Black Friday ads don’t work everywhere: Parallel study finds brands need to target viewers in the right needs state.

Simulations of seven major UK Black Friday ads found that a third to half of available YouTube content was a poor fit for each ad – and that the content where ads work best is often also a strong fit for competing brands.

Black Friday is one of the most crowded weeks of the year for advertisers. But a new study suggests that much of the content available to them may be a poor fit for the customer watching it. For each of seven major UK Black Friday ads, a third to half of the YouTube content tested failed to resonate with the viewer.

The Black Friday Resonance Report from Parallel examines how well ads fit the content people are watching. Parallel uses human-calibrated Digital Twins to score this fit – which it calls ‘resonance’ – for different combinations of customer, ad and content.

Parallel tested seven publicly-available 2025 Black Friday ads from major brands – Currys, O2, EE, Ralph Lauren, Wayfair, ASOS and Gymshark – against 300 pieces of YouTube content, using a UK panel of 60 human-calibrated Digital Twins which generated more than 125,000 simulated responses.

Key findings:

• Every ad has a large share of content where it doesn’t resonate. For each of the seven ads, a third to half of the content scored below 5 out of 10.

• Contextual category is a poor predictor of where an ad resonates. Within Home & Garden content, for example, the same ad scored 8.6/10 in one piece of content and 3.1 in another. Healthy Living content produced scores ranging from 1.0 to 8.7. The content itself matters more than the broad category it sits in.
  
• Most high-performing content is shared between competing advertisers. Across any two of the seven ads, 44% to 81% of the content where either ad resonates also works for the other. Every ad also has content where it resonates more strongly than any of the other six. This was true for at least 20 of the 300 pieces tested for each ad.

The study links these differences to the customer’s need state: the underlying reason someone is watching a piece of content. All seven ads resonated strongly when customers were deciding what to buy or treating themselves, while scores were much weaker when they were winding down.

For advertisers, that means looking beyond broad contextual categories to identify the content where an individual ad resonates – particularly where it outperforms competing ads.

What the findings mean for Black Friday planning

• Prioritise content where an ad resonates. Avoid content where the ad consistently scores poorly.
• Look for areas of competitive advantage. Content where an ad resonates more strongly than competing ads offers an opportunity to differentiate media buying.
• Value shared inventory according to the level of competition. Where several advertisers resonate with the same content, brands can assess how much of that inventory they need and what it is worth to them.
• Plan around customer need state, not the contextual category. All seven ads resonated when customers were deciding what to buy or treating themselves, while scores were weaker when they were winding down.
• Use multiple creatives where appropriate. Different creative can resonate in different content, potentially increasing the range of inventory where an advertiser can compete effectively.

Industry research shows that ads with strong creative-to-content fit see 4x higher unaided recall, 2x greater favourability and 1.5x higher receptivity. Every Parallel campaign includes a free brand lift study to measure campaign outcomes.

“Black Friday is one of the most cluttered weeks of the year, and for every ad we scored, a third to half of the content simply didn’t work for the customer watching,” said Parallel CEO Rob Hall. “Brands need to know where their ads resonate, stay out of the content where they don’t, and give themselves the best chance of driving outcomes.”

To view the full report, visit https://helloparallel.com/reports/resonance-black-friday-2026/.

Source: Parallel

  Black Friday, Parallel, Report, Research, Rob Hall, The Black Friday Resonance Report