Most marketing advice assumes twelve roughly equal months. Alaska laughs at that. Our year has booking windows, breakup, a hundred days of frenzy, and a giant statewide payday in October. Spend like a Lower-48 business and you'll be loud when nobody's buying and silent when everyone is.
Here's the calendar we actually plan against.
January–April: the booking window
While the state is dark, the decisions are happening. Summer visitors book their Alaska trips in deep winter — tours, lodges, charters, and everything downstream of them should be spending hard on Lower-48 feeder markets in Q1. If you're a tourism operator waiting for spring to advertise, you're advertising into a sold-out season you didn't sell.
This is also the quietest, cheapest quarter for local service ads — which makes it the smart season for trades and clinics to build review counts and map-pack position before demand returns.
May: the hinge
Breakup ends, daylight floods in, and every seasonal business flips on at once. Creative should already be shot and approved (from March), because once the season starts, nobody has a spare afternoon for a photo shoot. The businesses that look best in July did the work in April.
June–August: the hundred days
Peak everything: tourists, construction, daylight, competition. Two rules. First, capture beats persuasion — search ads and the map pack matter more than brand campaigns, because demand already exists and is choosing between you and the next result. Second, collect while it's busy: photos, video, reviews. This is the ninety-day window that funds your winter content calendar.
September: shoulder season honesty
Traffic falls off a cliff for tourism, but the locals are still here — and September–October is when Alaskans catch up on the things they deferred all summer: home projects, dental work, vehicle service. Trades and clinics should raise budgets while tourism sensibly lowers them.
October: PFD season
The Permanent Fund Dividend lands and it's the closest thing Alaska has to a statewide Black Friday. Retail, big-ticket services, travel deals, "finally fix the thing" purchases — all spike. If your product fits a four-figure impulse, your October creative and email calendar should be built in September, not scrambled on deposit day.
November–December: owned-audience season
Q4 belongs to retail and to everyone's email list. Ad prices climb with national holiday spend, so the cheap wins move to the audience you already own — the list you built during the hundred days. This is also planning season: next year's booking-window campaigns get designed now.
The point
Budget by season, not by twelfth. A tourism operator might sensibly spend 40% of the year's budget in Q1; a trades company might peak in September. Flat monthly spending is the most common — and most expensive — mistake we unwind for new clients.
Want your calendar mapped against your actual booking data? That's the first thing we build in any retainer.