What we heard at the Meta Marketing Summit 2026
Peak season performance is won weeks before the sale begins – Meta
With Black Friday and Cyber Monday approaching, Meta used this year’s Summit to lay out how it believes advertisers should prepare for peak season. Key themes presented to agencies and advertisers ranged from starting campaigns earlier to diversifying creative and reconsidering click-based attribution.
Here are a couple of anchoring stats from the event: Australian e-commerce spending exceeded $83 billion in 2025, representing 7% year-on-year growth. At the same time, three in four shoppers now wait for a sale, with many researching products, building wish lists and engaging with brands months before Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Consumer confidence remains low but people are still spending, and we can’t help but note the interesting tension in consumer behaviour. Still, they are researching more, comparing more and taking longer to make decisions. That means the journey towards a purchase can begin well before the promotional period itself.
Key considerations for advertisers
As far as takeaways go, here are a few that stood out from Meta’s advice to advertisers:
Start earlier. Purchase decisions are often made weeks before customers reach the checkout. Brands need to show up earlier, stay present throughout the journey and avoid putting all their focus on the final conversion.
Follow consumer attention. Short-form and streaming video now account for 70% of weekly video viewing time, yet many brands continue to invest heavily in static creative.
Meta also highlighted a disconnect between how people consume content and where advertisers are allocating their budgets. Short-form content alone now accounts for 40% of adults’ total video viewing time.
The opportunity is not simply to produce more video, but to create content that feels native to the platform. That means prioritising vertical 9:16 formats, designing for sound-on viewing and using creator-led content where appropriate.
Treat creative as targeting. Brands should look beyond the “core customer” and develop creative that addresses a broader range of needs, life moments and passions.
Balance optimisation with exploration. Allocating 70% of the creative budget to proven approaches and 30% to new concepts can help brands avoid the performance plateau that may result from repeatedly applying the same formula.
The point made at the Summit was that many brands find a winning creative formula, optimise it relentlessly and then watch performance plateau. Maintaining a varied pipeline of creative gives platforms more opportunities to learn. It also helps to find new audiences and maintain performance as spend increases.
Test before peak season. Peak season should not be when you start experimenting. It should be when you apply what you already know.
That means consistently protecting a portion of budget for testing throughout the year. It’s more advisable than directing every dollar towards immediate performance. And that testing should extend beyond creative. Offers, messaging, landing pages, audience angles and conversion experiences should all be tested before the lead-up to peak season.
Make personalisation useful. Connected product catalogues, partnership ads and timely messaging can create a more relevant customer experience. This also supports both acquisition and retention.
Keep offers simple. If customers need to calculate the value of an offer, the additional friction may be enough to discourage conversion.
Looking beyond clicks
Attribution was another important theme from the Summit.
As video and social discovery play a greater role in purchase decisions, the customer journey is becoming increasingly difficult to capture through clicks alone. A customer may watch a Reel, encounter a product through creator content and later return to purchase without clicking the original advertisement.
Traditional attribution remains useful for identifying patterns, but it often demonstrates correlation rather than causation. It cannot always determine whether advertising generated a sale or simply reached a customer who would have purchased regardless.
This distinction becomes particularly important when scaling. The challenge is making sure additional budget is actually creating additional results, rather than paying for people who may have converted anyway.
Performance may also appear to decline as investment increases, while click-based reporting fails to capture the full contribution of advertising activity.
Meta speakers recommended incrementality testing, including methodologies such as Meta’s Conversion Lift, as a way to provide a more meaningful assessment. This addresses a critical question: how many additional sales did the advertising generate?
Maintaining perspective after day one
The advice shared was that advertisers should also avoid reacting too quickly when performance moderates after an exceptional first day.
A decline may reflect a return to a more sustainable level rather than a fundamental performance issue. Reducing investment prematurely can limit the opportunity to reach customers who remain ready to convert.
Scaling successfully is also not simply a matter of increasing bids or spending more in the auction. Meta’s message was that clear first-party data can help the platform understand which outcomes matter. A varied pipeline of creative gives it more opportunities to learn, find new audiences and maintain performance as spend increases.
The broader message
Taken together, Meta’s message was that peak season increasingly begins well before the promotional window itself. It represents an extended customer journey that begins well before a sale launches.
The emphasis was on planning early, investing in varied creative, testing before peak, communicating clear offers and measuring the outcomes that contribute genuine incremental value.
And now we’ll suggest an interesting question for agencies and advertisers to consider. Which of those principles hold beyond Meta’s own ecosystem, and how do they fit within a broader media and measurement strategy?
By Dianne Mai, Account Executive and Marcus Sountas, Performance Media Manager, Audience Group
