Google Ads promotion occasions: Q4 dates and a creative set per window

Google Ads promotion assets list Black Friday and Cyber Monday as occasions that run from October 15 to December 15, Christmas from November 1 to January 15, Halloween from October 1 to November 15, and New Year's from December 1 to February 28. Those windows overlap, so in the first half of November one account can have four occasions live at once, and each wants its own picture and clip.

The dates come from About promotion assets in Google Ads Help (read 2026-10-11). Promotion assets are text: an offer, an occasion and dates. Sume does not create them or edit anything inside Google Ads. What Sume does is make the images and short videos that sit beside those offers, in batches, with a cost ceiling per run.

The occasion windows Google lists

Google's table gives each occasion a default start and end date. The assets only show inside that window, so the creative you pair with an occasion has a shelf life measured in weeks.

What the overlap means for creative

Black Friday 2026 falls on November 27, so the window opens six weeks and a few days before the day itself. Three practical consequences follow from the table.

• From November 1 to November 15 four occasions are open together (Halloween, Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas). A Halloween clip still running then competes with the holiday set for the same shopper.
• From December 1 New Year's joins the sale occasions, which is when a gift-wrapped hero image starts to look dated.
• The sale occasions last 62 days. One Black Friday clip for all 62 days will feel stale long before December 15, so plan at least a pre-sale, a sale-day and a post-sale version.

The six-month rule sets a hidden deadline

The practical reading: a promotion asset copied from last season and never opened will be paused, so open it, update the dates and refresh the paired creative at the same time.

Where Sume fits in the calendar

Build one creative set per window, not one per season. A Format can be called by name with a bulk request: Bulk runs takes 1 to 100 items and a concurrency window of 1 to 16, and each item is an ordinary run with its own receipt. Per-item generation_spend_cap_usd sets a ceiling for that item, and Create a run says to derive the Idempotency-Key from the thing the run makes plus a version, so a key like bf2026-presale-v2 replays safely.

To turn Halloween stills into a fall or holiday set without starting over, see November 1 switch day: restyle Halloween product stills. To pre-build the sale-week clips, the back-plan in Shopify BFCM 2026 warm-up teaser videos shows the batch shape.

A short checklist for each window: one hero image, one 6 to 10 second clip, one end card, and the date you will retire them. Sume produces the files; matching them to the right promotion asset is still done by hand in Google Ads.