Marketers spend months preparing for Q4, AKA the year’s biggest battleground for audience attention. Budgets peak, creative teams sprint, and consumers are bombarded with holiday offers from every direction. But while most brands collapse across the finish line come December 25th and hit pause, a quiet window opens up that savvy marketers call Q5 or The Hidden Quarter.
It’s that narrow, post-holiday sweet spot when we’re all still processing our festive food comas and losing track of what day it is. From December 26-31 advertiser demand dips, and consumer planning and discovery soar. This unique period offers measurable advantages: reduced CPMs and CPAs, an audience highly receptive to planning and self-gifting, and a golden chance to test creative and audience hypotheses before the new year officially kicks off.
The biggest reason marketers miss Q5 opportunities is habit. This period is traditionally seen as ‘shutdown’ time. The fact is, consumers haven’t switched off – far from it.
What are consumers doing in Q5?
During Q5, consumers transition from purchase urgency to planning and self-gifting. They’re often researching New Year goals like wellness, organisation, and skill development, which naturally increases engagement with inspirational content and longer consideration journeys. People save ideas, curate boards, and seek aspirational narratives that align with future intentions rather than instant purchases.
This behaviour rewards content that is inspirational, how-to focused, and positioned around outcomes rather than just discounts. Marketers who surface planning resources, resolution guides, and aspirational demonstrations will capture these ‘saved-for-later’ audiences and convert them into subscribers and retargetable lists for January follow-up.
The advertising opportunities in Q5
Reduced competition in ad auctions compresses CPMs and often lowers CPA because fewer advertisers are bidding aggressively. This opens up fantastic opportunities for scaled prospecting and inexpensive creative tests for digital-first and e-comm brands. Allocate a portion of your budget to prospecting experiments, refresh creatives rapidly, and use this period to populate retargeting lists with warmer, planning-phase users. For this to truly be worthwhile, it’s important to really understand how performance changes per platform during Q5.
| Platform | Typical Q5 performance shift | Outcome |
| CPA often falls and saves increase | Improved discovery and top-of-funnel list growth | |
| Facebook / Meta | CPMs drop while retargeting efficiency improves | Lower-funnel conversions at reduced cost |
| Google (Search & Shopping) | Lower CPC on non-branded discovery queries | Opportunity to capture new-intent queries affordably |
Platforms like Reddit are already helping advertisers tap into this moment with intelligent tools designed to do more with less.
- Lowest Cost Bidding: AI-powered bidding automatically hunts down the best conversions for your budget, maximizing return when CPMs are low.
- Auto Targeting: Reddit’s AI analyzes real user signals to find new, high-intent customers — expanding your reach beyond manual targeting.
- Auto Placements: Ads dynamically appear wherever engagement is highest — whether that’s in Feeds or Conversations — ensuring maximum visibility.
And starting November 3, Reddit’s new Targeting interface makes setup even smarter: you can now combine Custom Audiences and Gender targeting with Automated Targeting in a single ad group. Translation: reach your existing audience and let AI find more like them, all in one campaign.
How to win during The Hidden Quarter
- Keep the lights on. Don’t pause spend entirely; scale smartly. Even a smaller always-on budget can capture high-intent traffic while competitors are silent. If your team is offline during this time, change your messaging where necessary to prioritise prospecting and fill retargeting lists, ready for Q1 follow-up.
- Content: Where you can, focus on planning guides, inspirational posts and resolution-related resources to capture organic and referral traffic. Aim for save-worthy content that converts inspiration into consideration.
- Test and learn. Use lower costs to experiment: try new messages, audiences, or creative formats that can inform your Q1 strategy.
- Automate optimisation. Let AI tools handle the heavy lifting so you can focus on insights and creativity.
- Have an omnichannel plan ready: Be ready to hit your customers with short, value-led sequences focused on preparation and early-bird offers.
Final consideration
Like any marketing strategy, you need to be thinking of an omnichannel approach. Create a simple journey map: Paid social = discovery and list growth; Content = SEO + resource capture; Email = nurture and conversion; Retargeting = conversion push.
Hot tip: schedule timing to avoid message fatigue – stagger pushes across channels and harmonise creative formats so users receive coherent, reinforcing messages. Unified measurement across channels ensures Q5 cohorts are trackable across paid, organic, social, and email.
Q5 isn’t a cooldown period. It’s a hidden growth window: cheaper media, more engaged audiences, and a chance to get ahead while everyone else sleeps off December. The smartest brands aren’t winding down – they’re warming up. Don’t miss it!
