Solved: BFCM Creatives Strategy for $10k+/Day Spend

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

That's a cracking question and one that separates the pros from the amateurs, especially when you're playing with a budget of $10k+ a day. The stakes are just too high to get it wrong. Happy to give you some of my initial thoughts on this. The short answer is that there's no single "right" way, but there's definately a "smarter" way that protects your existing performance and sets you up for a massive BFCM. It's less about picking A, B, or C and more about building a dedicated, bulletproof strategy from the ground up.

Let's get into it.

We'll need to look at why 'just dropping them in' is a terrible idea...

Alright, let's tackle Option B head-on because it’s the most tempting and also the most dangerous. I see so many people do this. The logic seems sound, right? You've got an ad set that's humming along, spending big and delivering results. The algorithm knows the audience, you've got social proof on the existing ads... why not just add your shiny new BFCM creatives into the mix and let the algorithm do its thing?

At $10k+ a day, this is like trying to swap out a tyre on a Formula 1 car while it's doing 200mph down the main straight. You might get away with it, but the chances of a catastrophic failure are incredibly high.

Here’s the breakdown of why this is such a bad move at your level of spend:

1. Algorithmic Disruption: The Meta algorithm loves stability. Your proven ad sets are working precisely because the algorithm has found a stable, predictable pocket of performance. It knows which users respond to which of your existing ads and how to bid for them. When you suddenly introduce a bunch of new creatives with a completely different offer and urgency (BFCM deals), you throw a massive spanner in the works. The algorithm has to re-evaluate everything. It might start showing the new ads to the wrong people, performance can become erratic, and your once-stable CPA can go through the roof. It can trigger a significant re-learning phase, even if it's not the 'official' learning phase, which is the last thing you want during the most competitive week of the year.

2. Polluted Data: One of the most important jobs of a media buyer is to generate clean, actionable data. Your evergreen campaigns should be a source of truth for your business's baseline performance. When you mix temporary, high-intensity BFCM creatives and results into those campaigns, you muddy the waters completely. Come December, when you're trying to analyse your evergreen performance, it'll be impossible to seperate the BFCM spike from your normal results. You won't know if a change in CPA was due to the holiday season or a genuine shift in audience behaviour. Clean seperation of data is non-negotiable for proper analysis and future strategy.

3. Budget Cannibalisation: Your existing ads might have loads of social proof (likes, comments, shares) which the algorithm often favours. When you drop in new BFCM ads with zero social proof, the algorithm might be slow to give them any spend, favouring the ads it already knows. Conversely, if the BFCM offer is incredibly strong, the algorithm might swing the other way and dump all the budget into the new ads, effectively killing off your consistent evergreen ads. You lose control. It becomes a black box, and you're just praying it makes the right choice.

For a smaller account spending maybe £100 a day, sure, you could risk it. The potential downside is smaller. But when you’re responsible for a daily spend that's more than most people's monthly salary, you have to operate with risk mitigation as a priority. Option B is pure, unnecessary risk.

I'd say new ad sets are a step in the right direction, but still not perfect...

So, Option A: creating brand-new ad sets for your holiday creatives inside your existing, proven campaigns. This is definitely a smarter move than Option B. You're giving the new creatives their own space to breathe and you're isolating their performance data at the ad set level. This avoids the direct contamination we just talked about.

However, it's not a silver bullet, especially with the way Meta's campaign structures work now, particularly with Advantage+ Campaign Budget (formerly CBO).

Here's where the problems lie:

1. The Learning Phase Gamble: Any new ad set starts in the learning phase. During this period, performance is volatile as the algorithm explores how to deliver your ads. Starting this process during BFCM week is a massive gamble. CPMs (cost per 1,000 impressions) are at their highest point of the entire year. Competition is fierce. You're essentially paying premium prices for the algorithm to learn, and there's no guarantee it'll exit the learning phase with good results. You could burn through a significant chunk of budget before the ad set even finds its footing.

2. The Advantage+ Budget Problem: If you're running a campaign with Advantage+ Campaign Budget (and at $10k/day, you likely are), the budget is managed at the campaign level. The algorithm's job is to distribute that budget to the ad sets it believes will get the best results. What do you think happens when you put a brand new, unproven ad set (in the learning phase) next to your established "winner" ad sets that have been delivering consistent results for months?

The algorithm will almost always favour the proven winners. It's the path of least resistance. It'll continue to feed the majority of the budget to your existing ad sets, and your new BFCM ad sets might be starved of spend. You might set up these amazing new ad sets only to see them get a measly 5% of the campaign budget, completely failing to scale and deliver the volume you need for BFCM.

This approach gives you a false sense of security. You've seperated the ads, but you haven't truly given them a fair chance to compete for budget and scale effectively during the most critical sales period of the year. It's a halfway house that brings its own set of frustrations.

You probably should be building a dedicated BFCM 'War Room' Campaign...

This brings us to Option C: spinning up a whole new, dedicated campaign specifically for BFCM. This isn't just another option; for a high-spend, high-stakes account, this is the professional standard. This is how you build a fortress around your results, maintain control, and maximise your chances of a hugely profitable BFCM.

Think of it as your BFCM "War Room". Everything related to the holiday sale lives inside this one campaign. It has its own dedicated budget, its own specific ad sets, and its own isolated performance data. Your evergreen campaigns continue to run as normal, completely insulated from the chaos of BFCM.

The advantages are massive and directly address the flaws of the other approaches:

• Total Budget Control: You decide exactly how much you want to spend on BFCM. Let's say you allocate £100k for the week. You set that as the budget for this campaign, and you know it won't steal spend from your evergreen efforts, nor will it be starved of budget by them. You have full control over your investment in the sale.
• Perfectly Clean Data: This is huge. When the dust settles, you'll have a single campaign that tells you the complete story of your BFCM performance. What was the overall ROAS? What was the CPA? Which audiences performed best? Which creatives were the winners? This clean data is invaluable for planning next year's BFCM. I remember we worked with eCommerce clients where this post-campaign analysis directly informed their strategy for the following year, leading to even bigger returns. For one women's apparel client, this structured approach was part of a strategy that delivered a 691% return. You can't get that level of clarity by mixing everything together.
• Algorithmic Insulation: Your evergreen campaigns, the bedrock of your business, are protected. They keep doing their thing, unaffected by the wild CPM swings and different user behaviour of the BFCM period. The new BFCM campaign can go through its own learning phase without putting your baseline revenue at risk. This seperation is critical for stability.
• Focused Strategy & Testing: A dedicated campaign allows for a focused strategy. You can build ad sets specifically for BFCM audiences. For example, you can have an ad set targeting your most engaged customers from the last 30 days with an aggressive "VIP early access" offer, and another ad set targeting a broader lookalike audience with a more general "Black Friday Deals" message. This level of granular control is only really possible in a dedicated campaign structure.

Yes, the campaign will have to go through the learning phase. But you're doing it in a controlled environment where 100% of the budget is dedicated to making it work. You're not fighting an uphill battle for budget against your own proven ad sets. This is the only approach that gives you the control, clarity, and risk management required when operating at your scale.

You'll need to start preparing weeks in advance...

Here’s the real secret from my experience: the choice between A, B, or C is a tactical decision. The winning strategy, however, starts way before Black Friday week. The most successful high-spend accounts I've worked on treat October and early November as the crucial preparation phase. You can't just show up on November 24th with new ads and expect to win.

Phase 1: Creative Concept Testing (Mid-October to Early November)

Don't wait until BFCM to find out if your creatives resonate. You should be running a seperate, low-budget testing campaign *right now*. The goal isn't to get a huge ROAS; the goal is to gather data on which creative *angles* work.

For example, test these angles:

• Angle 1: Gifting. Creatives focused on your product as the perfect Christmas gift.
• Angle 2: Self-Treat. Creatives focused on "you deserve it" messaging.
• Angle 3: Scarcity. Creatives that hint at "limited stock" or "biggest sale of the year".
• Angle 4: Benefit-led. Creatives that ignore the sale and just focus on the core value proposition of your product.

Run these as simple image or video ads to a broad audience. Look at the metrics that indicate interest: Click-Through Rate (CTR), Hold Rate on videos, and Outbound CTR. The winning concepts from this test become the foundation for the actual creatives you'll run in your main BFCM campaign. You're removing the guesswork before the stakes get high.

Phase 2: Audience Warming & Pool Building (Early to Mid-November)

The cost of reaching cold audiences during BFCM is astronomical. The smart money is spent on warming up audiences beforehand so you can retarget them when it counts. Your goal here is to build massive, high-intent retargeting pools at a lower cost before the CPMs skyrocket.

Run campaigns with cheaper objectives:

• Video Views: Create teaser videos hinting at the upcoming sale. "Something big is coming..." type content. Run these to your best cold audiences (lookalikes, interests). Then you can create a custom audience of people who watched 50% or 75% of the video. This is now a warm, high-intent audience ready for your sale ads.
• Engagement (PPE): Run posts that ask questions or encourage comments related to your products or the holiday season. Everyone who engages with that post can be added to a custom audience. I recall one campaign we worked on for a subscription box client where we built up a huge pool of engaged users, which then converted at a 1000% ROAS during the main sales push.

I'd say you need to plan your budget properly...

Once you've decided on the dedicated campaign structure, the next big question is "How much should I spend?". Just picking a number out of thin air is a recipe for disaster. You need a data-informed approach. This is where a bit of reverse-engineering comes in handy. You start with your goal and work backwards to find your required budget.

Here’s an interactive calculator to help you model this out. Play around with the sliders. See how a small change in your expected conversion rate or CPC can drastically alter the ad spend you'll need. This is the kind of planning that prevents nasty suprises during BFCM week.

This is the main advice I have for you:

So, to bring it all together, here is a summary of the main recommendations based on my experience managing large-scale eCommerce campaigns. This isn't just theory; this is a field-tested process.

As you can see, the work involved in doing BFCM properly at scale is significant. It's a multi-stage project that requires careful planning, execution, and analysis. Trying to take shortcuts by just dropping new ads into old ad sets is an amateur move that will likely cost you a lot of money and opportunity.

Managing all these moving parts – the pre-testing, the audience warming, building the new campaign structure, and analysing the results – is a full-time job in itself, especially during the busiest quarter of the year. This is where having an experienced team can make a huge difference. From my experience, we've run these kinds of high-stakes campaigns for numerous clients across different sectors, like a luxury brand launch where we generated 10 million views, or for eCommerce campaigns consistently hitting 600-1000% ROAS.

If you'd like to chat through how we could apply a similarly rigorous approach to your own BFCM strategy, we offer a free initial consultation. We can take a look at your account together and map out a concrete plan of action.

Hope that helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh