The Holiday Stress Test: Why Customer Intelligence Matters More Than Ever

The holiday season has always been retail’s pressure test. Black Friday and Cyber Monday aren’t just high-volume days. They expose the strengths and weaknesses of every system a retailer relies on. When traffic spikes and customer behavior shifts hour by hour, you see very quickly whether your data foundation is built to keep up or if it starts to crack under load.

One area feeling the most strain is retail media networks (RMNs). RMNs have grown into a major revenue engine for retailers, but the underlying data needed to power them hasn’t kept pace. As budgets rise, the bar for performance and transparency rises with them.

RMNs Are Expanding, But Their Data Foundations Aren’t

This holiday season brings more volatility than usual. Shoppers are watching their budgets closely, retailers are investing heavily in artificial intelligence, and every decision needs to be backed by data that's both complete and trustworthy.

The challenge is that many retailers are still operating on fragmented or incomplete customer data. More than half say their customer records are scattered across systems, which makes consistent identity resolution difficult. AI can’t fix this. It can only work with the inputs it’s given, and when the identity layer is unstable, the outputs are too.

RMNs depend on a clean, unified identity to build audiences, personalize in real time, and measure conversions. Without it, retailers end up with mismatched audiences, inconsistent targeting, and campaign results that take days to piece together — if they can be stitched together at all.

Third-Party Identity is Ending, and the Timing Couldn’t Be Worse

Historically, RMNs leaned on third-party systems to match audiences between retailers and advertisers. That world is fading fast. Cookies are disappearing, regulations are tightening, and delays introduced by external match partners now create real risk.

A 48-hour attribution delay during peak holiday traffic isn’t a minor inconvenience. It can mean losing the window where shoppers are most likely to buy. It also creates blind spots that make it nearly impossible to optimize campaigns in-flight.

The only sustainable path forward is a first-party data foundation that gives retailers a reliable representation of each customer across channels, from in-store purchases to loyalty interactions to online behaviors.

Turning Holiday Signals Into Year-Round Advantage

Black Friday and Cyber Monday generate more signal density than any other period on the retail calendar. For RMNs, this isn’t just a sales moment. It's the clearest look at customer behavior you’ll get all year.

The most advanced retailers treat these days as customer data events. They want to know:

• Which audiences converted and why?
• Which products and promotions drove repeat behavior?
• Which customers came back after the holiday vs. those who didn’t?

When identity is accurate, AI can distinguish between shoppers who will become long-term customers and those who are purely seasonal. That allows retailers to tailor future outreach, reinforcing loyalty for high-value segments while treating occasional holiday buyers differently.

The New Reality of Retail Media

RMNs are still growing, but scale is no longer the differentiator. Performance is. And performance depends on the customer data foundation beneath every audience, insight and measurement workflow.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday aren’t just revenue tests. They’re infrastructure tests. They show whether your customer data, identity and AI systems can operate at the speed modern retail requires.

In the end, the real holiday stress test isn’t sales volume. It’s customer intelligence. Identity is the mechanism that turns peak-season traffic into year-round revenue, and RMNs can only perform at the level of the data they run on.

Derek Slager co-founded Amperity to create a tool that would give marketers and analysts access to accurate, consistent and comprehensive customer data. As CTO, he leads the company’s product, engineering, operations and information security teams.