Every year, brands get to Q4 with a little extra budget they need to use before
By Julie Spear · September 25, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
Every year, brands get to Q4 with a little extra budget they need to use before the new fiscal year. And almost always, the play is it to put it toward media investments. Sometimes that's the right answer...but not always. Here's an example:
A CMO handed us extra Q4 budget with one condition: prove the potential impact before it's fully approved.
So we put together a plan. Instead of dumping it all into incremental media, we split the money between that AND organic optimization. We built projections for what each side would do to conversion before spending a dollar.
The organic side took longer to deploy and longer to measure. That's one of the reasons why people can be hesitant to invest there at the end of the year.
Creative had to be built. It took time, and the impact showed up over months, not days. But once we tracked the results against the projections, the case made itself.
The brand ended up with more leftover budget the following year, and this time the ask was to run the same play across more marketplaces.
Incremental media will always be the easier sell in the moment.
Organic investment takes more work to justify and more patience to prove. But if you can show the projection and then track it honestly, you have a much stronger case for where that next batch of budget should go.