Black Friday Content Production Timeline
News
Black Friday is a deadline for every brand in your category. Is your content ready?
Written by Rachel Pearson
It’s only 3 months away (as of writing) and for many businesses Black Friday sales provide an excellent opportunity to smash through sales targets and see big peaks in sales. But it’s also a saturated time for advertising, so standing out with a bold, pokey, entertaining creative is vital. And that takes time to plan. How much? We’ll get into that…
We built this typical* timeline to show you what it takes to build an effective creative campaign platform with assets in time for Black Friday. The good news is also the bad news.
It’s not too late to build badass content that converts your audience to customers. But you have to start next week.
*typical can mean a lot of different things!
What has to happen between a brief and a live campaign?
Strategy and concept: Working out what your creative campaign is saying, and making sure it isn't what the other eleven brands in your category are also saying
Creative development and sign-off: One idea, fully committed to, before anyone books a crew
Pre-production: Casting, locations, permits, contracts, the clever hustling that makes shoot day effective and smooth
Production: The week everything else exists to protect
Post-production: Edit, grade, sound, the part where the idea becomes the thing people actually feel
Versioning and cutdowns: One film, cut for every screen it needs to live on
Legal and clearance: Music rights, talent releases, platform compliance
QA and Delivery: Getting every file to every place it needs to be, correctly, with time to spare
Run it properly and it should take around ten to thirteen weeks to really nail it. From today, that puts you right at the wire. THANKFULLY this is exactly the kind of hustle Be The Fox are known for and revel in. Speed without compromising creativity or quality - those are always built into what we do.
Black Friday Content Campaign Timeline
We’ve built a visual timeline for you to see what needs to go into building an effective creative campaign in time for smashing Black Friday…
Build in the buffer, on purpose
Notice the two days we leave between assets delivered and Black Friday. Not for making the work. For catching the one thing nobody plans for, because there's always one thing nobody plans for. A campaign that launches with two calm days in hand looks completely different to one that's still being tagged and trafficked at midnight.
That's not caution for its own sake. It's the difference between a campaign that launches and a campaign that launches well and comes from our team's years of experience on the front lines of advertising.
What this actually means for you
If you're reading this in August, you have exactly enough time to do this properly. If you're reading it in September, the maths is already tightening. If you're reading it any later than that, the conversation isn't "how do we make this great," it's "how do we make this happen at all."
We'd rather have the first conversation.
We're Be The Fox, a female-founded creative agency based in Brighton. If you want to know if you can make your Black Friday campaign effective in time for the big day, give us a call or get in touch and we’ll walk through it together.
Start early. Move fast. Be the fox. Get in touch.