Planning paid media for a product people only buy when it’s 45°C outside

Air conditioners in a hot climate are not bought the way shampoo is bought. Nobody browses for one in December. Demand arrives in a wall — the first properly hot week — and the brands that win it have usually done the work months earlier, when the dashboards looked dead.

That makes the usual paid media playbook dangerous. “Always-on” accounts, steady monthly budgets and a single evergreen creative set all assume a smooth demand curve. A seasonal category gives you the opposite: a long flat stretch, a steep ramp, a short peak and a tail that drops faster than your bidding strategy can react.

01The curve decides, not the calendar

Start with search demand, not with last year’s media plan. Pull at least three years of category search volume and mark the week each year when demand crossed its yearly average.¹ That crossing point — not a fixed month — is the moment your plan should be built around.

“In a seasonal category, the money you spend before demand arrives is what makes the money you spend at peak work.

The weather moves that crossing point by weeks, which is why fixed-date flighting quietly wastes money: too early and you are paying for awareness nobody remembers; too late and you are bidding against every competitor at the most expensive moment of the year.

02Four phases, four different jobs

Each phase needs its own objective and its own success measure. Judging the pre-season on ROAS is the most common way to kill the work that makes the peak profitable.

The rest of this piece turns the table into a working plan: how much of the year’s budget each phase gets, which search terms to own before the ramp, how to rotate creative so peak frequency doesn’t burn out, and the one-page sheet I review every Monday in season.