Notes · The work · Q4 2026

I dug out my 2019 BFCM plan. Eight things changed by 2026. Three didn't.

Every September the same thing happens. Everyone ships a BFCM playbook. They're a commodity, and most of them are borrowed authority: here's what you should do, from someone who read what someone else did.

I've actually run these, at Tupperware, Beast, Big Chill, Miracle, for a decade. So instead of another list of shoulds, here's the more useful thing: I found my 2019 version last week, a document literally called the BFCM plan, and I read it against what I run now. Most of what aged wasn't wrong. It was right for 2019, and the ground moved. The difference is the whole point, because it tells you what to trust in any Q4 plan, including this one.

Start with the shape of the year, because that's what moved the most.

What changed

Eight of them. In rough order of how much they cost you if you miss them.

01

It stopped being a BFCM plan.

My 2019 document was called the BFCM plan. Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Two days in the title, and that told you exactly where the thinking stopped. Everything in it pointed at one weekend, and everything after that weekend was somebody else's problem.

The file I work from now is called the Q4 and Q5 playbook, and the rename is not cosmetic. BFCM went from being the whole plan to being one moment inside it. The front end stretched back into September, the back end stretched past Christmas into a window that did not even have a name in 2019, and the two days that used to be the title turned out to be a minority of the money. There is a number for that, and it is further down.

Q5 is the part most people still have not caught up with. It is the stretch from Boxing Day into mid-January, and it is called Q5 because it behaves like its own quarter: cheap traffic, high intent, and almost nobody bidding against you. In 2019 I would have called that the holidays being over.

So if you are still running a BFCM plan, the name is the tell. Everything below is what filled the gap on either side of it.

02

The season used to start in November. Now it starts in September.

In 2019 my calendar had a kickoff in late October, creative locked around the first week of November, and the first real email around the 20th. That was normal. That was, honestly, slightly early for the time.

Then Amazon added a second event in October. The whole retail calendar shifted to meet it, and every DTC brand's promo schedule got dragged forward with it, whether they noticed or not. The shoppers were already in market weeks before anyone was talking to them.

So the play now is a peak moment planted in September, before the auction heats up, and October spent buying an audience rather than selling to one. If you are still waiting for Black Friday week to begin, you are not early and you are not late. You are arriving after the demand was already built and bought by someone else.

03

"The sale" became "the peak moment."

In 2019 the discount was the event. You announced a number, 20% off, 30% off, and the number was the news. That worked because fewer people were shouting and the shouting was novel.

It does not work now, because everyone has a number and most of them are bigger than yours. What works is a reason. Crocs invented an entire holiday, Croctober, and ran it as live commerce. That is not a discount strategy, it is a manufactured reason for the window to matter, and the offer sits inside it.

This isn't a discount-depth problem. It's a reason-to-buy problem. The percentage off only sets the floor. Something else has to do the actual moving.

04

Black Friday stopped being the finish line.

Here is the number that reorganized how I plan the whole season: Black Friday weekend is only about 16% of Q4 revenue. That is Ezra Firestone's figure, and it matches what I see across the brands I have run.

Sit with that. The weekend everyone builds their entire quarter around, hires around, panics around, is roughly a sixth of it. The other 84% is the pre-season you skipped, the gifting window in December, and the stretch after Christmas that almost nobody works.

Zoom the same year into the season itself and it stops being one peak. It is seven distinct moments, each with a different job.

Watch the green line, the returning customers. It sits above the new-customer line for most of the season and it is what carries the peak. You did not buy those people in November at peak prices. You bought them in October when they were cheap. That is the entire argument, drawn.

05

Discount depth gave way to offer architecture.

In 2019, if the promo underperformed, you went deeper. 20 became 25 became 30. It was the only lever most of us reached for.

The better lever is structure. Take a brand with a $75 order value and 40% cost of delivery. Run a flat 20% off on a single unit and each order leaves about $30, against $45 at full price. You need 50% more orders just to stand still.

Now run a deeper-looking 25% off, but tiered so it takes three units to get there. The order is $168, it leaves about $70, and it beat the full-price order outright. A deeper headline discount made more money, because the structure moved units instead of just moving price.

That is the whole idea. Dollar-off, gift with purchase, a bundle that deepens, a free-shipping threshold set just above your natural order. All of them lift the order instead of shaving the margin. Reach for a bigger percentage last, not first.

06

Broadcast campaigns gave way to always-on flows.

In 2019 the campaign calendar was the program. You built the sends, you shipped them, that was Q4. Flows existed but they were plumbing nobody looked at in November.

They are the engine now. Cart, welcome, browse abandon, post purchase. They run every hour of the season without you, they catch the traffic your campaigns paid for, and they compound. The calendar sits on top of them, not instead of them.

If you have one thing to fix before November, it is these. A broken cart flow in peak week is a leak you paid full price to fill.

07

Paid acquisition got a near-free sibling.

Partnerships and list-swaps with complementary, non-competing brands barely featured in my 2019 plan. Now they are a fixture, because they fill the funnel in the exact window where your paid costs are climbing and your list is worth the most.

Pool lists, run something co-branded, cross-promote to each other's email and SMS in October. Judge it on reach and net-new audience, not on instant conversion, because that is not what it is for. It is the cheapest thing on this page and most brands still do not run it.

08

The number you optimized in 2019 lies to you in 2026.

Last-click return on ad spend was close enough to the truth when the pixel worked. Then iOS 14 landed, the platforms went half blind, and the number became something the ad account feeds you to keep you spending.

It lies in both directions, which is the part people miss. Retargeting takes credit for sales that would have happened anyway. Branded search is the worst offender. Meanwhile the halo into Amazon and retail goes uncredited entirely, so some channels look worse than they are.

So you steer by the blended number against your own sales floor, you discount the platforms' claims by channel rather than across the board, and you accept that the truth is a range. Uncomfortable, but a range you understand beats a decimal that is wrong.

What didn't move an inch

Three of them. These are the ones I would still bet on in 2030.

01

The season is won before the peak, not on it.

In 2019 that instinct showed up as a "sign up to be first" list build a few weeks out. It was a hunch dressed as a tactic.

The data caught up. Emails acquired in October carry the highest value of any period, and roughly 89% of Black Friday purchases come from people who had already opened a pre-holiday email. Both of those are Common Thread Collective's numbers. Same truth I was guessing at, now with receipts.

02

Sell to the people you already have.

Owned channels and warm audiences at the peak. Not cold acquisition at the single most expensive moment of the year.

This was true when traffic was cheap and it is more true now that it is not. Peak week is the worst possible moment to introduce yourself to a stranger. It is the best possible moment to talk to someone who already knows you.

03

Give a real reason to buy, not just a lower price.

The offer moves people. The discount only sets the floor. I wrote a version of that sentence in 2019 about bundles and reasons to act, and "peak moments" is just the 2026 name for the same instinct with better production values.

So what do you actually do with this

Two things, and they pull in opposite directions.

Take the plays. The seven above are this season's answers and they are as current as I can make them. Run them.

Do not trust them for long. Every one of those seven expired something I believed. The tactics are perishable and getting more perishable every year, which is exactly why I stopped writing this annually and started writing it every quarter.

What does not expire is underneath: the calendar, the three truths, and the sponge. Fill it in the cheap windows, squeeze it at the peak, rest it, refill it in Q5. If you ever catch yourself reading a stale copy of one of these, it is the plays that went off, never the skeleton.

And there is one more thing no version of this document has ever been able to do, in 2019 or now. It cannot tell you which of these plays your margin can actually afford this year. Whether your cash survives filling the sponge in October. Whether the bundle you are planning still clears once shipping is loaded. Whether the number you are steering by is telling you the truth.

That read is the job. It always was. It is the one part of this that has not been automated, and the one part I would not hand to a playbook, including mine.

Here is the calendar in full, then how to get the rest.

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