Does a Seasonal Marketing Campaign Really Get the Best Results?

Every category has one stretch of the calendar where every brand shows up at once. Two or three months where the whole industry spends most of its yearly budget. The weeks before Diwali, or the run-up to Christmas. The window nobody wants to be seen skipping. Sometimes the whole year’s spend gets saved for it. The thinking is simple: this is where market share gets won.

They are doing what everyone else in their category is doing, at the same time, for the same reason. That is exactly the problem this piece is about.

Here is the belief, stated fairly. Festive season is when the whole country is paying attention. So it is when a rupee spent on ads should work hardest. Attention is concentrated, intent is concentrated, so spend should be too.

The numbers back that up, on the surface. India’s festive ad spend is set to cross ₹60,000 crore this year, against a total annual ad spend of around ₹1,74,605 crore for 2026. Do that division and festive season alone accounts for roughly 34 per cent of the entire year’s ad spend — more than a third, packed into two or three months.¹1 dentsu, WPP Media · 2026 That is not a fringe strategy. That is most of the industry, doing the same thing, at the same time.

0101What actually moves market share

In January 1990, a researcher named John Philip Jones published a study in the Harvard Business Review. He had spent twenty-five years at J. Walter Thompson before turning to research. His study covered more than a thousand brands, mostly in packaged goods.²2 Jones · HBR 1990

His finding was oddly precise. A brand’s market share does not move just because it advertises. It moves when a brand’s share of the category’s total ad spend — its share of voice — is bigger than its share of the market. Advertise at exactly your market share and you should expect to stay flat. Advertise below it and you are not just failing to grow, you are handing share to whoever is above you.

Nielsen later put a number on how much that gap is worth. Les Binet and Peter Field, the two people most responsible for making advertising effectiveness a real discipline, have used the same number in their work on the IPA’s effectiveness data ever since. The rule of thumb, on average, across categories: every ten percentage points your share of voice beats your share of market buys you about half a percentage point of market share growth the following year.³3 Nielsen; Binet & Field

Not from being present, but from being disproportionately present relative to your size. A big brand needs a much bigger absolute spend to create that same ten-point gap than a small challenger does, which is part of why this finding has always favoured a challenger willing to be loud outside the festive window over a leader who assumes their size alone protects them.

I want to be honest about that number rather than treat it like a law of physics, because it is not one. Jones worked with a media world of five to ten channels, long before anyone had heard of a cost per mille or a programmatic auction. So the figure is a rule of thumb, tested and retested for decades, not a fixed constant. Peter Field himself, looking at more recent IPA data, found the link between excess share of voice and market share gain has actually weakened. The researcher Orlando Wood argues the cause is the industry’s own drift away from broad brand-building advertising toward narrower, more mechanical performance advertising.³

Even a weaker version of a true thing is still true. Excess still buys growth. Presence alone never did.

0202When everyone spends at once

If growth comes from excess share of voice — share above your fair share — and your whole category raises spend together, for the same nine weeks, for the same festival, then everyone’s share of voice rises together too. The market is not any less crowded relative to you. You are just paying more to stand exactly where you already stood.

Media buyers in India are already living this, even if they do not call it by this name. One executive told Exchange4media plainly that the real battle is capturing attention weeks before the season even starts, because once it arrives, CPMs on the big platforms “skyrocket”.⁴4 Exchange4media · Sep 2026

Storyboard18 reported quick commerce ad rates climbing thirty to forty per cent in the festive rush. I could confirm that number from their own headline but not the study behind it, so treat it as a signal of the same pressure, not as proven fact.⁵5 Storyboard18 · headline only Either way, the story holds: you are bidding against everyone else in your category, at the exact moment everyone else is bidding hardest, for a share of voice that barely moves relative to theirs. (Figure 2)

0303What this means for a brand

None of this argues against festive spend. The intent sitting in a shopper’s mind during those months is real, and a brand that goes dark during the one stretch its category actively wants to buy is leaving money on the table for reasons that have nothing to do with excess share of voice.

What it argues against is treating the festive quarter as the place a brand’s growth gets built, when the research says the highest-yield place to build it is the other nine months.

In practice, the question worth asking before the festive media plan gets signed is not “how do we own this quarter”. It is “what was our share of voice, against our share of market, back in March”. If that number was flat or negative, the honest read is that the festive budget is being asked to do a job — building the brand — that the rest of the year failed to do, at exactly the moment it is most expensive to do it.

A brand that spends steadily above its market share in the unglamorous months arrives at festive season already carrying share it built cheaply. It can spend festive rupees converting intent instead of trying to manufacture visibility from zero, at auction prices set by everyone else trying to do the same thing at once. In practice this can be as simple as holding a small, steady excess of voice through February, June and August — the months a category forgets exist — instead of saving every rupee of ambition for one nine-week window and calling the other months maintenance.

Think about what those other months actually look like in most Indian categories. The stretch after the January sales and before summer starts. The flat middle of the monsoon, when every competitor’s media plan just says “hold”. The weeks after Holi, when nobody has booked a single hoarding because nothing on the calendar is asking to be noticed. That is not dead time. That is the cheapest inventory of the entire year, sitting unbought, precisely because everyone else has decided — using the same mental accounting shortcut — that it is not worth their attention either. (Figure 3)

The two budgets are the same money. They are judged by completely different rules, because one of them is visible and the other is not.⁶6 Thaler · 1985 The festive line gets defended because cutting it would be a visible loss; the always-on line gets cut because nobody experiences its absence as one.⁷7 Kahneman & Tversky · 1979 (Figure 4)

A brand that disagrees with that, year after year, without making a big deal of it, ends up with an advantage no single festive quarter, however well produced, can buy back.

0404The honest part

It is genuinely harder to sell a client on “spend a little more in February” than on “own Diwali”, even when the first sentence is the one the data backs. Every agency, including this one, gets rewarded more visibly for the loud quarter than for the months nobody is watching. That is exactly the incentive that keeps this bias alive industry-wide, not just in one marketer’s head.

No amount of festive creativity fixes that arithmetic. I would rather a client held us to that test too.

0505Where it actually lands

Step back from the media maths for a second and this stops being a story about advertising at all. It is the same mistake we make with almost anything that builds up without anyone watching.

The exam crammed for in one dramatic weekend feels like effort in a way daily study never does, even though the daily version is what actually helps you learn. The founder’s heroic all-nighter gets remembered and told as a story, while the plain discipline of showing up for a year — the thing that actually built the company — rarely gets one. Even a marriage runs on this same pattern. The big gesture on an anniversary gets photographed, while the small, steady habit of showing up on an ordinary Tuesday is what the relationship is actually made of.

We underrate the version that builds up in the background, because feeling nothing while it happens is exactly what it is supposed to feel like.

We are drawn to the loud, visible burst of effort because it is the version we can point to and feel like we did something.

None of this is a case for smaller ambition. If anything it is the opposite. A brand willing to speak up in the months its category has agreed to ignore is playing a cheaper, less crowded game than the one everyone else is fighting over at a markup.

The growth was never sitting in the loud quarter. It was sitting in the nine months nobody else was bidding for, waiting for someone to notice that the cheapest advantage in the whole calendar was the one nobody wanted to spend on, because it never felt like doing anything at all.

0606Sources

1. India festive advertising expenditure estimates for 2026 (dentsu India, WPP Media South Asia), as reported in Festive AdEx could touch Rs 60,000 crore, but brands want proof before opening their wallets, BestMediaInfo, September 2026. ↩
2. Jones, J.P. (January 1990). Ad Spending: Maintaining Market Share. Harvard Business Review. ↩
3. Nielsen data on excess share of voice and market share growth, and Peter Field’s more recent IPA databank findings on the weakening of that relationship, as reported in Three marketing experts on how to achieve ‘effective share of voice’, Marketing Week. ↩
4. Festive media bets shift upstream as brands chase intent before Diwali ad inflation, Exchange4media, September 2026. ↩
5. Quick commerce festive ad rate increase, reported in Festive rush pushes quick-commerce ad rates up 30–40% as brands shift more digital spend, Storyboard18. Figure confirmed from the headline only, not the underlying methodology, and used here as a directional signal rather than a settled statistic. ↩
6. Thaler, R. (1985). Mental Accounting and Consumer Choice. Marketing Science. ↩
7. Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk. Econometrica. ↩