How to Get Ahead of the News Cycle and win Christmas

Charlotte Crowther

PR Operations Lead

23rd October 2026

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From overlooked opportunities to clever creative campaigns, here’s what it takes to earn coverage during the busiest time of year.

In the fast-paced news agenda, it’s very difficult to know what news story is going to break from one day to the next.

That being said, there are some key events that we can count on each year. For example, heading into the Summer we can plan ahead and create campaigns around heatwaves and peak holiday season. As we approach the cooler months, all focus will be on the festive period, and the key dates that come with this including Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas Day itself and then as we look further ahead, the New Year and Blue Monday.

Whilst these are big events that you can’t avoid noticing, there are also smaller days that can be just as fruitful when you pair the right brand with the right messaging, such as commentary around Small Business Saturday for small business credit card company Capital on Tap.

However, it’s important to make sure you’re putting your efforts into events that will garner the most reward – National Caps Lock Day (22nd October) and Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day (last monday of January) aren’t likely to be top of a journalists agenda.

A couple of years ago Bottled Imagination ran a study showing the most marketable and press-worthy days by looking into the number of articles and searches associated with each day. Black Friday, Christmas Day, Christmas Eve and Boxing Day take up four of the top ten places, showing there is great appetite for content from both journalists and consumers at this time of year.

However, with great appetite for content also comes great competition.

These are my top tips in order to help understand where we can succeed and how to win the festive period.

Get campaigns live as soon as possible

We’re aiming for all Christmas content to be live by end of October. This means we have a long enough outreach window to test all the different angles within the campaign and also means we can set our stake in the ground early (and try to ward off similar competitor content!).

It also has the added benefit that it allows LLMs and Google to scrape and hopefully cite and rank the content ahead of the peak search period.

A lot of PR is about timing – contacting the right journalist with the right campaign at the right time (ahead of the competition) can determine whether you will garner coverage or not.

Use newsdesks to your advantage

Crimbo Limbo – the time where many of us aren’t sure what the day of the week is and the biggest decision to make is which chocolate to have from the selection box. However, newspapers still need to be filled and readers still want fresh content to rad, meaning journalists will still be manning the fort.

I always suggest to send or schedule any relevant content to the newsdesks between Christmas and New Year. There’s no way of knowing exactly which journalist will be working then, but there will always be someone working the newsdesk. In the period where they’re looking for filler content consider any lighter-hearted stories you have that are topical but not timely (aren’t tied to a specific day) that could help a journalist over this period.

Do your research

For exactly the same reason we want to launch our campaigns early, we also need to make sure we’re doing our competitor research. It may be that a direct competitor has a seasonal campaign they produce every year, such as NetVoucherCodes’ Cost of Christmas Dinner which has ran for the past two year. You may need to consider how you can pivot away from that topic to avoid cannibalisation and direct competition for journalist coverage.

There’s enough space for each brand, we just need to make sure we’re creating content that’s relevant, interesting, useful and unique.

Hopefully, you’re now in the festive frame of mind and want to jump right into an ideation!

Here are some of my favourite Christmas campaigns from the team here at Kaizen and beyond, and why I think they work so well!

Snowflake Brainteaser

Betway Casino

The Sun

This is the perfect example of content journalists want to see between Christmas and New Year where we’re all trying to avoid the heavy news agenda if possible. This brianteaser asked readers to see if they can find the matching snowflakes, a fun way to engage the brain. Brainteasers offer an added bonus to journalists in that they encourage readers to stay on the page for longer, helping boost their page statistics.

Scratch and Sniff Billboard

Subway

Mirror

For many people Christmas is all about the food! Last year Subway wanted to launch their stuffing-topped bread. They ran a survey asking consumers what were their favourite festive smells and Stuffing came top (I’m more of an roaring open fire person – but do agree it’s a crime not to have stuffing on your Christmas dinner!).

They then took this out of home, giving people the chance to scratch their billboard in Blackfriars (minus points for it being so London-centric) allowing people the opportunity to sniff the nations favourite christmas scent.

It’s a really nice example of how you can take simple survey insights and amplify them with out of home activity, something that’s becoming more and more important as the search-verse expands (I wrote about this earlier this year…)

Christmas Tree Decoration Calculator

Christmas Tree World

The perfect client to be creating Christmas content for – and I love that this is creating genuinely useful content. I’m sure we’re all guilty of having more than enough baubles, or one “perfect” tree and another hidden away filled with homemade decorations. This tool helps you understand the exact number of decorations you need based on the size and shape of your tree, as well as how full you want it looking.

Ready to get ahead of the next big news moment?

At Kaizen, we help brands make the most of the stories shaping the news agenda.

Get in touch with our team to see how we can make your next campaign stand out.