell 14 points between 2024 and 2025 before this year's climb. TV ads had been roughly flat for two years and then moved 20 points in one.

Brand experiences lost the top spot it held last year and now sits second.

Are brands discounting more this year?

The same research found 81% of brands and retailers expect their 2026 holiday discounts to be about the same as 2025. Only a minority plan to go deeper.

That is a decision worth understanding. Costs are up, and few brands think a deeper markdown is affordable. When we ran gift-with-purchase offers for merchant stores last season, the margin held far better than a straight percentage cut, which matches what this research found.

Ari Bloom of A-Frame Brands put it bluntly: "Costs are getting so high, and the economy is soft right now... The cost issue is going to be really hard for a lot of smaller companies to absorb with heavy discounting."

The replacement tactics named in the research are bundling and gift-with-purchase. Bloom's reasoning is that holiday shoppers buy multiples, so a bundle does the work of a discount without teaching the market to wait for January.

Which holiday tactics should a small store copy?

Do not copy the TV move. According to Ritual's Brodie, quoted in the same research, the point that matters is this: participating in streaming "is actually a decision for the whole year. Starting to engage just for holiday would be a risky move, especially for a smaller brand."

That is the honest read. The brands moving 22 points into CTV already have the creative pipeline, the measurement and the budget. A store with one product line buying its first streaming flight in November is buying reach it cannot convert.

Do copy the bundling shift. It is cheap, it protects margin, and it suits the actual shopping behaviour of buying the same gift for several people. If you sell anything under about $80, a three-for bundle priced below three singles is the highest-return change available before Black Friday.

Do copy the retreat from gift guides, with a caveat. The decline is in brands pitching themselves into gift guides, not in shoppers using them. If you have a gift guide page, keep it. What is falling out of favour is paying for placement inside someone else's.

What does the survey leave out?

There is a gap in this data worth naming. Nowhere in the shift toward TV and streaming does the survey address shopping done by AI agents, which is where a meaningful share of product research has moved this season.

A store cannot buy its way into an agent's answer, as our agent readiness breakdown shows. It can only be legible enough to be included. That makes product data the one marketing channel with no media cost and no auction, and it is the one most stores are still leaving incomplete.

How reliable is this survey?

The sample is 90 brand and retailer professionals, which is small, self-selected and skewed toward brands that participate in Modern Retail's readership. A 22-point move in that sample is not necessarily a 22-point move in the market.

The percentages also measure planned use, not actual spend. Plans in early November and cheques written in December are different things, and a brand that says it will run TV may find the inventory is gone.

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