Ad spend planning for large scale marketing moments

How timing your ad spend can dramatically improve campaign effectiveness without changing your budget.

There's always a huge amount of chatter in the ad space around where you spend your dollars. Which particular channels, which particular ad types, which particular campaigns—the list goes on.

These are extremely important conversations to have, there's no doubt. But just as important, yet much more overlooked, is the timing of when you spend those dollars. When you actually deploy that buying capital, at what points in time.

Today, I want to examine a real client case study and explore moments where this can go wrong, plus areas where you can make huge improvements to boost the overall efficiency and effectiveness of your ad program.

The Critical Importance of Day One Performance

Let me share data from a music festival client, though these principles apply equally to e-commerce product launches and other major marketing moments.

Looking at dozens of music festivals and product launches, we've discovered a phenomenon that might surprise you: the number one factor that correlated with overall ticket sales was the height of the day one on-sale peak.

What does this mean? Simply put, the higher the number of sales a festival made on its first day, the more likely it was to achieve higher overall sales throughout the entire duration of the campaign.

This first day is critical for two reasons:

1. Higher peaks lead to more total sales throughout the campaign
2. Sustained momentum: The drop-off from that initial spike tends to be much more gradual

We consistently see that brands with higher day-one peaks experience a gentler decline in daily sales compared to those with lower initial peaks, who face a much steeper, more drastic drop-off.

The Fundamental Rule: Spend Must Precede Sales

Here's where most brands get it wrong. This principle seems obvious and intuitive, but we see it forgotten constantly in our audits:

If you're running a paid program and want your ad dollars to influence sales, the actual ad spend needs to happen BEFORE the sale period begins.

This is crucial to understand. If you want ads to influence sales, ad dollars have to come before sales—not concurrently, and certainly not after the big sales moment.

💡 [Watch this] - The Fundamental Rule: Spend Must Precede Sales

The Most Common Mistake We See

The most frequent error we encounter when analyzing historical data from brand launches or festival on-sales is running ad spend effectively concurrent with sales moments.

Picture this: if you map spend by day over sales by day, most brands' spend mirrors their sales behavior almost exactly. This creates a fundamental problem—you're spending the most money on advertising at the exact moment when that advertising doesn't have a chance to influence future purchase behavior.

All that money spent concurrently with the sales moment isn't getting the opportunity to actually affect buyer behavior.

Case Study: What Not to Do

Let me show you what one of our clients did wrong last year, and how we're fixing it.

Looking at their sales and spend data, several issues jumped out immediately:

The Blind Presale Miss: This brand has significant historical value and didn't sell out their presale, meaning they could have spent considerably more before this moment to drive that peak higher. Instead, they barely invested in pre-presale advertising.

The Major Mistake: All of their advertising spend was deployed AFTER their large sales moment. They didn't just miss the concurrent timing—they completely missed the mark, spending their budget after the opportunity had already passed.

Wasted Spend: We found spend spikes with no supporting marketing moments or milestones, representing wasted dollars that moved the needle on sales numbers not at all.

One Success: At the campaign's end, we did see what we hoped for—spend preceding their last-minute push, which clearly affected the size of that final spike.

The Solution: Strategic Spend Pacing

For this year's campaign, we're implementing proper spend pacing:

• Massive pre-spend: A huge chunk of budget allocated before the on-sale to maximize that crucial day-one peak
• Sustained investment: Continued significant spend before the last-minute push
• Presale support: Dollars allocated before the blind presale to bring purchase behavior forward

By bringing sales and purchase behavior forward, we create more leverage for future decisions. Missing the sales moment means constantly playing catch-up.

Manufacturing Peaks in Low Seasons

Here's an advanced strategy: during sustained low periods, consider manufacturing peaks to create additional opportunities for outsized spend moments.

For our festival client, we suggested a single-day on-sale in the middle of their quiet period—selling weekend passes initially, then launching one-day passes.

For e-commerce brands, this could mean:

• Additional colorway launches
• Limited-time collaborations with creators
• Civic holiday promotions
• Exclusive limited-time offers

The goal is creating marketing moments that justify peak spend periods, which then create sales activity during traditionally low seasons.

The Bottom Line

The pacing of spend is essential. Yes, it's important to spend money on the right campaigns, bidding strategies, and creative types. But it's equally important to examine WHEN your dollars are spent.

Take time to map your spend behavior over your sales behavior with a fine-toothed comb. Look for opportunities to make better spending decisions by timing your investment to precede your sales moments.

The result? By taking the exact same media budget, the same assets, and the same campaign types across ad platforms—but spending at different times—you can achieve significant increases in efficiency and overall sales.

This is one of the highest-impact optimizations you can make to your advertising program, and it costs nothing but better planning.

Want to see how spend pacing could improve your campaigns? We'd be happy to audit your historical spend patterns and identify optimization opportunities.