Black Friday ecommerce sales have increased 30.7% in 2025 versus 2020, as consumers have largely shifted spending online since the pandemic. By 6:30 p.m. EST on Black Friday, U.S. consumers spent a combined $8.6 billion online. Shoppers using generative AI platforms were 38% more likely to complete sales than those who didn’t use those platforms. Buy now, pay later (BNPL) usage drove $747.5 million in ecommerce spending, or about 6.3% of all digital sales on Black Friday.

The 1+3 Rule: Why Commenting Always Beats Posting There is a fundamental misunderstanding in our industry about how visibility works. Most sales reps think they need to post content constantly to be seen. While posting is important, it is actually the least efficient way to grow a following from scratch. If you have 500 connections and you post a photo of a new brochure, maybe 50 people see it. If you comment on a post made by a marketing influencer with 50,000 followers, thousands of people could see your name and headline. The Math of Engagement: You need to adopt the 1+3 rule as your baseline minimum. For every single piece of content you post to your own feed, you must comment on at least three posts from others. This ensures that you are giving more to the platform than you are taking. However, if you really want to drive growth, you need to scale this up. The top performers I know in this space are not stopping at three. They are commenting 20 or 30 times a day.

The U.S. advertising marketplace contracted 12.7% in July versus the same month a year ago, marking its first double-digit rate of decline since July 2020, according to a MediaPost analysis of data from Standard Media Index's U.S. Ad Market Tracker. Compared with July 2020, which was the tail-end of the COVID-19 ad recession, the U.S. ad market was up 29.7%. Smaller ad categories continue to be sustaining ad spending better than the largest ones. While the top 10 ad categories declined 14% in year-over-year ad spending in July, all other categories contracted only 11%.