Your BFCM season has already started.

At the median brand, daily volume steps up ~8% on November 1 and stays elevated above October baselines until late December.

It’s a two-month season, not a five-day sprint. 🧵👇

The core takeaway for operators:

Track your pacing against October so you can plan resources for the full 7-week surge, not just the peak.

Want to see how your pace stacks up against peers in your category?

Plug your numbers into our free BFCM Pacing Calculator: fairing.co/resources/bfcm…

Your influencer code report is missing most of the customers who named an influencer.

Over BFCM, fewer than 4 in 10 customers who named an influencer used any discount code.

Measure influencer ROI with survey answers, not codes alone.

Code use drops at BFCM. Survey response doesn't.

Black Friday 2025: first-time buyers' code use fell about 10 percentage points vs October at the median brand.

Their survey response rate over BFCM: only about 2 points lower.

The survey still shows who sent them.

Brands with a visible referral program saw about the same rise in friends-and-family referrals as brands without one.

At the typical brand, they climb all November and peak the week of Dec 6.

Keep gifting and referral messaging live through mid-December.

Ask buyers about checkout and about 9% say something went wrong between finding you and paying.

Add that question to your post-purchase survey now. Log a few normal weeks so a BFCM spike stands out.

BFCM (week of Nov 2):
Word of mouth doesn't peak on Black Friday.

At large brands it climbs from early November and peaks Dec 8 to 10, more than a week after Cyber Monday.

Launch your referral or gifting push this week and keep it live.

CFOs: ask your CMO this. What's the incrementality of our overall marketing?

Andrew Covato's advice for a brand starting fresh: turn off the media you can, then measure what happens.

Does brand awareness correlate with revenue? Samir Balwani: yes, but the data most brands have (12 points a year) is noisy. A Harvard Business Review study found the link clearly, using daily data from bigger brands like airlines.

The best operators are sharing their AI workflows in NYC on Oct 22nd.

Leaders from brands and agencies are sharing real tactics to try (or avoid) in under 5 minutes a pop. Think TED Talks meets TikTok Reels.

Co-hosted with Klaviyo, Orita, Vibe, Superfiliate, & First Citizens.

Request to join here: luma.com/ioulby32

Our users kept asking for the same thing. So we built it.

More clarity on where budget should go at the top of the funnel.

"'Knowing a customer heard about a brand through a podcast doesn't provide enough information.'

Advanced Attribution builds on the HDYHAU post-purchase survey that Fairing helped popularize...

A customer hears about a product on a podcast, sees a creator use it, or asks ChatGPT for a rec, then searches for the brand days later. Pixel-based and modeled attribution credit the last touch, typically search or direct, and the channel that created the demand goes unmeasured.

As discovery fragments across audio, video, influencers, and AI, that gap is widening.

Advanced Attribution closes it by going one level deeper than the standard HDYHAU question."

Learn more: fairing.co/product/advanc…