With over 16 years at the business, Paul has seen Peak evolve through shifting consumer behaviour, new technologies, and the ever-growing scale of THG’s global brands. In this behind-the-scenes look, he shares his perspective on how performance marketing shapes Peak, the strategies that keep his teams ahead in a fast-moving landscape, and the trends he believes will define the customer journey this year. 

What does your role as Performance Marketing Director involve?  

I look after the performance marketing teams and channels (Paid Search, Paid Social and Affiliates & Partnerships) so more generally this is working closely with the wider stakeholders to set and define the overall strategy to ensure the channel heads have the right direction set. I have been with THG for over 16 years so often support across broader areas given that I have good connections across the business, including with the Ingenuity tech team. 

Specifically for Black Friday my main focus is to ensure the teams have all of the tools that they need to execute over the black Friday period. During Black Friday itself I love getting into the detail of whichever channel might need some support! 

What kind of work goes into preparing for Peak from a performance marketing perspective? 

A lot of the work is done during the first part of the year where we would aim to be running all of our tests to ensure we’re as optimised as we can be going into H2 and Q4. We get a lot of support from our partners (e.g. Google) in terms of insights which, shared with the other teams, helps us to plan our activity and ensure we’re set up for success. A lot of the work into Q4 is the budget phasing – so lots of collaboration between teams to ensure the spend phasing across each of the channels aligns with the overall targets and expected trends.  

How does your team start planning, and when does the prep really kick off? 

As above, we are always thing about peak, even in the early part of the year and will try to ensure we are doing as much testing as possible during Q1/H1. With key trading periods such as Easter and Bank Holidays falling in H1 it never really feels like we’re not in peak – but these periods help us get a good feel for how subsequent periods will go – and allow us to refine ahead of the next peak. 

For Cyber specifically, we’re fortunate that we have a centralised activation team that help to collate all of the plans into a format that allows the channel teams to then ensure we have everything we need for each individual channel. They will support on ensuring everything from creative to trading mechanics are visible and we will typically start this towards the end of the summer as we need time for the creative to be briefed in. We will then get to the specific day to day activations for November in early October. 

What advice would you give to anyone going through Peak season? 

Plan ahead and Keep calm! Sometimes things don’t quite go as planned but all you can do is have a solid plan in place and then react to what is happening in front of you. In my experience we have always dealt with challenges better when we have been confident in the initial plan and then been able to react if things haven’t quite gone to plan. There are plenty of people around that have been through it so don’t be afraid to lean on anyone around you for support.  

How do you decide where to focus your marketing spend and efforts during Peak? 

A lot of this will be based on how things have performed all year, we won’t typically make any huge changes to our investment mix for Peak and will also lean heavily on what worked last year.  We will be flexible during the period and try to shift budgets where we can based on what it working (or not!)  

What are the biggest shifts or trends you’ve noticed in consumer behaviour during Peak over recent years? 

It’s not really specific to peak and more general trends, but the biggest shift being covid. Post covid it’s settled back down now but obviously we saw a huge spike in online participation during covid which was hugely exaggerated in peak during those periods. I’m looking forward to seeing how AI plays a part this year, that being the biggest shift we are likely to see in terms of customer behaviour and trends, and how LLMs such as ChatGPT play a part in the customer journey this year. Watch this space…! 

What has been your favourite Peak moment? 

To be honest, there have been so many it’s hard to pick one. Some have been tougher than others in terms of performance and in some ways, those stand out more as we see great examples of people coming together under the pressure and we always come out the other side! I have to say dressing up as ginger spice for a Black Friday promo video (Internal, not customer facing!) is also one of the highlights!