Black Friday Ad Examples: What 20 DTC Brands Actually Spent
See 20 real Black Friday ads with the numbers attached: what each brand spent, how many people it reached, how long it ran and the day it switched on.
Every Black Friday round-up shows you the creative and calls it high-converting. None of them shows a single number, because the writer never had one.
These 20 do. Each ad below ran during Black Friday 2025 and names the event in its own copy, and each one carries what the brand actually spent, how many people it reached, the day it switched on and the day it stopped. The figures come from Meta's EU Ad Repository, where advertisers running in the EU and UK have to disclose spend and reach. Together the 20 account for €457,653 of disclosed spend and 45.5 million people reached.
One number reframes the whole event before you scroll. Daily spend across these 20 ads runs from €122 a day to €18,508 a day, a spread of 151x. Black Friday is not one playbook. It is at least two, and the brands running them are the same size.
The 20 Black Friday ads
Ranked by the number of people the ad reached in the EU and UK. Spend and reach are the advertiser's own disclosures, not estimates. Format and the day each ad switched on are in the entries below.
| # | Brand | Sells | EU reach | EU spend | Days run |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | AYBL | Gymwear | 6.8M | €66,230 | 22 |
| 2 | The Oodie | Wearable blankets | 3.7M | €42,072 | 5 |
| 3 | KILLSTAR | Alt fashion | 3.5M | €31,196 | 55 |
| 4 | Zelesta | Bedding | 2.9M | €29,006 | 50 |
| 5 | HexClad | Hybrid cookware | 2.8M | €31,652 | 20 |
| 6 | ARNE | Menswear | 2.5M | €28,830 | 8 |
| 7 | SKIMS | Shapewear | 2.4M | €23,481 | 8 |
| 8 | Loop | Earplugs | 2.1M | €18,508 | 1 |
| 9 | apol | Waterproof caps | 1.9M | €19,225 | 157 |
| 10 | Lounge | Underwear | 1.9M | €19,036 | 16 |
| 11 | YoungLA | Gymwear | 1.9M | €15,232 | 15 |
| 12 | Represent | Streetwear | 1.7M | €19,643 | 9 |
| 13 | More Nutrition | Supplements | 1.7M | €16,945 | 15 |
| 14 | Ridge | Wallets | 1.6M | €18,029 | 40 |
| 15 | Govee | Smart lighting | 1.5M | €14,848 | 1 |
| 16 | Atolea | Waterproof jewellery | 1.5M | €15,713 | 85 |
| 17 | Beauty of Joseon | Korean skincare | 1.4M | €16,383 | 10 |
| 18 | RingConn | Smart rings | 1.3M | €10,417 | 21 |
| 19 | PURELEI | Waterproof jewellery | 1.3M | €12,803 | 12 |
| 20 | Skullcandy | Headphones | 1.2M | €8,405 | 21 |
How to read the numbers
Spend and reach are EU and UK only. European rules make advertisers disclose both for ads shown there. Nothing equivalent exists in the United States, so a US brand's real global Black Friday budget is larger, sometimes far larger. The European slice is the part that is checkable.
Every one of these 20 was already running before Black Friday itself. Black Friday 2025 fell on 28 November. Not one of the ads below switched on that morning. Eight were live by 15 November, and More Nutrition's was running from 2 November, twenty-six days out.
"Days run" is the ad's whole life. Several kept running deep into the new year, which is a decision, not an oversight. One ran until the following April.
The rank badge in each screenshot is per advertiser, not per platform. "Top 2% of 272 active ads" means the ad beat 266 of its own siblings in that brand's account.
1. AYBL
The biggest Black Friday reach on this list: €66,230 over 22 days, 6.8 million people. The creative is not a sale graphic. It is a product shot headlined with the exact item and colourway, "Balance V2 Seamless Leggings - Speckle Black", and the offer lives in the body: "AYBL Black Friday! Shop up to 60% off for a limited time only".
That order matters. The product is the hook and the discount is the reason to act now, rather than the other way round. AYBL switched it on 11 November, seventeen days before the day itself, and kept it running until 3 December.
2. The Oodie
Five days, €42,072, €8,414 a day. The Oodie compressed almost as much money as AYBL spent in 22 days into a single work week, and reached 3.7 million people doing it.
The headline names the offer and the product in one line, "Black Friday's Biggest Deal: Oodie™ Originals Half Price", and the body opens by pointing at the algorithm rather than the product: "You've seen it all over your feed… now's your moment." For a brand with 4 million customers and 604 live ads, familiarity is the asset, and the ad spends its first sentence cashing it.
3. KILLSTAR
The best pun in the dataset, and it is not a pun. KILLSTAR's Black Friday creative is a collaboration announcement with a creator whose name is literally It's Black Friday: "It's Black Friday X Killstar", introducing "a muse of midnight elegance and modern rebellion".
The brand gets a Black Friday ad and a product drop out of one creative, and it ran 55 days, from 13 November to 7 January, at €567 a day. A sale ends. A collaboration does not, which is why this one could keep running through Christmas and into the new year without going stale.
4. Zelesta
50 days, €29,006. The only ad in the top ten that never mentions a discount in its opening line. It opens with a scene instead: imagine coming into the bedroom at night and never having to put a duvet cover on again.
Zelesta sells a two-in-one washable duvet, and the ad sells the chore it removes. It also carries |anzeige|, the German disclosure label, at the very front of the copy. A story-led ad ran into mid-January while the discount-led ads around it stopped in early December.
5. HexClad
The most arithmetic in any ad here. HexClad's body copy is a price ladder written out in full: "From £1,148 To £749 Now £599, Save £589* on HexClad's best-selling 13-piece set and get it for the lowest price of the year."
Three prices and a saving, on a $412 average order value. At that ticket the buyer is doing the maths anyway, so the ad does it for them and removes the only real objection with the last clause, "the lowest price of the year". 20 days, €31,652.
6. ARNE
The whole ad is three words: "Black Friday. Coming soon." The headline is "ARNE BLACK FRIDAY". There is no offer, no product, no discount and no date.
ARNE spent €28,830 across 8 days at €3,604 a day to tell people something was going to happen, and stopped it on 28 November, the day itself. This is the clearest example in the dataset of a brand buying anticipation as a separate line item from the sale, and it is the pattern most of the round-ups miss entirely, because a teaser looks like nothing when you only look at the creative.
7. SKIMS
SKIMS ran the same product image it uses year-round, the Fits Everybody Triangle Bralette on a plain ground, and changed only the body copy: "30% OFF SITEWIDE: Our Black Friday Sale is finally here."
It started on 26 November and ran 8 days for €23,481. A $28.7M-a-month brand with 1,411 live ads did not build a bespoke Black Friday creative for its best-reaching ad of the weekend. It took the ad that already worked and taped the offer to it.
8. Loop
One day. €18,508. The highest daily rate in this list by a distance, on 27 November, the day before Black Friday, reaching 2.1 million people in 24 hours.
Loop runs 7,882 live ads, the largest account here by a factor of four, so a single-day burn of this size is a deliberate spike rather than a brand emptying its budget. The copy is a problem and a product in two lines: "Love the vibes, hate the noise?" then three ticks, filters out noise, all-day comfort.
9. apol
The strangest row in the table. apol's "BLACK WEEK SALE LIVE" ad switched on 24 November 2025 and did not stop until 30 April 2026. That is 157 days, five months, at €122 a day, the lowest daily rate here.
The headline is not the sale at all, it is a rating: "★★★★★ (4.8/5.0)". The Black Friday line sits in the body, which is presumably how it survived so long past the event. An Austrian cap brand with 112 live ads found one creative that worked and simply never turned it off, siren emoji and all.
10. Lounge
"Bis zu 70 % Rabatt", up to 70% off, is the entire headline, and the body is one sentence: "Curated for your collection. Discover the Black Friday shopping event."
The deepest discount on this list, from an $11M-a-month underwear brand, and the copy is calmer than almost anything around it. No emoji, no countdown, no capitals. 16 days, €19,036.
11. YoungLA
The only ad here that gives a specific launch time. YoungLA's copy reads like a comment, "This stuff really is comfy AF tho 😂", then announces the drop: "Comfy Collection goes live with our 30% OFF Black Friday drop, TUESDAY November 25th."
Naming a weekday and a date converts a sale into an appointment, and the ad ran 15 days at €1,015 a day in the run-up to it. The brand does $18M a month with only 511 live ads.
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Nine days, €19,643, €2,183 a day, and the shortest copy in the list: "Represent Black Friday sale is live. Shop up to 60% off* online now." The headline is the button text, "Shop Now".
At a $129 average order value on British streetwear, the ad assumes you already know the brand. It ends on 28 November, so unlike most of this list Represent treated Black Friday as the finish line rather than the starting gun.
13. More Nutrition
Live from 2 November, twenty-six days before Black Friday, and stopped on the 17th, eleven days before it. More Nutrition ran its whole Black Week campaign and finished before the weekend even started.
The German market calls the event Black Week, and the copy uses it as a proper noun: "Bist du bereit für die More Nutrition Black Week?" with up to 50% off. €16,945 across 15 days.
14. Ridge
Ridge is the only brand here that names an odd discount: "Save up to 32% OFF". Not 30, not a third. The body then pivots straight to gifting: "Two bands, one perfect gift. A lifelong promise that lasts."
It ran 7 November to 17 December, 40 days at €451 a day, which spans Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the run into Christmas as one continuous buy. At a $163 average order value that is the right shape: the discount opens the door and the gifting angle carries it for another three weeks.
15. Govee
A single day, €14,848, and the headline is a date: "Black Friday ab 20.11." Black Friday from the 20th of November. The ad ran on 14 and 15 November, six days before the sale it was announcing.
Two of the 24 ads here ran for exactly one day: Loop's at €18,508 and this one at €14,848. Neither was selling on the day it ran. They were both booking attention for a date in the future.
16. Atolea
"BLACK FRIDAY IS LIVE" as the headline, and the offer is a multibuy rather than a straight cut: "Get 4 for the price of 2 and up to 70% OFF."
It started on 27 November and ran to 20 February, 85 days, at €185 a day. For waterproof jewellery at $70 a piece, four-for-two raises the basket instead of shrinking the margin on a single item, and a multibuy does not expire the way a headline percentage does.
17. Beauty of Joseon
The only ad in the 24 whose headline is not the discount: "Don't Miss Free Shipping". The Black Friday deals are mentioned second, after the shipping, alongside "mystery gifts".
At a $38 average order value, shipping is a larger share of the decision than another five percent off the product, and the K-beauty brand puts it first accordingly. Ten days, €16,383, finishing on Black Friday itself.
18. RingConn
The oddest creative here, and the second teaser. RingConn's copy reads: "Only Group 7 knows. Only Group 7 sees. The code has been unlocked. Black Friday is coming… and your access starts now. If you're not Group 7… you didn't see this."
There is no Group 7. It is an invented in-group, and the ad's entire mechanism is making the reader want to be inside it. The cheapest reach in the list at €7.84 per thousand, over 21 days from 14 November, for a $213 smart ring.
19. PURELEI
"Black Week: Bis zu 50 %" in the headline, and the body adds the only genuine scarcity claim in the list: "aber nur solange der Vorrat reicht", only while stocks last.
For a German jewellery brand at $38 a piece, stock-limited is more believable than time-limited, because the reader can picture the warehouse. Twelve days, €12,803, ending 2 December.
20. Skullcandy
The lowest spend here, €8,405, and the cheapest reach of all 24 at €7.05 per thousand. The headline is "BLACK FRIDAY IS HERE" and the body is a positioning statement that happens to contain a discount: "Premium Sound. Smart Price. Skullcandy is built for those who know great sound doesn't need a luxury price tag. Save up to 50%. Don't overpay for performance."
It is the only ad in the 20 that argues about price positioning rather than announcing a price cut, and it reached 1.2 million people for less money than anything else here.
What the 20 have in common
Nobody waited for the day. All 20 ads were live before 28 November. Eight were running by the 15th, and More Nutrition started on 2 November and finished its whole campaign eleven days before Black Friday. If your Black Friday creative goes live on Black Friday, you are buying attention in the most expensive hour of the most expensive week of the year against brands that booked it a fortnight ago.
There are two strategies, not one, and the gap between them is 151x. Three ads ran five days or less, averaging €13,923 a day. Five ran 30 days or more, one of them for 157, at rates as low as €122 a day. Both groups contain brands doing over $10M a month. The blitz and the long tail are choices, not budget tiers.
The discount is usually not the headline. Thirteen of the 20 name a figure somewhere, from 30% to 70%, but only three put it in the headline. The rest lead with the product, a rating, free shipping, a collaboration, a date, or in two cases with nothing at all except the promise that something is coming.
Two of the 20 sold nothing. ARNE and RingConn both spent real money, €28,830 and €10,417, on ads with no offer and no product. One said "Coming soon" and the other invented a secret club. Teasers do not appear in swipe files because they look empty, and they are the least copied idea in this dataset.
The price of reach barely moves. Cost per thousand people reached runs €7.05 to €11.50 across all 20, a spread of 1.6x, across nine home markets and product prices from $38 to $412. Whatever separates these campaigns, it is not media efficiency.
How this list was built
Every figure is the advertiser's own disclosure, and it is worth being exact about what that is and is not.
Meta publishes spend and reach for ads shown in the EU and UK. Brandsearch indexes that repository alongside store-level data. The pull ran on 12 September 2026 and filtered for:
- Shopify stores classified as DTC brands, at $2M or more in estimated monthly revenue
- ads that started between 25 October and 5 December 2025
- ads whose own copy names the event: Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Black Week or BFCM
- a disclosed EU spend figure present, which excludes every US-only campaign
That second filter is the one that matters. Date alone is useless: most ads that start in November are product launches and evergreen creative that merely overlap the weekend. Filtering on the copy produced 1,195 ads across 164 brands that are genuinely about the event. The 20 here are the highest-reaching, one per brand, after dropping marketplaces, supermarkets and electronics chains, and after collapsing regional records of the same brand into one row. Four more were dropped at the last step for a duller reason: their Rank tab in the app is empty, so the ad could not be opened to check the figures against the screenshot, and an unverified number does not get published.
What the numbers are not: global spend, revenue, or return on ad spend. Nobody outside these companies knows what any of this sold. Spend, reach and longevity are evidence of what a brand chose to fund and for how long, which is the strongest public signal there is, and it is not the same as a conversion rate.
Estimated monthly revenue and average price are Brandsearch estimates, stated in US dollars for every brand regardless of the store's own currency.
Every screenshot is the live Brandsearch product, captured on 12 September 2026, showing each ad exactly as it appears in the app.
Pull the 2026 version yourself
This list is one call, and the same call run in December 2026 gives you next season's version of it:
curl -G https://api.brandsearch.co/v1/meta-ads/search \
-H "X-API-Key: $BRANDSEARCH_API_KEY" \
-d q="black friday" \
-d platform=shopify \
-d brand_type="dtc brand" \
-d ad_started_from=2025-10-25 \
-d ad_started_to=2025-12-05 \
-d sort_by=eu_total_reach \
-d sort_order=desc
Every row returns with eu_total_spend, eu_total_reach, start_date, end_date and the creative's own copy. Swap the q for your own category, or the dates for this year's window. The same data runs over MCP, so Claude, Cursor or ChatGPT can query it directly. Get an API key.
Frequently asked questions
How do you advertise Black Friday deals?
On the evidence of these 20 campaigns, you start early and you do not lead with the percentage. All 20 were running before Black Friday itself and eight were live two weeks out. Only three of the 20 put a discount in the headline; the rest led with the product, the shipping, a collaboration, a rating or a date.
What are some catchy phrases for Black Friday?
Taken verbatim from the ads above: "Black Friday. Coming soon." (ARNE), "Black Friday's Biggest Deal" (The Oodie), "Our biggest sale of the year" (AYBL), "Premium Sound. Smart Price." (Skullcandy), "Don't Miss Free Shipping" (Beauty of Joseon), and "Black Friday is coming… and your access starts now" (RingConn). The shortest of them is three words and it cost €28,830 to run.
Can you give me an example of a promotional ad?
HexClad's is the most complete one here. The headline announces the sale, and the body writes the entire price ladder out: from £1,148, to £749, now £599, a saving of £589 on the 13-piece set, described as the lowest price of the year. It ran 20 days for €31,652.
When should Black Friday ads start?
Earlier than most people run them. The median ad in this list switched on 18 November, ten days before Black Friday. More Nutrition was the earliest, running its entire campaign from 2 to 17 November and stopping eleven days before the weekend began.
How much do brands spend on Black Friday ads?
For a single successful creative, between €8,405 and €66,230 of disclosed European spend across its life. Daily rates vary far more than totals: from €122 a day on an ad that ran for five months to €18,508 in one day.
Where can I see real Black Friday ads with their spend?
Meta's Ad Library shows the creatives and the EU disclosure fields, but it does not rank them, does not group them by brand performance, and does not tell you which ad in an account carried the budget. That is what every screenshot in this article shows.
