Jul 07, 2011 Beth Monaghan
Every summer, companies rush to get their major news announcements out before the vacation season gets underway. A quick Web search about the most popular weeks for vacation didn’t turn up much information other than the common knowledge that the weeks before and after Memorial Day, July 4th and Labor Day are popular.
While some of our most fruitful media initiatives have taken place over holiday weekends when news is slower, we don’t typically recommend the summer months for major launches. Summer is an important time to maintain momentum though, and there are many cases when news cannot, and should not wait until the fall when the wires will be cluttered again with news releases fighting for attention.
So if you are planning a summer launch or campaign, when should you do it? We decided to get some qualitative data to understand the best bets. We ran the poll through Crowdtap (an InkHouse client), which is an on-demand consumer participation network. We asked 1,013 men and women between the ages of 13 and 75 (the average age of our respondents was 31) when they plan to take vacation this summer.
The results were not overwhelmingly definitive. People will be on vacation every week of July and August, but some weeks were more popular than others:
Weeks to Avoid
- July 11, 18% on vacation
- July 25, 11% on vacation
- August 1, 11% on vacation
- September 5 (week of Labor Day), 10% on vacation
- September 12, 13% on vacation
The Best Weeks
- August 15, 6% on vacation
- August 22, 4% on vacation
Here is a screen shot of the complete results:
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