In 2026, marketing performance cannot be left to chance. The brands that will succeed are those that have managed to plan and pace their communication consistently throughout the year.

A well-planned 2026 marketing calendar ensures you capture your audience’s attention at the right moments while aligning budget and business objectives. Each key moment then becomes an opportunity to generate tangible results: data collection, engagement, conversion, loyalty, and more.

In this article, we highlight the key dates in the upcoming marketing calendar and explain how to make the most of their commercial potential.

SUMMARY

• Why the 2026 marketing calendar is essential for your marketing performance?
• Gamification to better engage and convert during key moments
• 3 examples of interactive mechanics to deploy throughout 2026
• Measuring and improving the business impact of your marketing campaigns
• Q&A – 2026 marketing calendar

A 2026 marketing calendar is not just a simple list of dates. It is a strategic tool that helps anticipate the key moments of the year ahead: sales, holidays, industry events, or important dates. This clear overview enables brands to identify the moments that matter to their audiences and ensures they don’t miss opportunities to engage and convert them.

Planning ahead also means gaining consistency. Campaigns find their proper place throughout the year and are structured around clear, measurable business objectives. The result is smoother, more effective, and more memorable communication.

The 2026 marketing calendar finally plays a key role in managing your marketing budget. By allocating budgets wisely over twelve months, it becomes possible to maximize each investment and avoid inefficient spending peaks.

Gamification involves incorporating playful mechanics into a marketing strategy. It relies on interactivity and game elements to capture the attention of a highly targeted audience. By making the experience more immersive, it boosts engagement and encourages action, whether it’s signing up for a mailing list, sharing an offer on personal networks, or purchasing a product with a discount coupon.

Another advantage of gamification for activating your marketing calendar: is its flexibility. Game mechanics (quizzes, instant-win games, battles, prize wheels) can be adapted to any key moment. Each format can be designed to fit the context of an event and the strategic objectives associated with it. A quiz to mark the back-to-school season, a wheel for Black Friday, or an Advent calendar at the end of the year.

This variety allows for communication that is always relevant, aligned with current expectations, and keeps campaigns engaging throughout the year without ever tiring the audience.

Each key moment has its own specifics: consumer expectations, purchasing context, and level of competition. Adapt the gamification mechanic allows addressing these challenges while maximizing business results. Here are three effective formats to deploy depending on the nature of the key moment and the objective pursued.

1. Collect customer data with a Quiz

The Quiz captures attention by sparking the curiosity of audiences eager to test their knowledge or learn more about themselves. For brands, it is an excellent data collection tool, with each answer enriching customer insights with precise information about participants’ preferences, habits, or purchase intentions. The first-party data then feeds into the CRM, refines customer segmentation, and enables the optimization of future campaigns.

Examples:

1. a “what’s the perfect gift for your partner?” quiz for Valentine’s Day,
2. “which destination suits you best?” quiz before the holiday season,
3. “what gift idea for Mom?” quiz for Mother’s Day.

2. Engage your audience with a contest

The contest helps reactivate your audience and boost participation by challenging them to complete a task with an attractive reward at stake. It maintains engagement around the brand and generates regular interactions during slower commercial periods.

Examples:

1. a digital Easter Egg Hunt (Hidden Objects)
2. a costume Photo Contest for Halloween
3. a back-to-school story Contest

3. Drive conversions during a key moment with an Instant Win game

The Instant Win game leverages the immediacy of the reward. It turns curiosity into quick action and fits perfectly with a promotional key moment in the 2026 marketing calendar. This format is ideal for driving impulse purchases and boosting short-term sales.

Examples:

• a digital scratch card during the sales period,
• a Wheel of Fortune to distribute discount vouchers during Black Friday,
• a Digital Calendar for Christmas

To boost the performance of their 2026 marketing calendar, brands need to rely on rigorous campaign tracking and content adjustments.

Here are three levers to use for measuring and improving the impact of marketing actions:

• Build on the results of previous years
  Track metrics such as the number of leads generated, conversions, re-engagement rate, or CRM impact. This data will help optimize new campaigns throughout the year.
• Select the most relevant key moments
  There’s no need to focus on every date. It’s better to choose those that resonate with your audience to reduce ad fatigue, optimize your marketing budget, and ensure campaign visibility, especially through paid media.
• Maintain annual consistency
  Establishing a regular schedule for publishing and engagement encourages immediate conversions and drives repeat purchases. This consistent thread enhances the impact of each activation and supports long-term revenue.

What are the key marketing highlights to integrate in 2026?

Key highlights to anticipate in your 2026 marketing calendar include major holidays (Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day), sales events (summer/winter), Black Friday, Christmas, as well as industry-specific or ephemeral events like « Veganuary » or Earth Day.

What strategies can be used to engage audiences throughout 2026?

To energize your 2026 marketing calendar, use gamification at every stage: quizzes, instant win games, and interactive wheels. Adapt the format based on the objective (acquisition, conversion, loyalty) and use it for every highlight to maintain constant engagement.

How to choose the relevant thematic days for your brand?

Select dates that align with your brand universe and your customers, and do not position yourself exclusively on the most visible ones. This ensures good budget usage, avoids over-solicitation, and reinforces the coherence of your marketing strategy, with priority given to high-potential commercial events.

How to leverage unexpected or emerging events in 2026?

Stay on the lookout for trends (e.g., Awareness Day, viral phenomenon) to integrate them into your 2026 marketing calendar. These opportunities bring freshness to your communication and encourage spontaneous, agile, and engaging content.

Boost your sales performance in 2026 by planning your marketing calendar in advance. Adictiz supports you in setting up and deploying your campaigns throughout the year. Discover our interactive campaigns, which can be adapted to every highlight, and boost the visibility of your messaging thanks to our media promotion offer!

You’re probably familiar with Candy Crush Saga. Launched in 2012, it is the world’s most popular digital game, attracting more than 240 million monthly active players and accumulating more than 3 billion downloads.

Candy Crush is based on a simple Match 3 principle: line up identical items (in this case 3), swapping their positions to make them disappear and score points. Easy to learn and addictive, this mechanic is an asset for brands looking to energise their campaigns and captivate their audiences.

In this article, we explain how to create an online Match 3 game and customise it so that it fits into your world. We share examples of how to use this format as a recruitment and loyalty tool.

SUMMARY

• Why integrate the match 3 game into your marketing campaigns?
  
• Our tips for creating an engaging online match-3 game
  

The Match 3 game is a fun, intuitive and captivating format that brands can incorporate into their marketing strategy. This mechanic is used to engage, convert and build audience loyalty. Here are the reasons to adopt it to optimise your communication and move users through the sales funnel.

1. To boost your profile

The Match 3 game is ideal for attracting an audience because it is well-known and appreciated. Simple and addictive, it captures attention and increases brand visibility.

It’s easy to customise the design to reflect the brand’s visual identity and immerse customers and prospects. By adding functionalities (a ranking and the ability to share your score), Match 3 can go viral and amplify the reach of a campaign (on social networks).

Example: As part of the Men’s World Handball Championship, Lidl proposed a campaign aimed at increasing brand awareness through this partnership. The game was positioned as a strategic lever for capturing data and recruiting qualified leads in affinity with the brand.

2. To engage your audience

The Match 3 game immerses users in a fun and interactive world. Brands evoke positive emotions linked to entertainment, but also to the possibility of progressing in the game and winning rewards.

Because of its addictive nature, Match 3 extends the interaction between the brand and its audience and multiplies the points of contact (by tracking scores or adding new levels).

Example: SFR Caraïbes’ Mother’s Day game campaign aimed to increase brand awareness while engaging its audience. Backed by Adictiz Ads media coverage, the campaign was a success, with remarkable engagement: each participant spent an average of 11 minutes playing the game.

3. To generate leads

Brands can use Match 3 to enrich their database and collect new leads. To access the game or the rewards, participants have to fill in a registration form. The information collected can be used to segment leads (according to their profile and their behaviour or interactions with the game).

This format can be a conversion tool, via the rewards distributed. These are incentives to buy (such as promotions or discount coupons to be used on the next order).

Example: The Floa Sweets campaign was dedicated to increasing the visibility and awareness of the Floa Bank mobile app, in order to encourage its use. The Match 3 mechanic enabled Floa to recruit new users and build loyalty while boosting app downloads.

4. To enhance your database

Finally, the Match 3 game enables brands to enrich their customer base by collecting:

• demographic data (via the entry form),
  
• behavioural data (by monitoring player interactions),
  
• direct feedback (including micro-surveys at the beginning or end of the game).
  

The data obtained will be used to create highly targeted (retargeting) marketing campaigns. For example, a user who has unlocked all the levels could receive a personalised offer or message.

Example: Electrolux’s Ecoline campaign was launched with the aim of engaging consumers in reducing their energy consumption. At the same time, the brand aimed to recruit new opt-in leads. The media campaign exceeded its objectives, with over 70% of opt-ins coming from the Adictiz Ads source.

Before launching a gamified marketing campaign, here are a few practices to follow to ensure it is as effective as possible.

1. What software should I use to create a match 3 game?

Advertisers can use platforms specialising in playable marketing to create their match 3 game. These tools offer an intuitive interface and functionality tailored to their needs. They can be used to personalise their marketing game, optimise its distribution or track campaign performance.

2. How do I customise my match 3 game?

With Adictiz Box, you can fully customise your game to reflect your brand identity. The graphic elements (backgrounds, colours, icons) can be adapted to reflect the brand’s values and visual universe. The difficulty of the game can be configured and levels introduced to prolong engagement.

3. How do you manage endowments?

Rewards are essential to motivate participants. Gamification tools make it easy to manage rewards. Whether in the form of discount vouchers, free samples or physical gifts. Advertisers can configure random or conditional winning mechanisms (based on a minimum score), and automate the allocation of prizes to simplify management.

4. Can someone take charge of my campaign?

For companies lacking the time or resources to manage their campaign, Adictiz offers turnkey support via Adictiz Studio. The agency’s teams take charge of the creation, design and optimisation of the campaign.

5. How can I make my campaign more visible?

To maximise the impact of a match 3 game, brands can call on the services of a Media Agency. The latter will be responsible for promoting the game via targeted advertising campaigns on social networks. Partnerships with influencers and multi-channel actions to boost the game’s visibility and brand awareness.

6. How can I track the performance of my campaign?

Thanks to a gamified marketing tool, companies can easily track their KPIs using detailed dashboards. These allow you to monitor your metrics in real time. For example, the number of players, average time spent or data collected (leads). These insights will help advertisers adjust their strategy and achieve better results.

Conclusion

Creating an online match 3 game is an effective strategy for animating your community and boosting engagement. With Adictiz, the design and delivery of your campaign is seamless and easy to adapt to your objectives and your audience!

There are many reasons why consumers take part in a marketing competition. First and foremost, the majority want to take part in a unique experience, compare themselves with a community (by climbing the leaderboard), but also find out about new products or brand news.

Nevertheless, it’s impossible to deny that gamers enjoy marketing games largely because they offer them the chance to win rewards. The choice of prizes for a competition is therefore crucial to its success. It is a lever for increasing the number of participants, making your interactive game viral and boosting participant retention.

In this guide, we share practical advice and concrete examples of how to choose the best prizes for a marketing competition.

SUMMARY

• Why is choosing the right gifts so important?
• Understand the motivations of the participants of the competition to choose its endowment
• The golden rules of good gamified marketing staffing

Do you know what the first thing participants remember when they discover a competition for the first time?

The prize!

Overall, it’s the game that attracts the most attention from users, ahead of the concept of the marketing game, its graphic universe, the calls to action and the organic brand.

The golden rule for creating an engaging marketing game that encourages your target audience to take part is to choose a striking prize that will capture their attention or stimulate their curiosity!

The prize money for a competition will have an undeniable effect on its appeal. To attract the maximum targeted audience, so it’s crucial to choose your endowment carefully. But it’s also crucial to promote it in all your communication media (media plan, home page, landing page).

This in no way precludes designing a competition that is attractive, challenging and original.

But in order of priorities, the equation for a successful competition is as follows:

A well-chosen prize + a well-thought-out concept = guaranteed seduction

Like any other marketing strategy, the choice of prizes for a competition must be user-centric. Cela signifie concrètement qu’il ne faut pas choisir les lots à remporter en fonction des objectifs de son entreprise (par exemple des produits invendus qu’elle souhaite écouler).

The rewards of a marketing game must be thought out according to the participants’ expectations and what is likely to motivate them to play!

In practice, the right prize will not be the same for all companies and all competitions. The company will have to base its decision on the data it possesses about its target audience. In particular the first-party data it has collected from previous marketing campaigns.

Nevertheless, a better understanding of consumers’ motivations as a whole, and of the current economic context, will enable us to sketch out the contours of the ideal endowment!

Boosting purchasing power with its interactive game prizes

The current boom in marketing competitions is part of a social and economic context that is very specific.

On the one hand, consumers value authentic and playful interactions with brands. They are sensitive to the efforts made by companies to offer them quality content and who are committed to creating a real, close relationship with them.

On the other hand, 74% of French people say that the year 2022 (and its inflationary context) have weakened their finances. 62% will have changed their consumption habits by 2022 to preserve their purchasing power.

Against this backdrop, with household morale at half-mast, businesses have a role to play. They can offer promotions or other commercial actions (such as the famous anti-inflation basket) to help consumers preserve their purchasing power.

But they can also give their target audience the opportunity to win prizes as part of a competition. This will serve the interests of consumers at the same time. In fact, 59% of them are actively looking for promotions. But the marketing game is also a powerful vector for brand awareness, commitment and loyalty.

Now that the company has a better understanding of the motivations of future participants in its competition, all it has to do is choose the right prize accordingly.

Above all, it needs to ask itself the right questions:

• What is the context of my scheme?
• What are the objectives of my interactive marketing campaign?
• What is my target audience: the typical profile of participants, their motivations and their expectations of the brand?
• What is its budget (for the campaign itself and for endowments)?
• What human resources does it have?

Based on their answers and the information we’re about to share with you, it will be easier to organise a winning competition!

The most effective prizes

As a general rule, vehicles, money (in the form of a voucher, for example) and trips are the three most popular rewards for participants in a competition. However, there are other possible prizes to explore, depending on your objectives and the resources available.

Fashion/beauty items, home furnishings and high-tech appliances are also excellent endowment choices.

Choosing a striking prize

The whole point of a good competition prize is to catch the eye and convert as many Internet users as possible into the target players.

The prize must be eye-catching. To do this, it must be visible in the form of a good-quality photo. The visuals must also show the full extent of the prizes up for grabs, as well as their overall value (in euros).

A very good example of hard-hitting prize comes from the competition organised by La Roche-Posay. The campaign’s visuals perfectly showcase the brand’s new serums, which players can win by taking part in a Click & Win. The result: over 69,000 people signed up.

A prize consistent with the brand universe

50% of participants expect a prize linked to their brand. It is therefore advisable to choose a prize that is easily associated with your company, your sector of activity or the marketing highlight ( Christmas, Halloween, etc.). This choice of endowment will increase the conversion rate of the campaign as well as its memorability.

For Black Friday, Norauto has therefore proposed a ‘your order 100% reimbursed’ scheme. This is a promise that is consistent with marketing highlights, giving consumers the chance to grab a bargain.

A prize in line with its interactive marketing campaign

The choice of prize must also be adapted to the context of the marketing game and the objectives it is designed to achieve.

For example, a competition organised to generate leads should choose an exceptional prize (a car or a high-tech device). It can also multiply the number of prizes. To generate traffic and encourage conversion, the gift chosen should be linked to an act of purchase (gift card, discount, etc.).

Targeted prizes for participants

Choosing the right reward for a competition also means defining the target audience you want to reach.. Il peut s’agir d’une cible familiale, avec des enfants. Ou plutôt d’un public féminin/masculin. Les marques devront également s’intéresser à l’âge/génération de leur audience pour choisir la bonne dotation.

The Bonduelle brand has opted for a targeted approach by launching a campaign aimed at customers who have purchased a Bonduelle product. To take part, you had to enter the bar code of your Bonduelle product.

The choice of prize is crucial to accelerating the performance of a marketing campaign, whatever its objective (loyalty, engagement, visibility). So take the time to select rewards or prizes that are both relevant to achieving the objectives you’ve set yourself and meet the expectations of your target audience!

And to make organising your competition easier, discover the Adictiz solution!