• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, August 11, 2010

Call it the year of the Creeping Christmas: Retailers—especially those with a major online presence—are pushing holiday sales messages earlier this year, according to the just-released annual holiday benchmark report from Experian Marketing Services.

Marketers are expected to advertise Black Friday sales sooner, and extend them over greater time periods, Bill Tancer, Experian's general manager of global research, tells Marketing Daily. "Timing is going to be much more important, given the economy," he says. "Knowing when consumers begin thinking about holiday purchases can provide marketers with a big advantage over the competition."

Target is pushing that concept to the extreme, and launched a "Black Friday in July" sale on its website last month. While that might seem small—one chain, after all, hardly counts as a trend--Tancer says it did send ripples of shopping interest through the online world. "During the same period last year, there were only two search terms used often enough to be measurable—'Black Friday' and 'Black Friday 2009.' But this year, there were not only more searches, but under many more terms. 'Black Friday' and 'Black Friday 2010' came in first and second, but 'Black Friday in July' came in fourth, and even though Walmart wasn't doing Black Friday event, it's name came up in searches more often than Target's." Experian expects intense web searching under "Black Friday" to begin early in September this year.