November the 44th

Every retailer says they want to be demand led. It sounds progressive and it looks like the latest lever to pull in the agency deck. But when it comes to December, that goal disappears into the same habits that held retailers back the year before.

Budgets reset and targets change and retail digital teams return to weekly (sometimes daily) pacing instead of market demand pacing. The urgency that defined making the most of November goes and shifts into caution to make sure that budgets come in as expected and in reality this is a period that should be an extension of peak rather than becoming a reset.

This is the quiet contradiction inside most retailers and how they operate. They try to follow demand, but they organise around dates. Do they trust data when it suits the plan and then default to their implicit knowledge when the plan changes day-by-day?

44th of November is simply a way of exposing this mismatch. It asks a simple question: what would happen if retailers behaved for two more weeks as though it was still November? Same intent and focus, with the same clarity, with no break.

The answer is obvious once you’ve seen enough accounts; performance would be stronger, momentum would hold and critical learning would stay intact. This translates into SKU visibility remaining broad instead of collapsing, and teams not spending half of December trying to rebuild campaign structures that were already working.

Nothing dramatic would need to change, only fighting the need to reset and build things again. The reset is the real problem as it takes PMax learning coupled with product understanding that has been built over weeks and takes them back to zero. It puts retail internal cycles ahead of external consumer behaviour….why?

Look at what continues into December if you leave it alone. High intent shoppers don’t disappear, gifting behaviour stays active, and decision cycles become tighter. The only thing that changes is that retailers stop treating them as if they matter as much as November customers.

The teams that didn’t reset, who treated early December as November, but extended, didn’t just keep performance stable. They improved it. Maximising lower competition brought down CPCs, while conversion held up. The media market became more efficient, not less, because fewer advertisers were paying attention.

This is what demand led actually means - a discipline and a refusal to break momentum achieved with the market momentum, just because the date changed. A recognition that customers don’t care whether it’s November or December. They care about what you show them when they are looking to buy.