When do Black Friday ads start in the UK?

Last season, the UK brands we track launched their first Black Friday ad a median 35 days before the day itself — so late October, not November. Fifteen of 24 brands were live in October or earlier. The earliest four were running Black Friday creative in the first week of September, 84 days out. Black Friday 2026 is Friday 27 November, which puts the median launch date at roughly 23 October. Here is the dated evidence, the caveats that matter, and what it means for your calendar.

The short answer, with the dates attached

We hold dated Black Friday creative for 24 named UK brands across the 2025 season (Black Friday fell on 28 November 2025). For each brand we took its earliest ad our AI qualifier labelled with a Black Friday seasonal theme, and measured it against the day:

Brand	First Black Friday ad	Days before Black Friday
Sky	5 Sep 2025	84
Cinch	5 Sep 2025	84
easyJet	5 Sep 2025	84
carwow	6 Sep 2025	83
ASOS	9 Sep 2025	80
giffgaff	10 Sep 2025	79
Verisure	16 Sep 2025	73
Pets at Home	9 Oct 2025	50
B&Q	13 Oct 2025	46
Castore	14 Oct 2025	45
Magnet	17 Oct 2025	42
Victorian Plumbing	21 Oct 2025	38
Zooplus	27 Oct 2025	32
Simba	28 Oct 2025	31
Cult Beauty	30 Oct 2025	29
Lounge	3 Nov 2025	25
loveholidays	3 Nov 2025	25
VioVet	5 Nov 2025	23
BOXT	11 Nov 2025	17
Jet2	12 Nov 2025	16
Three	14 Nov 2025	14
Screwfix	18 Nov 2025	10
iHeat	20 Nov 2025	8
LookFantastic	25 Nov 2025	3

The spread is the story: 81 days separate the earliest brand from the latest. There is no industry consensus on when Black Friday starts — there is a long, thin September tail, a thick October cluster, and a scramble of brands arriving inside the final fortnight.

October is when the market actually turns up

Brand-level first dates tell you who was early. Ad-level launch volume tells you when the weight of creative hit. Counting how many Black Friday ads first appeared in each week of the 2025 season:

Week commencing	Black Friday ads launched
1 Sep 2025	5
8 Sep 2025	18
15 Sep 2025	1
22 Sep 2025	3
29 Sep 2025	1
6 Oct 2025	3
13 Oct 2025	6
20 Oct 2025	2
27 Oct 2025	56
3 Nov 2025	11
10 Nov 2025	7
17 Nov 2025	15
24 Nov 2025	4
1 Dec 2025	1

The week commencing 27 October carried 56 ad launches — more than every September week combined, and more than the three weeks immediately before Black Friday put together. That single week is the real start of the UK Black Friday advertising season. The 2026 equivalent is the week commencing 26 October 2026.

Google agrees, as it happens. Google's own promotion assets carry an optional "occasion" label, and the Black Friday occasion window runs from 15 October to 15 December — you cannot schedule a Black Friday occasion asset outside those dates without deselecting the occasion entirely (About promotion assets, Google Ads Help). The platform's default assumption and our observed median launch date land within about a week of each other.

The caveat that matters: early dates, uncertain intent

We would be selling you a cleaner story than we have if we left the September dates unqualified. Six of those 24 launch dates coincide with the brand first-showing a large batch of unrelated creative on the very same day. That is the signature of an account-wide rebuild — a feed migration, a campaign restructure, a tracking-template change that re-dates everything — not necessarily a deliberate Black Friday launch:

ASOS first-showed 863 of its 3,073 Google ads on 9 Sep 2025.
Cult Beauty first-showed 428 of its 1,729 ads on 30 Oct 2025.
easyJet first-showed 132 ads on 5 Sep 2025.
Simba first-showed 80 ads on 28 Oct 2025.
iHeat first-showed 50 ads on 20 Nov 2025.
giffgaff first-showed 42 ads on 10 Sep 2025.

The date is real — Google published it, and the ad genuinely carries Black Friday messaging. What is less certain is whether the brand chose that day to open its Black Friday campaign, or whether the Black Friday ad was swept along in a bulk rebuild that happened to land then. For planning purposes, treat these six as weak evidence.

The strongest evidence for a genuine early-September start comes from the brands that launched a handful of Black Friday ads on an otherwise ordinary day, with no batch around them:

Sky — 8 Black Friday ads on 5 Sep 2025.
Cinch — 7 ads on 5 Sep 2025.
carwow — 3 ads on 6 Sep 2025.
Verisure — 1 ad on 16 Sep 2025.

Those four are deliberate. A small, targeted batch of seasonal creative appearing in isolation is a campaign being switched on, not an account being rebuilt. Two telecoms/subscription businesses and two considered-purchase categories — cars and home security — all testing Black Friday messaging 11 to 12 weeks out. Long sales cycles reward early seeding; if your buyer takes six weeks to decide, a Black Friday ad in late November is too late to influence anything.

A note on what "first shown" means. These dates come from the date Google publishes for when a creative was first served, which we read from the Ads Transparency Center — see our guide to the Google Ads Transparency Center for how that works and where it falls short. It is the most reliable public launch signal available, but it dates the creative, not the campaign. A brand can build a campaign in August and only serve the first impression in October; equally, an edited creative can acquire a new first-shown date. We also have no spend data of any kind, so none of this tells you how hard a brand pushed — only when it started.

Black Friday ads look different, and the data says how

Across our library, Black Friday creative is measurably more aggressive than everything else a brand runs. We score every qualified ad for urgency on a 0–100 scale. Black Friday ads average 72/100. Non-seasonal ads average 23.6. That is not a nudge — it is a different register of copy, built on deadlines, countdowns and scarcity.

Discounts move too, though less than you might expect. Of the Black Friday ads with a measurable percentage recorded, the median is 30%, against 25% across the library as a whole (144 Black Friday ads carry a measurable percentage; roughly one in six percentages in our data is our model's read of the brand's prevailing offer rather than a figure printed on the creative, so treat depth as directional). A five-point lift. Black Friday's reputation rests heavily on urgency rather than genuinely deeper cuts — worth remembering before you promise your finance director that 50% off is the entry ticket.

Two practical warnings follow from that urgency number. First, if you are planning to out-urgency the market, you are competing in the most crowded register of the year; our guide to fake urgency in ads covers what happens when the countdown never actually expires. Second, the switch-off discipline is where brands come unstuck — seasonal ads outliving the offer printed inside them is a recurring pattern in the creative we have read, and we show examples with their dates in Black Friday ad examples.

What this means for your 2026 calendar

Black Friday 2026 is Friday 27 November. Translating last season's findings into this season's dates:

Benchmark	Days out	2026 date
Earliest deliberate launches (Sky, Cinch, carwow)	83–84	4–5 Sep 2026
First wave complete (7 brands live)	73	15 Sep 2026
Median brand launches	35	23 Oct 2026
Biggest launch week of the season	28–34	w/c 26 Oct 2026
Three-quarters of brands live	23	4 Nov 2026
Latest arrivals	3–10	17–24 Nov 2026

Today is 3 November 2026 — 24 days out. If you have not launched, you are 11 days later than the median brand was last season, and behind 17 of the 24 brands in our sample, which had all launched by this point last season. That is not a catastrophe: four of the 24 launched inside the final fortnight, including Screwfix at 10 days and LookFantastic at three. But it does mean two things. You have lost the cheap early-funnel window that Sky and Cinch were buying in September, and you are launching into the auction at its most expensive and most urgent.

If you are planning for next season

Put your creative deadline at mid-October, not mid-November. Assets signed off by 15 October gives you the option of launching with the pack in the w/c 26 October wave rather than chasing it.
Consider a September teaser if your sales cycle is long. The four clean early launches were all considered purchases. If your buyer needs weeks, seeding in September is defensible rather than eccentric.
Decide your switch-off date when you decide your launch date. Put the end date in the campaign, not in someone's head.
Separate urgency from discount. A median 30% with genuine deadline mechanics beat the market last year more often than a deeper discount with vague "up to" framing.

If you want to watch rivals rather than guess

Everything above is public. Google's Ads Transparency Center and Meta's Ad Library both publish first-shown dates, and you can check a named competitor by hand in a few minutes — our guide to tracking competitor Black Friday ads walks through the manual method, and tracking competitor promotions covers the year-round version. The manual approach breaks down on two things: volume, and the moment you want to compare brands rather than inspect one.

That is the gap AdRival fills. We hold 50,831 AI-qualified ads from 158 qualified brands (223 UK brands covered in total), each creative labelled for offer, discount, hook, audience, urgency and 14 other fields — which is what makes a question like "when did 24 brands start their Black Friday campaigns, and how hard did they push?" answerable at all. Of those ads, 17,014 carry an offer and 6,424 have a discount recorded that you can actually measure. Browse any brand page — Sky, ASOS, Screwfix — to see the qualified fields on real creative, or the full brand index for who we cover.

The honest summary. The median UK brand we track launched Black Friday ads 35 days early — about 23 October for 2026. The biggest launch week was the last week of October. A deliberate minority start in early September, and they skew towards long sales cycles. Only one brand in our sample left it to the week of the sale itself — LookFantastic, three days out — and a brand arriving that late is arriving into the most expensive, most urgent auction of the year.