The busiest shopping times of the year create a huge opportunity for companies like Ziff Media to help consumers find the best holiday deals.
Key Details
- Friday, November 25, is Black Friday, one of the biggest shopping days of the year, and Monday, November 28, is Cyber Monday.
- The holidays generate billions in annual revenue for holiday retail businesses and a major aspect of this comes from savings and deals from major retailers.
- Ziff Media is one of the leading providers of Black Friday deals and leaks. It makes $1.4 billion in annual revenue and owns the domains for Blackfriday.com, Bestblackfriday.com, and Theblackfriday.com.
- VP Frank Minervini tells Bloomberg that the process of putting the best deals on savings is time-consuming and requires communication and coordination—but it allows his company to make nearly all of its revenue through affiliate links.
Why it’s Important
Black Friday 2022 and Cyber Monday 2022 are expected to be major sales days—compared to previous years. The COVID-19 pandemic slowed down the world economy and kept shoppers away from long in-person lines, but now an estimated 140 million Americans are preparing to line up and spend $51 billion, Finder reports.
Minervini sees this as an opportunity, with millions of shoppers eager to take advantage of excess inventory and heavy discounts.
Possible Solutions
Ziff Media tracks details and retail leaks in order to put the best deals on display. The company hires “deal hunters” from around the world who coordinate in Slack channels to check all of the best deals around the clock every day.
The company also posts leaked ad scans of digital and printed Black Friday advertisements, but as retail stores shy away from printed Black Friday ads over time the company is shifting and creating its own digital ads that show the best available deals and provide applicable affiliate links to them.
“We thought there were probably a couple different offerings. One could be an evergreen asset. One could be predominantly an ad scan asset and then one would be kind of the premier … The original owners’ intent was to capitalize on getting ad scans live, get your programmatic display revenue, and not really worry about the experience or trying to create a direct relationship with the customer,” says Minervini.