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!

Culture is a crucial sector in France, because it helps to preserve our historical heritage and put the country on the international map. But it is also a sector that has suffered from the pandemic.

To revitalise cultural sites and experiences, and improve visitors’ experience of them, marketing gamification is an effective lever to explore. Integrating game mechanisms into areas such as leisure, culture and tourism makes the customer experience fun, interactive and memorable.

Thanks to interactive marketing experiences, visitors to a cultural venue are no longer passive spectators. They are immersed in the history of a venue or behind the scenes of a cultural movement, right from the moment they get in line. They are captivated by the world they are discovering, and are much more likely to retain the knowledge that is being imparted.

In this article, we’re going to look at the ways in which gamification can be a solution to facilitate the discovery of a heritage site or museum. We’ll explain how you can use gamification in an original way to stand out from the crowd and improve the customer experience at your venue or cultural event.

Gamification, i.e. the integration of game mechanisms into an experience is not a new phenomenon. It is already used in marketing, in education and vocational training.

This is a widespread approach in cultural institutions. Which offer their visitors the chance to rediscover a place or a piece of history through gamified experiences (challenges, competitions, treasure hunts or riddles).

The aim is to use these entertaining mechanics for more than just fun. There, the aim is to educate visitors, enhance cultural heritage and improve the customer experience by making the visit more attractive (for younger visitors or those waiting in line).

As we have already seen in the marketing sector, gamification is a very interesting tool to deploy at every stage of the customer experience. It’s a great way of capturing their attention. But also to boost their engagement by multiplying the opportunities for them to interact with the brand.

But interactivity can be a powerful strategy before and after the visit. It can be used to prepare for the visit (by arousing desire or sharing relevant information in a fun way that the visitor will need afterwards). Once the experience is over, gamification becomes a loyalty-building lever, using the data collected during or before the visit, for example, to propose similar/complementary offers to visitors.

In a nutshell, gamification is a way of improving the customer experience in the culture by:

• Creating a real buzz around an experience or event (particularly online)
• Making a museum visit more fun and memorable;
• Enabling consumers to reappropriate cultural content;
• Multiplying interactions between visitors themselves to federate committed communities around a cultural institution.

Whether it’s an interactive game, a treasure hunt, an augmented reality digital tour or a photo competition, culture and leisure operators have no shortage of ways to gamify and therefore improve their customer experience.

Here are 4 use cases to inspire you.

Wait marketing before a visit or cultural event

Wait marketing is based on the use of digital tools to animate an audience before the launch of a new product or in the queue at a cultural event. It is a lever particularly used in certain sectors where consumers have to wait in a waiting room (particularly in the medical world), but also in events.

The aim is to optimise the user experience before it even begins and to make the most of customers’ waiting time. This time can be used to display relevant information prior to a visit, for example; but above all, wait marketing can transform this tedious moment into a pleasant and entertaining one.

Before the visit begins, or before the artists take to the stage, the cultural institution can, for example, broadcast a quiz on a large screen. It’s a great way to keep visitors waiting while testing their knowledge and skills. by teasing out what would happen next.

For the Paris-Roubaix race, the Haut de France region set up an Outrun game to immerse participants in the heart of the sporting event.. The campaign engaged the public and recruited qualified leads by means of an entry form for a competition to win attractive prizes (goodies, etc.)

Geocaching: turning a walk into a treasure hunt

Geocaching is a practice that combines the principle of treasure hunting with new technologies. It offers a unique and entertaining way to explore a territory or cultural site.

Using a smartphone and a series of clues, participants are tasked with finding ‘geocaches’ hidden along a footpath, in a neighbourhood or even in a town. This interactive game is a highly effective way of enhance the value of your location, reveal little-known or forgotten sites, and improve the customer experience.

In the tourism sector, geocaching allows travellers to collect points for the monuments they visit, or for sites observed. The more points they have, the more rewards they can receive to encourage them to return or share their experience with friends and family.

Interactive tours to attract young visitors to the museum

Interactive or augmented tours can be experienced both physically and online. In addition to a guide, visitors interact with a digital device (a smartphone or tablet for example) through which they can take part in a game.

The Royal Museum of Mariemont in Belgium, for example, has set up a tablet video game called ‘The Ferryman’. Aimed at the very young , this interactive game showcased the museum’s Egyptian collection. Children had to find hidden objects, solve riddles and complete levels. This fun format was ideal for introducing them to Egyptian mythology in a more immersive and entertaining way.

Outside museums, digital walks also combine education and fun. Mobile applications can, for example, enable visitors to take part in quizzes to find out all they need to know. The use of QR codes will also make it easier to display these interactive animations in key places. It’s an excellent way to visit without getting bored, but also to remember important information more easily.

Conclusion

Gamification and expectation marketing are two powerful levers for improving the customer experience in the culture and leisure sector. They enable you to engage your audience at every stage, from discovery to loyalty. To make your cultural venue more attractive, don’t hesitate to use our interactive game mechanics!