Holiday retail can grow this year without the average consumer actually planning to spend more, and understanding the difference between those two things may be one of the most important starting points for marketers heading into the season.
Across major markets, consumers remain cautious and increasingly selective about where their money goes, even as stronger spending among particular groups, higher prices and continued demand in certain categories can keep overall retail sales moving upward. In other words, a growing holiday market does not necessarily mean a universally confident holiday shopper; increasingly, it can mean that growth is being generated by a smaller set of consumers, categories and purchasing occasions.
The UK illustrates that tension particularly well, with PwC finding that one in four consumers plans to spend more on Christmas shopping and celebrations this year, compared with roughly one in five planning to spend less, even as cost-of-living pressures remain one of the biggest reasons for cutting back.¹ Separate research from the IPA found that 45% of UK consumers expect to feel more financially anxious because of rising costs this Christmas, yet almost half say they are not planning to cut back on anything, suggesting that consumers are finding ways to protect the parts of the season they value even while feeling pressure elsewhere.²
That is also what we see in Dailymotion Business’s H2 Shopping Intent Study, based on more than 15,000 consumers across the U.S., UK, France, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, where nearly 1 in 2 consumers say they plan to spend less than last year, while more than 1 in 4 plan to spend more.
Rather than pointing toward a contradiction, those numbers reveal something more useful for marketers: holiday demand has not disappeared, but it is becoming more concentrated, with meaningful pockets of growth emerging by category, country and age group even as the broader consumer remains cautious.
For marketers, then, the useful question is no longer simply whether “the consumer” is up or down this Christmas, because increasingly there is no single holiday consumer. The more important question is where incremental spending is still happening, who is driving it and what those consumers are doing before their purchase intent becomes obvious.
The average hides the opportunity
Nearly 1 in 2 consumers in our study expect to spend less than last year, making affordability and value unavoidable parts of the 2026 holiday story, but concentrating only on that group obscures the other side of the market, where more than 1 in 4 expect to increase their spending.
This is what helps reconcile apparently conflicting holiday forecasts, because aggregate retail spending and individual spending intentions measure different things, and a market can grow even when many households are cutting back if other consumers spend significantly more, prices rise or spending shifts toward higher-value categories.
More importantly, consumers themselves do not behave like averages, and somebody reducing their overall household budget can still decide to spend significantly more on the beauty product, trip, technology upgrade or premium gift they have decided is worth prioritizing.
For brands, that makes holiday growth increasingly a question of concentration rather than averages, because when roughly half of the market is pulling back and another quarter is leaning in, treating both groups as one broad seasonal audience inevitably hides where the incremental opportunity actually sits.
Luxury, Beauty and Travel are pulling ahead
That concentration becomes clearer at category level, where roughly 1 in 3 Luxury shoppers expect to spend more, compared with about 3 in 10 Beauty and Travel shoppers, putting all three categories ahead of the overall benchmark.
Luxury is particularly interesting because the difference is not simply how many consumers plan to spend more but how much more they expect to spend, with 18% saying they will spend “a lot more,” nearly twice the rate seen in Retail & Apparel.
That points toward a holiday consumer who may be economizing in some areas while deliberately trading up in others, which makes value a more complicated concept than price alone and suggests that categories connected to aspiration, experience, gifting and personal reward can remain resilient even when household budgets are under pressure.
For marketers, category context can therefore become considerably more useful than a topline measure of consumer confidence, because the same household that looks cautious through the lens of its overall budget may look very different when viewed through the category it has decided to prioritize.
There is no single global holiday consumer
The geographic differences are just as pronounced, with more than 1 in 3 UK consumers expecting to spend more, making it the strongest growth market in our eight-country study, followed by Brazil at just under 3 in 10 and Spain at a similar level.
The UK findings are particularly interesting when viewed alongside external research, with PwC reporting that consumer sentiment reached its highest level in five years this autumn and, for the first time since the pandemic, more consumers expected to increase their Christmas spending than reduce it.¹
But the bigger opportunities appear when market and category are considered together, because nearly 4 in 10 Beauty shoppers in Spain and Brazil expect to increase spending, as do a similar proportion of Entertainment shoppers in the UK, while Luxury reaches roughly 1 in 3 shoppers in France and Mexico, and Automotive does the same in Italy.
For international marketers, those gaps matter because the same category can encounter dramatically different demand conditions from one country to another; Beauty in Spain, where well over a third of consumers expect to spend more, is not the same media opportunity as Beauty in Italy, where fewer than one-quarter say the same.
The implication is that localization should extend beyond language and creative, because when intent itself changes materially by market, investment should follow the demand rather than simply follow the global media plan.
Younger consumers are one of the clearest growth audiences
Age creates another divide, with more than 1 in 3 consumers aged 18–34 expecting to spend more, making younger shoppers about 1.3x more likely to increase their spending than the broader benchmark.
That resilience among younger shoppers is not unique to our study. PwC’s research during the 2025 festive period found that almost one-third of UK consumers aged 18–24 planned to increase their holiday spending, while also forecasting that the group would be the biggest spender per person.³
What makes younger consumers particularly interesting for marketers, however, is not simply their willingness to spend but how they arrive at the purchase, because in our study advertising trust among 18–34-year-olds is highest in Social at 29%, followed by CTV at 18% and creator content at 15%, reflecting a journey where discovery increasingly begins through entertainment, culture and recommendation rather than with a deliberate product search.
That means the shopper who eventually converts during Black Friday may have first encountered the product weeks earlier through a creator, seen it again through paid social and then encountered the brand across premium video or CTV as consideration developed, making the opportunity less about identifying one winning channel and more about maintaining relevance with the same audience as it moves between them.
The consumers spending more are also using video differently
That connection becomes particularly important when we isolate consumers expecting to spend more, because more than 1 in 2 say video plays a concrete role in their purchase decisions, compared with fewer than half of consumers overall, an eight-point difference between the broader population and one of the season’s most commercially valuable audiences.
Among Beauty and Luxury shoppers, the relationship becomes even stronger, with 56% influenced by creator-driven content compared with a 47% benchmark, reinforcing the role inspiration, demonstration and recommendation can play in categories where consumers often need more than a discount to decide that something deserves a place in their holiday budget.
This does not mean video itself causes higher spending intent, but it does show a meaningful overlap between the consumers planning to spend more and those using video and creator content as part of the decision-making process, giving marketers an opportunity to recognize the signals associated with future demand before the transaction itself occurs.
And in a season where consumers are becoming more deliberate about what deserves their money, that period between discovery and transaction may matter more than ever.
Prime Big Deal Days is an early test of holiday intent
One of the first major tests of whether stated intent is translating into actual behavior comes in October, as Prime Big Deal Days increasingly operates not simply as another promotional event but as an early holiday shopping moment.
The scale of previous events shows why it matters: Amazon’s 2024 Prime Big Deal Days became its largest October shopping event at the time, with more Prime members participating than the previous year, more items sold and higher sales, while shoppers globally saved more than $1 billion across millions of deals.⁴ The event also extended well beyond the U.S., running across markets including the UK, France, Italy, Spain and Brazil, which makes it particularly relevant as an early international indicator rather than simply an American retail moment.⁵
That does not mean Prime Big Deal Days can predict the entire Christmas season, but its performance can provide marketers with an early behavioral read on whether the intent consumers expressed earlier in the year is beginning to translate into purchases, particularly across categories such as Beauty, Electronics, Home, Fashion and gifting that have featured prominently in previous October events.⁴
For marketers, the interesting question is therefore not simply how much Amazon sells but which categories move, how strongly consumers respond to promotion and whether the audiences already signaling greater spending intent begin behaving accordingly, because those signals can help inform where investment should move before competition reaches its peak in November.
Our own 2026 holiday planning framework reflects that shift, treating Prime Day and October sales as an important activation window before Black Friday and Cyber Monday rather than viewing the traditional November shopping weekend as the point at which holiday intent suddenly begins.
Black Friday is a conversion moment, not the beginning of the journey
The growing importance of October also reflects a much bigger change in holiday timing, because shoppers increasingly begin researching, comparing and purchasing weeks before the traditional Black Friday starting gun.
In the UK, 1 in 7 consumers had already begun Christmas shopping by mid-August, while another 16% said they intended to shop earlier than they had the previous year, meaning almost one-third of consumers had either already started or expected to bring their shopping forward.¹
That behavior fundamentally changes the role of holiday media, because the shopper who eventually buys a fragrance in late November may have watched beauty content in October, engaged with a creator recommendation several weeks later and begun comparing brands before ever searching explicitly for a Black Friday deal.
The most valuable moment to identify that shopper can therefore occur considerably earlier than the most valuable moment to ask them to buy, which is why Dailymotion’s holiday framework is built around maintaining presence, building relevance and then increasing investment as purchase intent strengthens, rather than concentrating the entire plan into a handful of promotional days.
The holiday opportunity is not simply to win Black Friday. It is to recognize the future Black Friday shopper before everyone starts bidding for them as a Black Friday shopper.
CTV adds trust when the season becomes noisy
The role of premium video becomes even more important as the season progresses and promotional noise increases, particularly because CTV is not functioning simply as a reach environment in our study but as a trusted advertising environment in several major markets.
Across all eight countries, Search at 22%, Social at 22% and CTV at 20% sit relatively close together for advertising trust, but the national picture is more revealing, with CTV ranking first in France at 25%, ahead of Search at 22% and Social at 17%, while in the UK CTV also leads at 23%, compared with 20% for Search.
That gives marketers a useful division of labor across the holiday journey, because creator and social environments can help a product enter consideration through discovery and recommendation, while premium video and CTV can give that message scale, attention and credibility as the consumer moves closer to purchase.
The challenge is connecting those moments around the same audience rather than planning each channel as an isolated line on a media plan.
From buying holiday impressions to understanding holiday audiences
In a holiday market this uneven, the advantage is not simply knowing that Beauty, Luxury or younger consumers are showing stronger spending intent; it is being able to recognize the individual behaviors behind that intent early enough to do something with them.
That is where Motion and Audience Path become two parts of the same holiday strategy rather than two separate products, because Motion helps brands enter the journey where inspiration increasingly begins, using creators and their communities to introduce products through content that feels native and culturally relevant, then taking the strongest assets beyond organic publishing into paid social and ultimately into premium video, CTV, publisher environments and other screens.
In other words, creator content does not have to end where it starts.
Audience Path takes the other side of that equation, using Ray-powered intelligence to understand the behaviors and interests forming around those audiences and identify future shoppers through evolving signals rather than static demographics, whether someone is consuming gift guides, exploring Beauty or Fashion content, comparing products, watching seasonal entertainment or exhibiting other behaviors that suggest a purchase may be getting closer.
That audience can then be activated across premium online video and CTV as the consumer moves from discovery toward consideration and purchase, creating continuity between the early signals that somebody may become a shopper and the later moments when intent becomes much more valuable.
The approach is already visible in King’s Hawaiian, where Audience Path identified high-intent holiday grocery signals and activated them across premium video using EchoShop, ultimately delivering more than 3 million impressions, nearly 4,000 click-to-cart interactions and more than $37,000 in purchase-intent value, with performance 44% above the grocery benchmark.
Put together, that creates a different way to think about holiday planning: Motion helps create and scale the inspiration, Audience Path helps identify and activate the audience forming around it, and cross-screen video keeps the brand present as that consumer moves from discovery to consideration and eventually purchase.
That distinction matters when nearly 1 in 2 consumers are pulling back while more than 1 in 4 are leaning in, because the brands that win this holiday season will not necessarily be those that reach the most shoppers; they will be the ones that become better at recognizing which shoppers are still ready to spend, understanding what is moving them and reaching them before the rest of the market starts competing for the same purchase.
Holiday demand has not disappeared. It has concentrated, and the opportunity is to find the people driving that concentration before their intent becomes obvious.
Audience Path finds your future shoppers. Motion gives them a reason to choose you.
Source
1. PwC UK. “Consumer Sentiment Rises to Its Highest Level in Five Years, but Feel-Good Factor May Be Short-Lived as We Approach the Golden Quarter.” PwC UK, 14 Sept. 2026.
2. Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. “More ‘Tight’ Than White Christmas, Reveals New IPA Research.” IPA, 30 July 2026.
3. PwC UK. “Festive Spending Forecast to Reach £24.6bn This Year.” PwC UK, 12 Dec. 2025.
4. Amazon. “Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days Was the Company’s Biggest October Shopping Event Ever.” Amazon Press Center, 10 Oct. 2024.
5. Amazon. “Prime Big Deal Days 2024 Is Amazon’s Biggest October Shopping Event.” About Amazon, 2024.
6. Dailymotion Business. H2 Shopping Intent Study. 2026. 15,386 respondents across the U.S., UK, France, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Mexico and Colombia; population-weighted.
7. Dailymotion Business. Christmas + Black Friday Season 2026. 2026.
8. Dailymotion Business. Brand Lift Study: Q4 2025. 1 Oct.–31 Dec. 2025.
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