The holiday shopping season (Q4) brings a massive surge of high-intent traffic to e-commerce platforms. While this spike offers incredible opportunity, many advertising systems are too slow and static to capitalize fully on the fast-changing shopper behavior. They don’t fully account for real-time shopper intent in retrieval and bidding, which means platforms and advertisers alike can miss opportunities when demand is at its peak. 

The result? Money left on the table and advertisers struggling to reach the most valuable, high-intent customers during peak moments.

At MCM, we knew there was a smarter way. We are thrilled to announce powerful enhancements to our outcome-based smart bidding technology, specifically designed to help platforms and their advertisers thrive during high-volume promotional periods.

The MCM Difference: Dynamic Bidding for Dynamic Shoppers

To help platforms unlock the full value of holiday traffic, MCM built new capabilities designed specifically for high-velocity promotion periods.

Most traditional retail media systems operate on static, one-size-fits-all bidding models. MCM's core strength is outcome-based smart bidding, where advertisers set a target Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) and our system dynamically adjusts bids in real time to meet their goals.

This capability is essential, but promotional periods require even greater agility. Traffic spikes are characterized by:

• A short duration (days to 1-2 weeks)
• Extreme bursts of traffic and advertising demand
• Significantly higher conversion rates

To truly leverage these moments, we’ve introduced key enhancements:

1. Promotions Context: Instead of reacting after the fact, MCM gives ad serving models advance context about upcoming promotions—so they can learn, adapt, and perform in real time. Platforms can now input their promotional events’ start and end dates and optional characteristics into our platform control system. This information gets propagated to all key ad serving components, including our outcome based smart bidding models.
2. Dynamic Bid Multipliers: We've expanded the range and responsiveness of our bidding, including ability to incorporate promotions context. This increased dynamism allows the system to reflect a user's higher conversion intent, giving advertisers the ability to win highly sought-after impressions while staying within their ROAS target.
3. Optimized Smart Bidding Feedback Loop: Promotion periods do not last forever but the impact in a poorly tuned model can. We've tuned our learning models to ensure that the unique, aggressive bidding behavior during a short promotion does not negatively impact the ongoing, post-promotion ROAS performance for the advertiser.
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The Impact: Measurable Growth When It Matters Most

Our new, dynamic, promotions-aware system has already delivered significant results for our platform partners. By intelligently capturing peak demand, advertisers can unlock up to 25% additional Ad Spend on top of natural increases from traffic and budget growth, all while maintaining ROAS — powered by highly dynamic, outcome-based bidding that prioritizes high-value impressions.

As holiday shopping continues to evolve, MCM helps commerce platforms move at the speed of their users - turning seasonal surges into sustained revenue growth. Don't let rigid ad systems limit your Q4 revenue potential. It's time to equip your advertisers with a tool that truly reflects the speed and intent of the holiday shopper.