Halfway to Holidays: The holiday audience everyone is fighting for

Key takeaway: The closer we get to holiday, the fewer “new” audiences remain—only more competition for the same ones.

Why audience competition is becoming more intense than inventory competition

If the first shift in holiday planning is timing, the second is concentration. As consumers fragment across platforms, advertisers are doing the opposite – they are converging.

The illusion of infinite reach

Streaming has dramatically expanded where audiences can be reached, but expansion does not equal diversification.

In practice, most advertisers still rely on similar audience definitions:

• high-intent shoppers
• retail category intenders
• in-market audiences
• past purchasers

The result is predictable, as holiday approaches, everyone targets the same people, and those audiences become increasingly saturated.

The real problem isn’t reach—it’s overlap

Multiple industry studies (including IAB media quality research) have consistently shown a growing challenge in digital and streaming environments,

Audience duplication increases as targeting precision decreases.

In other words:

• more impressions ≠ more incremental reach
• more platforms ≠ more unique audiences
• more investment ≠ more net-new consumers

This is where holiday efficiency begins to break down. Because even if budgets increase, audience opportunity does not scale at the same rate.

Enter the forgotten audience segment. This is where a different lens becomes useful. Samsung Ads identifies a segment known as ghost users – users of a streaming app who are active in the past 12 months and become inactive for 4 or more consecutive months during that time.

These audiences are not absent, they are dormant. They are not actively engaged in streaming or category behavior signals that typically drive targeting strategies, which is exactly why they matter. According to Antenna, 89% of new streaming subscriptions are negated by churn. Ghost viewership ranges from 50% for the most popular apps to more than 100% of long-tail apps, where more viewers trial and ghost than become regular users.

Why ghost users matter in holiday planning

Holiday media planning is fundamentally biased toward,

• active shoppers
• high-frequency viewers
• recently engaged audiences

But as competition intensifies, these segments become,

• more expensive
• more saturated
• more duplicated across campaigns

Ghost users represent the opposite,

• lower competitive pressure
• untapped re-engagement potential
• incremental audience expansion opportunity

And critically, they often re-enter viewing cycles during high-consumption periods like Q4.

The strategic shift

With 87% of shoppers surveyed say ads influenced their research and purchase decisions, the most advanced holiday strategies are no longer just about reaching the right people. They are about reaching people before everyone else starts targeting them. That shift changes the role of planning entirely. It is no longer just media allocation, it is audience
discovery timing.