Black Friday ad examples, with the dates they actually ran

Most "Black Friday ad examples" posts are a gallery of pretty creative with no evidence behind it — no dates, no sources, no way to tell whether anyone ever switched the ad off. Every example below is a real UK ad carrying the first-shown and last-shown dates Google publishes in its Ads Transparency Center. Those dates are the interesting part: they expose a copy pattern and an operational mistake almost nobody writes about. Black Friday is 27 November 2026 — here's what last season's ads teach you first.

What these examples actually teach

Three lessons fall out of reading these ads with the dates attached:

• Promotion extensions carry their own expiry date — and outlive it. Google lets you attach a promotion extension with explicit valid-from and valid-to dates, and those dates show in the ad. What the extension does not do is switch the ad off when it expires. We found ads still being served long after the offer window printed inside them had closed.
• Seasonal labels get bolted onto evergreen content ads. The most surprising examples aren't product ads at all — they're guides and advice pages somebody attached a Black Friday offer to. The ad keeps earning its place in an always-on campaign, and the seasonal offer rides along indefinitely.
• "Up to X%" is doing enormous heavy lifting. Across the 50,671 ads we've AI-qualified from 158 UK brands, 16,954 carry an offer — 33.5% of everything — but only 6,403 have a discount recorded that you can measure as a percentage. The rest hide behind "up to", "from", or no number at all. "Up to 70% off" is legitimate if one SKU is 70% off; it tells the reader almost nothing about the deal they'll get.

Black Friday ad copy examples from UK brands

ASOS — "Black Friday @ ASOS" on a product-specific search ad

ASOS ran a Google Search ad headlined "Petite Combat Trousers At ASOS - Black Friday @ ASOS", body copy: "Shop up to 70% off almost everything - AKA the best deal of the year."

First shown 30 October 2025. Last shown 6 August 2026 — a 280-day run (creative CR00488819762785157121).

Steal the structure: specific product intent ("petite combat trousers") in the first headline slot, the seasonal frame in the second — that ad can win a long-tail search and still communicate the event. Steal the voice too; "AKA the best deal of the year" is conversational in a way most retail search copy isn't. What to avoid: it was still being served in August, nine months on, promising the best deal of the year. See ASOS's live ad library.

Wren Kitchens — a 635-day "Black Friday Specials" ad

Wren Kitchens ran "60% Off Pre-Built Units - Black Friday Specials", with body copy offering a free home measure and design consultation, and a 4.9-star rating extension attached.

First shown 5 November 2024. Last shown 2 August 2026 — 635 days (creative CR06859710401240629249).

This is the clearest case of seasonal creative being absorbed into always-on activity: launched for Black Friday 2024, still reported running nearly two years later, through a second Black Friday. The lesson isn't that Wren erred — the ad presumably performed, nobody had a reason to pause it, and no process existed to retire the seasonal label. For a considered purchase like a kitchen, a stated 60% off plus a free design consultation plus a 4.9-star rating is a strong combination. It just shouldn't still say Black Friday in July.

Castore — the promotion extension with its expiry printed on it

Castore ran a Search ad with sitelinks for England Cricket 25/26 and "Up To 70% Off The Hundred", plus a promotion extension that read: "Black Friday - Up to 70% off The Hundred, Valid Nov 13 - Nov 28".

First shown 24 October 2025. Last shown 21 October 2026 — 362 days (creative CR15740017458561417217).

The promotion-extension lesson made concrete. The offer window is stated inside the ad — 13 to 28 November — yet the ad was reported running until the following October. An expiry date written in ad copy is a promise to the reader, not an instruction to Google. Note too that Castore started on 24 October, a month before the event; early starts are the norm, as we cover in our guide to tracking competitor Black Friday ads. Their current activity is on the Castore brand page.

Pets at Home — a Black Friday offer attached to a kitten feeding guide

The most instructive example is the least obvious one. Pets at Home ran an ad for a kitten feeding guide — advice content, not a product — carrying a promotion extension reading "Black Friday - 50% off Lily Cat Tower".

First shown 6 November 2025. Last shown 20 August 2026 — 287 days (creative CR09694095762392088577).

Strategically this is clever. The ad targets informational intent — someone searching how to feed a kitten — and the promotion extension converts part of that traffic with a relevant product offer. The content ad earns its keep all year; the offer monetises it during the event. Copy that pattern deliberately: attach your Black Friday offer to your best-performing evergreen content ads, not just your product ads. The catch is that a content ad has an indefinite life by design, so the seasonal extension inherits it unless somebody removes it. Browse Pets at Home's live ads.

What the discount numbers look like across the whole library

If you're deciding how deep to go, here's what UK brands actually advertise, from the 6,403 ads in our library with a measurable discount percentage recorded:

The mean recorded discount is 32.5%, the median 25%. The 70% numbers in the ASOS and Castore examples are both "up to" claims — which is the point. Round, modest numbers are what brands commit to in writing; big numbers almost always arrive wrapped in a qualifier. If your category's norm is 20-25%, a clearly-stated 30% is a stronger position than an "up to 60%" readers have learned to discount. Our guide on monitoring competitor prices and discounts goes deeper on the website side, and how to track competitor promotions sets out the weekly sweep and the six fields worth recording for every offer you find.

Building this year's campaign — and diarising the switch-off

Black Friday 2026 is Friday 27 November. The examples above suggest a short, unglamorous checklist.

Before launch

1. Start earlier than the event. Three of our four examples launched in late October or the first week of November. Creative tested early is creative that can take real budget during sale week.
2. Put the specific intent first, the season second. The ASOS headline structure — product, then "Black Friday @ Brand" — lets one ad serve long-tail search and still carry the event.
3. Use promotion extensions, with honest dates. They add visible offer detail without burning headline characters. Set the valid-to date to the real end of your offer.
4. Decide whether "up to" is worth it. It's legal and common, and increasingly transparent to readers — a stated floor ("30% off everything") converts differently from a ceiling. If you use urgency language, keep it true; see fake urgency in ads.
5. Tag your seasonal creative so you can find it again — ad-group naming conventions, or a spreadsheet of creative IDs. This is what makes the next section possible.

The switch-off — the bit everybody skips

Every example here was reported running months after its Black Friday had passed. Four brands, four sectors, same failure. It's an ownership gap: the seasonal campaign gets a launch date and a launch owner, and no end date and no end owner. Promotion extensions make it worse by looking like they handle expiry when they don't.

There's a judgement call here. An ad that runs for 635 days is, on the face of it, an ad that works. The honest read on all four examples is that seasonal creative gets parked in always-on campaigns because it earns its place, and nobody owns the switch-off date. If a Black Friday ad is still your best-converting creative in March, the answer isn't necessarily to pause it — it's to rewrite the seasonal label out and keep the offer. Our guide on how long you should run an ad covers the trade-off.

How to look up any brand's Black Friday ads yourself

Everything in this guide came from public, free sources. You can do the same research on any competitor in an afternoon.

• Google Ads Transparency Center — the only library giving multi-year first-shown and last-shown dates, which made the dated examples above possible. Search the advertiser, filter to the United Kingdom, read the date range on each creative. Two limits: the interface stops paginating at roughly 900 creatives, so you never see a large advertiser's full account; and many creatives share an identical early first-shown date that is an archive floor in Google's data, not a real launch date — treat very old, suspiciously common dates with scepticism. Our Transparency Center guide and missing ads in the Transparency Center cover both.
• Meta Ad Library — where Black Friday creative tends to be tested earliest and cheapest. Filter to the UK, sort by newest; clusters of creatives sharing a start date signal a fresh launch. Meta reports a start date but is far less useful than Google for historic ads. See our Meta Ad Library guide.
• Record four fields per ad: headline, stated discount (and whether it's "up to"), first-shown date, and any promotion-extension dates. That's enough to reconstruct a competitor's seasonal calendar and spot which offers are real events versus permanent sale furniture.

One caveat, plainly: a long run tells you an ad was served, not that it was profitable. We hold no spend data and neither do the public libraries, so nobody can tell you what these campaigns cost. Longevity is a decent proxy for performance in a well-managed account and a poor one in a neglected one — and as above, you often can't tell which you're looking at.

Where AdRival fits

The manual method works. It's just slow, and it doesn't scale past a couple of competitors. We run the sweep continuously across 158 UK brands and 11 channels, AI-qualifying every creative against 25 fields — offer type, stated discount, promo code, offer deadline, hook, urgency, audience — which is how we can answer "which brands are running offers, and roughly how deep" rather than just showing pictures of ads.

If you want this done for a specific competitor, a Brand Report is £99 one-off and a Tracker starts at £99/month for weekly coverage with promo and new-launch alerts. Either way, start free — browse the live brand libraries and see what we hold on your category first. And if you take one thing from this guide, take the calendar entry: 30 November, pause the Black Friday creative.