Back-to-school (BTS) is one of the most competitive and high-stakes moments on the retail calendar, and this year it is expected to drive significant consumer spending across both K–12 and college segments.
According to Deloitte, K–12 families in the U.S. are projected to spend $30.9 billion on back-to-school items in 2025. When combined with back-to-college purchases, total seasonal spend is forecasted to hit $117.5 billion.
College students and their families are expected to contribute $86.6 billion in spending alone, according to the National Retail Federation. This marks the second-highest total in the survey’s history, only slightly down from last year’s $94 billion.
The most common shopping destinations for back-to-school continue to be online retailers, department stores, discount stores, clothing stores, and electronics stores.
However, while demand remains high, the economic climate has changed. According to Marketplace, some consumers may pull back on spending due to inflation and the impact of tariffs. Many are shopping earlier to avoid late-summer price surges, and value-driven decisions are becoming a higher priority.
The takeaway: advertisers need a thoughtful, data-informed approach that matches how people are actually shopping today. Keep reading for a breakdown of challenges to watch, programmatic solutions, and best practices to make your back-to-school campaigns more impactful.
Key Challenges Facing BTS Advertisers
1) Narrow Audience Pools From Over-Targeting: When marketers rely too heavily on third-party or first-party data, audience pools can shrink quickly, especially for brands with limited budgets. This restricts scale and may exclude valuable but less predictable shoppers.
How IntentKey Helps: IntentKey AI models audiences based on real-time concepts and behaviors rather than personal data or pre-set segments. This allows brands to maintain reach while still aligning with consumer intent. Models can be fine-tuned at the concept level to balance precision and scale.
2) Economic Sensitivity and Shifting Messaging Preferences: Back-to-school ads focused strictly on price or discounts can underperform against lifestyle-forward campaigns that resonate emotionally. Consumers are still price-aware but want messaging that reflects their values, not just low costs.
How IntentKey Helps: By understanding the motivations behind audience content consumption patterns, IntentKey helps advertisers align creative to what truly matters, whether that is savings, longevity, quality, or simplicity. The AI surfaces high-performing concepts that can uncover hidden insights about your audience and guide messaging direction.
3) Privacy Regulations and Signal Loss: Following the deprecation of third-party cookies and the tightening of privacy regulations between 2023 and 2025, many marketers have experienced a drop in addressable audiences.
How IntentKey Helps: IntentKey AI was designed to operate in a privacy-first world. It understands intent from open-web signals without relying on cookies, personal data, or user identifiers. That means brands can continue targeting with relevance and accuracy, even as legacy tactics lose effectiveness.
4) Contextual Alignment and Brand Safety: One of the most overlooked risks in back-to-school advertising is brand safety. When your campaign is speaking directly to parents about their children’s needs, ad placement matters just as much as the message itself. Appearing next to low-quality, controversial, or misleading content can immediately tarnish brand perception and erode trust.
How IntentKey Helps: IntentKey goes beyond standard contextual targeting. Rather than matching basic keywords or static URL categories, our AI analyzes each page’s semantic meaning, geolocation relevance, and how well the content aligns with your audience’s models concepts. This ensures ads are not only placed in brand-safe environments, but in ones that truly match the mindset of the intended audience.
To further protect brand image, IntentKey uses:
- Highly vetted custom allowlists that prioritize thousands of high-quality websites and exclude MFA sites.
- Real-time page scoring based on alignment with audience concepts, not just surface-level content
This multi-layered approach helps advertisers build trust while maintaining performance.
5) Cross-Channel Attribution and Measurement Gaps: CTV, display, and native formats often operate in silos, making it difficult to track performance holistically. Without reliable measurement, advertisers may struggle to determine ROI across the full funnel.
How IntentKey Helps:Inuvo’s Programmatic Spend Analysis offered through managed services predicts optimal media allocation across channels, helping increase ROAS by identifying where each dollar performs best. Unlike CPA models that overvalue last-touch tactics, our system attributes success across the full funnel to ensure top-of-funnel prospecting gets the credit it deserves.
Tips to Maximize BTS Campaign Performance
1) Understand Your Audience’s Economic Mindset: Some parents are focused on saving money. Others are looking for quality that will last all year. And some value both. Understanding these motivations is key.
2) Avoid Ad Fatigue with Smart Frequency and Creative Rotation: Back-to-school campaigns flood the market during summer months. To stand out, brands must strike a balance between visibility and overexposure. Rotate creative often and avoid static messaging.
3) Plan Around Key Shopping Peaks: According to NRF trends, K–12 shopping typically peaks in July through early August, while college purchases extend into September. Brands should also account for late-season buyers and last-minute shoppers who are responsive to urgency messaging.
4) Lean Into Interactive and Shoppable CTV: Interactive CTV formats, including shoppable ads and QR codes, can more engagement than standard video pre-roll. With CTV completion rates topping 95 percent, this channel is one of the most powerful ways to convert intent into action.
Why IntentKey is Built for Back-to-School Success
IntentKey is more than a targeting solution. It is an adaptive, AI-powered audience modeling platform that continuously updates in real time, helping brands stay ahead of shifting consumer behavior.
With IntentKey, advertisers get:
- Privacy-first targeting without reliance on cookies or personal data
- Audience models that update every five minutes based on current intent signals
- Concept-level insights that inform both media strategy and creative direction
- Seamless activation through any DSP using Deal IDs for self service users
In a retail moment where precision, agility, and relevance are more important than ever, IntentKey delivers the intelligence and flexibility needed to succeed.
To show just how fast and flexible targeting can be, we built a back-to-school audience model in seconds using the IntentKey Platform. Check it out here.
Ready to build a custom AI-powered audience model of your own? Explore what IntentKey can do at inuvo.com/IntentKeyPlatform
