4 Black Friday lessons from last year (and what to do about them now)

Black Friday & Cyber Monday (BFCM) feels like it's months away - until it isn't.

Every year, we watch the same pattern play out: the brands that start planning now walk into BFCM with confidence, momentum, and a clear playbook. The brands that wait until October are the ones firefighting in November.

We spent time digging back through last year's BFCM data, our own campaigns, client results, and broader ecommerce and service-based business trends, to pull out the lessons that actually matter. Here are four of them, and what the team at Cymbal are politely urging you to do before it’s too late and you're scrambling to pull together a last-effort BFCM campaign that won’t stand a chance against your industry’s big players.