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AppLovin reports significantly better ad results for frequently refreshed creatives during Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2025. According to the platform, advertisers who uploaded new ad creatives almost every week in November achieved a median D7 ROAS that was 23 percent higher than advertisers who only added one or two creative updates. For Black Friday planning 2026 this is a useful signal, but not proof that the higher creative frequency alone caused the difference.
The AppLovin analysis is based on e-commerce and campaign data from the holiday business 2025. AppLovin itself explicitly describes the results as observational and not as a guarantee for future campaigns.
Fresh creatives correlated with higher ROAS and lower costs
63 percent of the advertisers analysed uploaded new creatives in three or four weeks in November 2025. In this group, the median D7 ROAS during Black Friday and Cyber Monday 23 percent above the value of advertisers who only added new ad assets in one or two weeks.
The analysis also shows a difference based on the age of individual ads. Creatives uploaded in November achieved a 20 percent higher D0 ROAS and a 15 percent higher D7 ROAS compared to ad assets older than 60 days. According to AppLovin, the cost per purchase was 19 percent lower on the first day and 13 percent lower after seven days.
This is relevant for performance teams because creative fatigue is often discussed only qualitatively. The data suggests that a planned creative pipeline before the peak can matter more than a single large Black Friday launch. However, it does not show whether more frequent updates were the cause itself, or whether better-organised advertisers also had other advantages in offer, budget or optimisation.
Promotions did not simply beat evergreen content on every metric
AppLovin also separates product-focused creatives from explicit Black Friday or Cyber Monday offers. Promotion creatives made up 41,8 percent of the uploaded creative sets, but received 62,2 percent of the delivered spend and generated 64,2 percent of the revenue attributed after seven days.
For D7 ROAS, AppLovin reports 1,38 dollars of revenue per advertising dollar spent for promotion messaging, compared with 1,26 dollars for product-focused creatives. Even so, this does not mean brands should only use discount messages. In its own recommendation, AppLovin speaks of a mix: product arguments should build demand, while promotions at the point of purchase create additional urgency.
For budget planning, the measurement logic is therefore just as important as the advertising message. Our article on independent incrementality measurement at DoorDash explains why attributed revenue and genuinely incremental revenue are not the same thing.
Short videos gained the most during the Black Friday period
For videos up to 15 seconds, the D0 ROAS for new customers rose by 83 percent compared with the non-promotion weeks from June to September. For videos between 16 and 29 seconds, the increase was 39 percent, and for videos of at least 30 seconds it was 24 percent.
The comparison therefore measures change against an earlier baseline, not a universal advantage of every short video over every long one. Category, product, offer and target audience remain decisive.
Similar caution is sensible with other platform data. If, for example, a brand reports a high ROAS from AI-driven CTV media buying, the metric alone says nothing about how well the effect can be replicated outside that specific campaign.
For Black Friday 2026 the test structure matters more than any single figure
For German advertisers, the AppLovin data mainly suggests a testing plan: produce several creative waves in advance, do not switch off strong motifs too quickly, and add new variants during November. Promotion and product messages should be measured separately, rather than mixed in one campaign without a clear comparison logic.
AppLovin also recommends testing short videos and interactive end cards specifically against other formats. That is more sensible than adopting the reported 23 percent as a blanket expectation in a German media plan.
Other platforms also deliberately build their holiday advertising products around short-term conversion phases, such as Snapchat with Dynamic Product Ads for Q4. The common denominator is not a particular format, but rapid creative iteration plus clean impact measurement.
The most important limitation of the AppLovin analysis is therefore stated in the methodology itself: the results come from observed campaign data. They show correlations, not controlled causality.