WRITTEN BY: ALEXIS HUREWITZ
For most DTC brands, November isn’t just another month — it’s the month. The holiday rush often pushes marketing and creative teams to the brink. Promotional campaigns are running, discount codes and deadlines overlap, and teams sprint toward Black Friday and Cyber Monday with little room for error. Last year, the BFCM period drove $11.5 Billion in record sales for Shopify businesses, and this year is positioned to break those records by 5-10%, based on Adobe for Business forecasts.
During this period, marketing and creative operations become the difference between organized chaos and just plain chaos. The goal isn’t to avoid the rush — it’s to manage it gracefully, with systems and workflows that help your team deliver great work under pressure.
Here are a few ways internal teams can prepare before the madness hits.
- Start With a Shared Holiday Calendar
- When timelines compress, visibility is everything. A single, shared calendar (with key dates across marketing, creative, e-commerce, and paid) helps everyone see what’s going live — and when.
- Create one source of truth for all campaigns, from the first teaser email to the last Cyber Monday banner.
- If each team tracks deadlines in their own doc, things slip. Linking briefs, campaign tasks, and creative delivery dates back to this shared calendar ensures every asset ladders up to the right live date.
- Lock Your Briefs Early
- Creative teams need clarity, not curveballs. The best way to protect production time is to lock campaign briefs early — ideally as early as possible.
- Finalize campaign objectives, offers, and deliverables before creative kickoff.
- When details change mid-production, timelines fall apart.
- Funnel late adjustments through a single Marketing Operations partner so true priorities rise to the top without derailing the entire workflow.
- Tighten Your Review and Approval Rounds
- Approvals are often where things bottleneck — especially when multiple stakeholders jump in last-minute.
- Define exactly who reviews what, and in what order. Keep it visual and time-bound using tools like Asana, Smartsheet, Google Sheets trackers.
- Endless feedback rounds lead to missed launch windows. Consolidate feedback before it reaches creative, and empower one final approver to keep decisions moving.
- Build an Asset Command Center
- When the pressure’s on, you can’t afford to lose time hunting for the “real” final file.
- Centralize all Black Friday Cyber Monday assets — hero banners, promo codes, email graphics — in a clearly labeled, access-controlled folder.
- Files scattered across Slack, Drive, and Dropbox cause confusion. Create clearly labeled folders for each round of creative and final assets.
- Over-Communicate During Launch Week
- Even with perfect prep, things move fast during Black Friday Cyber Monday week. That’s when communication makes or breaks execution.
- Keep everyone aligned in real time with daily check-ins, a shared Slack channel for launch status, and assign a point person for each channel.
- Over-communicating helps teams pivot quickly when something breaks — without panic or finger-pointing.
- Capture Learnings While They’re Fresh
- Once the dust settles, don’t rush past the debrief. The best operational improvements come from documenting what worked and what didn’t.
- Schedule a post-mortem 1-2 weeks after after to capture insights while they’re still top of mind.
- Teams often collapse post-launch and never revisit the chaos. A short retro now saves days of stress next year.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday will always be intense — but they don’t have to be chaotic. Strong marketing and creative operations aren’t about adding process for process’s sake; they’re about building clarity, communication, and calm into the busiest season of the year.
When teams can see what’s coming, know who’s doing what, and trust the system in place — that’s when great work happens, even at peak speed. Schedule time with Alexis to build your bridge between strategy and execution.
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