Your Holiday Campaigns Are Only as Strong as Your Content: Why Brands Need Fresh Photography and Video Now

Believe it or not, the holidays are approaching almost as quickly as shoppers are scrolling past ads on their phones.

By the time the average consumer starts shopping for holiday gifts, decorations, food, drinks, and everything they need to bring the holiday season to life, they’ve already been hit with a flood of seasonal content.

The brands that stand out aren’t necessarily the ones showing up the most. They’re the ones giving people a reason to stop.

A little surprise and delight. A shot that feels unmistakably like the season. Great holiday content doesn’t just put a bow on the product – it taps into the excitement people already feel about this time of year and gives them something worth looking at.

And if your holiday campaign is still running on last year’s shots, we’d love to help get your creative 2026 ready.

Holiday Marketing Runs on a Different Clock

Holiday campaigns don’t wait until the holidays anymore. What used to launch in November is now rolling out in September and October, which means the photography and video behind those campaigns need to be concepted, shot, edited, approved, and ready to go well before the first pumpkin spice coffee is poured.

That creates a tight production window for:

• New product photography for seasonal packaging, limited editions, bundles, and gift sets
• Lifestyle and tabletop imagery that creates a feeling around the product instead of simply putting it on a white background
• Video and behind-the-scenes content built for social, paid media, websites, retail partners, and wherever else your campaign needs to live

Waiting until November to start shooting holiday content doesn’t put you on a tight timeline. It puts you behind the campaign.

Here are a few examples from Marci Rhodes, one of our photographers, and her ongoing partnership with Naked & Thriving, helping them prep for the past few holiday seasons.

What Does “Holiday-Ready” Actually Look Like?

Putting a product next to an ornament doesn’t automatically make it holiday content.

The strongest seasonal imagery creates a moment. It gives consumers something familiar enough to feel like the holidays, but fresh enough to make them stop scrolling.

• Gift-worthy styling: bows, wrapping, ribbons, textures, and staging that make the product feel like something you want to give or get
• Warmth and atmosphere: steam curling off a mug, condensation on a cocktail glass, candlelight across a tabletop, string lights catching the edge of a bottle
• Movement : a splash frozen at exactly the right second, fabric in motion, a pour, a toast, a hand reaching into frame
• A complete content library: hero shots, packaging images, lifestyle photography, detail shots, vertical video, social content, and everything in between

Because one beautiful hero image is great.

One beautiful hero image that your marketing team then has to crop, stretch, repurpose, and somehow turn into an entire Q4 campaign? Feels like a lot of work for one asset!

That’s where thoughtful production makes the difference. Build the shoot around the full campaign, and one production can create an entire season’s worth of cohesive content.

Built for the Biggest Season of the Year

OMS Photography has spent nearly four decades helping brands turn products into images people want to look at.

And during the holidays, that experience matters.

Our studios in Cincinnati and Golden, Colorado, are built for productions that need to accomplish a lot without sacrificing the details – from product and tabletop photography to food and beverage, splash, lifestyle, motion, and behind-the-scenes content.

For brands, that means:

• Speed without sacrificing the sho: holiday timelines move fast. So do we.
• Consistency across the campaign: product, lifestyle, motion, and social assets that actually look and feel like they belong together
• More from every production: instead of solving for one image at a time, we can build an asset library around the places your campaign needs to show up
• A team that understands how the work gets used: e-commerce, retail, paid social, organic, digital, print, and everything that gets added to the deliverables list along the way

Whether you’re building a holiday campaign from scratch or realizing you’re three hero images and six vertical videos short of being ready, we can jump in.

We’ve done it across food and beverage, beauty, CPG, apparel, outdoor, pet, and plenty of products that are much harder to photograph than they look.

Ready to make something worth stopping for? Reach out to OMS Photography and let’s build a holiday content plan that gives your audience a reason to stop scrolling.