We are leaving behind Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the two most unmissable events of the year for all online shopping enthusiasts and beyond.From clothing to consumer electronics, from the automotive sector to events: Black Friday fever now involves every sector and every year it is renewed in search of increasingly bombastic deals, anticipating to all intents and purposes the Christmas shopping season.
Here then, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are no longer just 48 hours of crazy shopping, but the deals come to affect much more than two days covering the whole weekend, if not the whole week, so much so that we hear more and more about Black Weekend or Black Week.
But the goal remains the same: to win customers, and while, off-line, many retailers are enriching their offerings with increasingly engaging experiences such as late-night openings and in-store events, online the last-click challenge is played out in creativity.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday: a growing trend year on year
There is no denying how Black Friday has become a planetary event, capable of circulating in a few days volumes of sales and turnover normally achievable in weeks of work (if not months).This year, too, the growth trend has been confirmed and from a strictly “numerical” point of view, it marked a doubling compared to 2018.As for the United States, for example, CNBC defines Black Friday 2019 as the “second largest online shopping day ever,” with about $7.4 million spent.For Italy, on the other hand, there was a 19.5 percent growth in online shopping during Black Friday week this year.According to data also released by PayTech, the player that manages more than 41 million cards and collaborates with 890 thousand merchants, the increase in spending, compared to the weeks before Black Friday, was 23 percent.While the data inherent in the number of online purchases grow significantly, compared to last year, it remains to be noted that the trends inherent in the time slots in which users interact with Black Friday promotions, remains essentially unchanged over the years.
When are users most active?The typical day of a user who wants to take advantage of Black Friday, has its peak interaction in the early afternoon, data of absolute interest when used when planning marketing strategies.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2019: attracting attention by going beyond the offer
In a weekend where inboxes teem with advertising content, social media go crazy with ads and even storefronts are colored with signs announcing 30% to 50% discounts, hitting the attention of potential customers becomes the real challenge.That’s when Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the latter especially on the Web, become an opportunity for many advertisers and marketers to bring out all their creative vein.So, leaving aside mere commercial offers (although we noticed that many brands opted to propose unusual discounts such as 47 percent or 57 percent), we had fun looking around for original concepts and creative proposals.
Black Friday 2019: room for story telling…in black and white
Winning the challenge with Amazon in the week of Black Friday and winning customers is not easy especially in the field of electronics and tech.Here then it becomes necessary to change the paradigm and try to play the challenge on another level, that of creativity.This is what Unieuro did, which, in addition to presenting super offers, amazed everyone with “Addams Black Friday,” a real high-level film project that linked the electronics brand to one of the most famous families of 1960s television, the Addams family, in perfect style…black and white! It is an original project perfectly consistent with the story and its protagonists, complete with an iconic refrain. Consistency but also novelty: the rather macabre atmosphere of the Addams family is interrupted by the bright colors of the Unieuro products and the promise of a monstrous grand finale, in a perfectly omnichannel perspective, from the flyer to TV via social media, which with Facebook and Instagram, first and foremost, are confirmed as the indispensable channels for a good marketing strategy
Also in total black mode are the Salmoiraghi & Viganò campaigns, which sympathetically associate the concept related to poor eyesight with the “black” weekend of the year!
Black Friday 2019 creativity: not just weapons of persuasion
As in any self-respecting Black Friday, the message copy, in many circumstances, did not “betray” the rules of persuasion.This is the case with the campaign of Piquadro and MediaWorld , which in the message copy launched a few hours before the close of the promotions have precisely referred to the principle of scarcity.
Also very interesting is the play on words created by Alitalia, which, just for Black Friday, started Black Flyday…just a short time to grab the best deals to fly in the early 2020s at a super cheap price.
For NamedSport, on the other hand, Black Friday is colored orange and articulated in a packaged offer that from the names awakens all the “sportsmanship” in us: “Are you Pro, Advanced or Extreme?”
Although Black Friday and Cyber Monday have now become calendar occasions even for us Italians and commercial offers tend to become increasingly homologous, the creativity and concepts on which these are built still manages to make a difference.
Creativity, fortunately, is still the salt of advertising…who knows what the coming Black Friday and Cyber Monday will hold for us.Surely lots of new insights, perhaps in an increasingly omnichannel and personalized perspective on social as well, thanks to the valuable contribution of marketing automation!
