Black Friday Ads: Stop Scaling on ROAS Alone

Build a Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2026 strategy around contribution margin, smarter offers and profitable customer acquisition. In this video, I walk through how to calculate what discount your ecommerce business can afford, set customer acquisition cost (CAC) and marketing efficiency ratio (MER) targets, and decide when to increase or pull back ad spend during BFCM. We connect the offer, ad creative, Meta, Google, email and SMS into one plan. I also share ideas worth evaluating for your business: refunded-order promotions, conversion-reach campaigns and connected TV (CTV). Then we look beyond the weekend at customer quality, lifetime value and payback. EXPLORE STELLA I co-founded Stella to help brands understand which marketing is driving incremental growth and where to invest next. https://www.stellaheystella.com/ Work with Stella’s team: https://stellaheystella.com CHAPTERS 00:00 Your Black Friday / Cyber Monday 2026 plan 00:31 Choose the right goal for your business 01:16 Contribution margin: what discount can you afford? 02:18 Set your allowable CAC and MER target 03:12 Bundles and discount framing 04:14 Real urgency and tiered offers 05:12 Ad creative for three different audiences 07:00 Give each marketing channel a job 07:54 The email/SMS refund strategy 08:18 Meta campaign structure 08:55 Ad budgets and evergreen campaigns 09:31 Conversion-reach campaigns 09:54 YouTube and founder-led ads 10:19 CTV and incremental growth 10:51 Hourly media buying: when to scale, hold or cut 12:53 AMER and new-customer acquisition 13:23 LTV, customer cohorts and payback 15:12 Bring your BFCM plan together 15:23 Your turn: what won’t you repeat? 15:40 Subscribe for more profitable growth CONNECT WITH ME Instagram:   / brendenbuilds   TikTok:   / brendenbuilds   LinkedIn:   / brendendelarua   X / Twitter: https://x.com/brenden_delarua Marketing Made Me Buy It:    / @marketingmademebuyit   Free resources, newsletter and ways to work with me: https://linktr.ee/brendenbuilds What’s one strategy you used last Black Friday that you WON’T repeat this year? Tell me in the comments. Subscribe for more in-depth ecommerce marketing, paid media and measurement content to help you grow a profitable business. Opening chart source: Adobe’s 2025 U.S. Cyber Week data. https://news.adobe.com/news/2025/12/a... Numerical examples are illustrative. AI-generated ad examples are labeled on screen and used only to demonstrate creative concepts. #BlackFridayMarketing #EcommerceMarketing #BFCM