According to a Glossy Research report on 2025 holiday marketing strategies, brands are pulling budget from owned channels—email, SMS, loyalty programs—and redirecting it toward paid media. Among 248 brands surveyed, the share planning to prioritize owned channels for the holiday season dropped measurably from prior years, signaling a strategic retreat from the direct-to-consumer playbook that dominated pandemic-era retail.
The mechanics are straightforward: brands built robust email lists and SMS programs between 2020 and 2023, often treating them as zero-cost acquisition engines. But list fatigue set in. Open rates declined. Conversion per send dropped. The incremental revenue from another promotional email became harder to justify against the deliverability cost and subscriber churn. At the same time, paid media platforms—Meta, Google, TikTok—improved targeting and attribution, making external channels competitive again on a cost-per-acquisition basis. Brands that once celebrated independence from ad platforms now see them as necessary scale levers.
Bath & Body Works exemplifies the shift. The fragrance and body-care retailer relies heavily on holiday gifting, a period that can represent a disproportionate share of annual revenue for mass-market personal-care brands. Like many in the category, the company built a substantial owned-channel apparatus during the direct-to-consumer surge. But with increased competition in the mass market and a turnaround still in progress, the brand is supplementing owned touchpoints with paid campaigns. The company recently enlisted Zooey Deschanel for a holiday push, a signal that it is betting on broad awareness plays rather than list-nurture alone.
Why it worked: owned channels excel at retention and low-friction conversion among existing customers, but they do not build the top of the funnel. Paid media does. When category competition intensifies—new entrants in body care, fragrance brands moving into mass retail, Amazon's private-label push—a brand cannot afford to rely solely on its existing customer file. It needs new names. Paid media, particularly video and social platforms, delivers reach and consideration at scale. The trade-off is cost, but for a seasonal business like holiday gifting, the payback window is short enough to justify the spend.
The steal for a small physical-product brand: reallocate 15 to 20 percent of your Q4 email and SMS budget to paid social. Run a simple awareness campaign on Meta or TikTok targeting lookalike audiences based on your existing customer list. Use static images or 15-second video showing the product in a gifting context—unboxing, wrapping, or display on a counter. Set the objective to traffic, not conversions, and send clicks to a collection or gift-guide landing page, not the homepage. Budget $500 to $1,000 for a four-week test. Track new-visitor sessions and first-time buyers separately from your email cohort. If cost per new customer is within two times your email CAC, continue the campaign through December. If it exceeds that threshold, pull back and redirect spend to retargeting existing visitors. The goal is not to abandon owned channels but to stop relying on them as the sole growth engine when the calendar demands new names.
The broader pattern: owned channels are retention infrastructure, not acquisition infrastructure. When a brand's growth stalls, the instinct is to mail the list harder. The better move is to spend strategically on external reach, measure new-customer acquisition cleanly, and use owned channels to convert and retain the incremental volume. The brands winning 2025 holiday will do both, not one at the expense of the other.
Owned channels retain customers but do not build the funnel; paid media fills the gap when category competition demands new names.
Editorial & Disclosure Notice: This article was written with artificial intelligence from public sources and is published without individual human review. Artificial intelligence and other digital tools are also used for research, analysis, editing, formatting, and production. Errors, omissions, outdated information, or inaccuracies may occur. References to companies, brands, products, services, organizations, or individuals are for informational and editorial purposes and do not imply endorsement, sponsorship, affiliation, partnership, or approval unless expressly stated. All trademarks and other intellectual property remain the property of their respective owners. Opinions, analysis, estimates, and commentary are informational only and should not be construed as financial, investment, legal, tax, medical, procurement, or other professional advice. Information may be corrected, clarified, or updated after publication. Corrections or removal requests: jenny@pops4.com.
The branded-identity layer Chiefs of Staff and heritage CMOs route through — your name imprinted on real authorized stock, your pick of 200+ brands and 70,000 products, shipped from one accountable house. Nine editorial desks publish the intelligence those operators read before they sign.
200+authorized brands
70,000products · virtual proof on each
9 deskspublishing daily
1997one house, since
70,000 SKUs · virtual proof in 60 seconds · no platform fee · blind-shipped · ASI #217876
Your next customer won't visit your website. Their AI will.
AI assistants have quietly taken over the first step of buying — they answer from catalogs they can read and shortlist whoever can actually ship. Two questions now decide whether you exist to that buyer: can a machine read your catalog, and can you fulfill the order. Most brands fail one or both and never find out why the orders went elsewhere. The winners of this shift aren't the loudest. They're the most readable. Build for the machine that's about to do the shopping.
Built by the craft floor — apparel, media, packaging, and secure print.
This trade runs on hands, not desks. Imprint manufacturing & Komori heritage press through approved vendors · Canon high-speed secure-media operations is a craft floor — genuine Six Sigma discipline applied to ink, thread, foil, and registration, where a hundredth of an inch is the difference between a brand that reads serious and one that reads cheap. POPS4 is built by exactly those operators: independent, boots-on-the-ground engineers who carry their own book, read a client in microseconds, and put their name on every run. Beyond our own Virginia Beach floor, we work with a vetted network of craft manufacturers across the US — each meeting the highest excellence in QC standards in the industry, each a specialist in its own discipline — so apparel, hard-goods imprinting, media manufacturing, packaging, and secure printing all go to the bench built for them, coordinated from one accountable hub. Short-run from twenty-five units, volume to five hundred thousand. Two hundred authorized national brands, seventy thousand SKUs with virtual proofing on every one. Art archived for instant reorders. Net-thirty corporate terms, NDA-standard white-label — your name on the work, or none at all.
Strategy, positioning, identity, creative, and messaging — wired into an AI system that publishes and distributes on its own. Nine editorial desks generate the authority, the production house ships the physical proof, and the attribution layer tells you which post sold which SKU. What you get is an operating layer — content, catalog, and order path under one roof — that keeps working whether or not you are in the room. Built for principals who would rather own the machine than rent the agency.
Named-account programs — one desk, quiet delivery, NDA-standard.
One point of contact who already knows the file, so nothing restarts from zero between engagements. The work ships blind, under NDA, with your name on it or none at all. Built for single-family offices, heritage-house CMOs, sports-ownership groups, and the agencies that white-label our production. The relationship is the product; the merch is the proof of it.
SFO · Chief of Staff desk. Principal household, properties, aircraft, yacht, calendar, philanthropy — one file.
Shop seventy thousand products. Virtual proof on every one. 24/7.
Drop your logo on any product and see the virtual proof before asking. Quote routes direct to the desk. MCP catalog for AI agents. Celeste for the fast conversation. Full self-service checkout in development.