‘Halloween is when Christmas ends’: A look at publishers’ pre-Black Friday commerce content playbooks

By Kayleigh Barber

Many publishers’ commerce teams know what to expect during the lead up to Black Friday by now: An inbox full of hundreds of product pitches from public relations professionals asking to be included in gift guides, keeping a close eye on any and all sales as they are announced, and, of course, working during the shopping holidays and weekends when many editorial counterparts are enjoying their Thanksgiving logged off.

“I expected Q4 to be slow because of the economy, or slower. But it’s still Q4 … classic Q4,” said a commerce editor who sits on the branded content team at a multi-publication media company and spoke on the condition of anonymity. “I literally just upped my dose of Bupropion, because the last few weeks have been so crazy.”

No doubt a stressful time, this year only seems to have been exacerbated by the uncertainties of the economy and what this will do to consumers’ budgets, which has the potential to upset the amount of revenue media companies can earn off of affiliate commerce.

And yet, some editors are hoping their editorial strategies — honed for upwards of a decade at this point — will be enough to bolster this business. “All we can do is make sure that all of our content is optimized for the people who are ready to spend money,” said Jon Phillips, editor-in-chief of Foundry’s PCWorld and TechHive publications.

That optimization has started to look different for each individual publisher, from changes in editorial calendars and the frequency of article updates, to how products are selected for round-ups. Here’s a look at how publishers have optimized their pre-Black Friday commerce playbooks.

The earlier the better

At Reader’s Digest, the production of gift guides and holiday shopping content begins in mid- to late-August, according to Bryce Gruber, a senior shopping editor at Trusted Media Brands. Aside from small updates or product additions to particularly well performing content, “for the most part, Halloween is when Christmas ends,” she added.

After all that content goes live by the first week of November, Gruber said her focus pivots back to evergreen content, like best pillows, or semi-evergreen articles, like cozy winter items, for the remainder of the fourth quarter. Only one or two people on her team are tasked with staying on top of last-minute deal coverage or adding updates to holiday posts through the rest of the quarter.

Freelance journalist Jill Schildhouse, who writes commerce content for Reader’s Digest, Travel + Leisure, Brides and others, said the end of the third quarter is her busy period when it comes to holiday shopping assignments. “I started getting gift guide assignments in September [and] actually, I think I’m done with all of them now and have been for maybe a week now,” she said in a conversation with Digiday on Tuesday. Still, this year has had fewer holiday assignments than normal, which she chalked up to the folding of a few publications she typically contributed to in years past.

Not all publishers are able to wipe …read more

Source:: Digiday