When you think of major shopping events, your mind may immediately go to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Amazon Prime Day or the entire plot of the famous Oscar snubbed Jingle All the Way where Arnold Schwarzenegger spends his Christmas Eve sprinting through malls and fighting Sinbad over a toy robot.

However!

Did you know that back to school shopping is an $83 BILLION dollar industry? That’s right. Families with kids K-12 are expected to spend nearly $700 each. If they’re sending a kid to college, they’re spending almost a cool thousand.

More stats? For families with K-12 kids, average spending breaks down as:

  • $237 on clothing
  • $138 on shoes
  • $122 on supplies

The college kids are shelling out on average of $229 on electronics alone.

And what types of stores are folks flocking to as summer break winds down?

  • Department stores (57%)
  • Online Retailers (55%)
  • Discount Stores (52%)
  • Clothing Stores (51%)
  • Office Supply Stores (35%)

Do you run advertising for a brand listed above? If so, you need to ensure a piece of that $83 billion dollar pie.

So, how can your brand capitalize on the phenomenon of back to school shopping? VuePlanner® has a strategy.

Here’s the deal, back to school shopping has already begun but will reach more momentum as we cross into August. Even then, however, only 45% of shopping will be completed by September 1st. What this means is that you have plenty of time to set up a contextually relevant campaign that targets family shoppers in advance of this year’s back-to-school rush.

Remember when we talked about what Gen Z was up to this summer? We came to the conclusion that they were watching YouTube, lots of it. Or what about when we talked about the rise of Connected TV? People are watching YouTube on large format televisions, and being served ads. There is probably a teen out there watching NBA Summer League on YouTube right now who would add your hot new fall basketball shoes to his or her back-to-school list. Or how about all the people watching highlights of the US Women’s National Team winning a record fourth World Cup? If you haven’t heard, the jersey sales are breaking records. Lots of boys and girls are going to need new soccer gear come this fall.

Want to get even more targeted? VuePlanner® enables you to leverage the intent-based nature of the YouTube platform by identifying the videos most related to your products. Take backpacks as an example. They are one of the hottest back-to-school items out there and content around them is trending on YouTube. Our team built a collection with just a dozen related keywords that our forecasting tool predicts will generate over 80 million views in the next 30 days. On backpacks. Get your brand in front of those actively searching for related items to buy and conquest over your competitors by targeting content about their specific products.

The point is, lots of money is going to be spent in the coming months and the best way to capitalize on it is through contextually targeted ads, presented in a brand suitable environment. Thousands of families will be spending the dog days of summer beating the heat watching YouTube together. Don’t miss this golden opportunity.

To get started on your back-to-school campaign, click here.

BACK TO SCHOOL SPECIAL!

Drive customers onsite during the 2nd biggest shopping season of the year with proprietary contextual targeting on YouTube & track store visits through privacy-compliant offline media measurement. Giant Media is partnering up with Freckle to provide a full-funnel back-to-school strategy from awareness to purchase with attribution of instore revenue to contextual campaigns build with VuePlanner®. Make smarter optimization decisions throughout the campaign lifecycle with real-time transparency from where your ad will be shown to how it performed in driving offline conversions.