Somewhere around mid-October, South African advertisers all start planning their Black Friday campaigns at once. Budgets get topped up, campaigns get built and a broad audience labelled something close to “shoppers, 25 to 54, interested in retail” goes live against everyone else’s broad audience labelled nearly the same. Then every brand competes to be heard by the same people.
Peak retail season is the loudest trading window of the year and volume is the default response to it: spend more, reach wider, run longer. The trouble is that volume is what every competitor brand is buying too, which makes it the one lever guaranteed not to set you apart. Precision is the lever that does, and precision is not something you switch on during Black Friday week. It is a planning decision, made weeks earlier, about which behaviours you actually target.
The retail season is louder and longer
Online retail spending over South Africa’s 2025 festive season rose almost 50% year on year, with e-commerce reaching 11.5% of total retail spend, while in-store grew just 4.1%. The timing has shifted too, with Black Friday and early Christmas promotions pulling spend out of December and into October and November. The shopping period is longer, the competition heavier and the spend spread thinner across it. Shouting louder into that is an expensive way to be ignored.
When every advertiser uses the same targeting and those audiences overlap, the same people get served the same message over and over. Flow has seen standard targeting push frequency as high as 36 in a single campaign. That is not reach … that is one message, repeated three dozen times, at people who had made up their minds by the fourth. With first-party data audiences, Flow advises a frequency of three to four. When you are reaching the right people, you do not need to tell them 36 times.
Precision needs the right audiences. Reaching them has been the hard part
The audiences that make precision possible already exist. They are built on real purchases and real behaviour, a verified wine and spirits shopper at a premium retailer rather than someone whose profile suggests they might enjoy wine. The catch has always been getting to them. The best first-party data sits with individual retailers and platforms, and reaching it has meant a separate conversation, plan and negotiation with every one of them every time a brief lands.
Flow has brought a first of its kind to South Africa’s advertising industry: a single marketplace where advertisers can discover, book and measure first-party audiences and, for the first time, the campaign packages that data partners build. Audience Marketplace 2.0 puts hundreds of first-party audience segments from more than 35 data partners in one place, from the likes of Woolworths, ARC and Bash, each tiered by the underlying data, so you can match the audience to the brief and see exactly what you are buying. You browse, book and activate across your chosen channels, including Meta, Google and TikTok, and measure it all in the same place. What used to take weeks of back and forth now takes minutes, and it can be planned before the season starts rather than bid for during its most expensive week.
“No one, anywhere, has brought the audiences, the partner packages and the planning together the way Audience Marketplace 2.0 does,” says Gil Sperling, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Flow. “Tens of billions of rand move through digital advertising in this country every year, and we are opening the door for far more of it to reach the audiences that actually drive sales.”
What precision looks like when it lands
Over the last celebratory season, RGBC ran Moët & Chandon and Veuve Clicquot through Woolworths’ first-party data, targeting known Woolworths wine and bubbly shoppers rather than broad interest audiences. Sales value rose 53% and units rose 54%. The campaign reached more than 100,000 unique shoppers and beat link-click benchmarks by 32%.
“Usually, during a peak retail period you’re just hoping your message cuts through all the noise,” said Tess Mackeurton, National Key Account Manager at RGBC. “But by activating a campaign with Woolworths, we were able to talk directly to the people who actually buy our products.”
Homeware retailer @home makes the same point from another angle. Instead of a generic homeware segment, through Flow it was able to retarget people who were actively moving house, browsing properties at specific price points. The signal was not “likes homeware”, it was “is moving home”. That returned a 9.78 return on ad spend during peak season, at a lower cost per click than the targeting it replaced. In each case, the winning decision was made at audience selection, not at the bidding stage.
Plan the signal before you plan the spend
By the time Black Friday week arrives, the only lever left is bidding, and bidding is the most expensive way to buy relevance. Peak season rewards the brands that decide early, and the audiences are there to book before the season starts. Audience Marketplace 2.0 is where demand meets data.
Explore Flow’s Audience Marketplace, or book a demo to work through your peak season audience plan with the Flow team.
Commerce Media, in full Flow.