Field notes
Building a Tet flight calendar without overbuying January
1 June 2026 · Minh Tran
Tet planning still starts too late for many brands. By mid-December, auction prices for gift and travel keywords already reflect every national advertiser’s panic spend. A calmer paid media plan treats the festive period as three flights, not one blob of budget.
Split the season
Pre-gift research (early December): Lower daily caps, heavier upper-funnel messaging, and creative that teaches product differences.
Purchase window (two weeks before holiday leave): Peak budgets on proven offers only.
Post-holiday return (late January): Remarketing and service messaging for people who browsed but delayed buying.
Guardrails that actually work
Set a hard ceiling for any single day of spend equal to a small percentage of the monthly media plan. When auctions spike past that ceiling without a matching lift in store traffic, pause prospecting and keep only remarketing. This is planning discipline, not a software rule — someone on the team has to own the pause decision.
Local nuance for Dak Lak and similar markets
National creative often ignores highland shipping timelines. If you sell physical goods into Buon Ma Thuot and surrounding provinces, move the purchase window earlier than Ho Chi Minh City calendars suggest. Our paid media planning retainer builds those regional offsets into the flight memo so national agencies do not overwrite them.