TikTok Black Friday work-back calendar: 28 days to a Nov 2 launch

Count back from the date you choose to go live, not forward from today. TikTok's Black Friday guide says to start preparing in September, finalize creative and partnerships in October, and go live in early November (TikTok Ads guide, read 2026-10-05). If you pick Monday, November 2 as the first live day, you have 28 days from October 5, and Black Friday itself (November 27) is 53 days away.

The calendar, with dates

The only dates TikTok gives are months, so the day-level split below is our own planning choice. It keeps creative locked a week before launch so nothing is still rendering when the budget turns on.

What the first batch costs

TikTok recommends an opening of 3 to 5 seconds that uses teasers, countdowns, or discount reveals to stop the scroll. Treat each opening as a variable and keep the rest of the ad fixed. On Sume, an 8-second Gemini Omni Flash 1.1 clip at 720p lists at $0.10 per second, billed at list times 1.25, so $0.125 per second and $1.00 per clip. Add burned captions at $0.20 and a $0.02 video-trim to cut the winning 5-second hook, and each finished variant is $1.22.

Ten variants are therefore $12.20. That is 10 x ($1.00 + $0.20 + $0.02). If a hook loses, you have spent $1.22 on it, which is the cheapest place in the calendar to be wrong.

• Change one thing per variant: the first 3 to 5 seconds.
• Keep captions on every variant so a muted viewer gets the offer.
• Lock files on Oct 30; a render that finishes after launch is a render you cannot test.

Why lock creative on October 30

TikTok's guide describes a sequence, not a deadline for every asset, but a single freeze date makes the sequence enforceable. Friday, October 30 leaves the weekend and Monday, November 2 as a buffer. Anything you want to change after that is a new render, a new caption pass, and a new upload, and each of those can slip.

Cyber Monday is the one place where a late edit is cheap. The creative can stay the same while the end card changes, because the offer line is the only thing that differs. Keep the offer as a separate burned-caption pass so a swap costs $0.20 rather than a re-render at $1.00 plus review time.

Where this plan can go wrong

Omni Flash takes 3 to 10 seconds per clip and only 16:9 or 9:16, so a 9:16 TikTok ad longer than 10 seconds needs a Timeline stitch at $0.10 per started output minute. Check the live prices with GET /v1/catalog before you budget; the figures here come from the repo docs on the read date.