The Black Friday-ification of the 4th of July: what a decade of email data told us about America’s 250th

The Black Friday-ification of the 4th of July: what a decade of email data told us about America’s 250th

Though the final numbers aren’t in yet, America’s 250th anniversary is shaping up to have been the most commercially significant Independence Day in the nation’s history. 

To understand how brands actually approached the holiday – how they tackled the tensions around patriotic language at a time when the country is increasingly divided – Jacquard analysed 368,000 promotional email subject lines sent by major B2C brands between 2016 and 2025, in partnership with Ariela Nerubay Turndorf, Adjunct Professor of Digital Marketing and Multicultural Marketing at the University of Southern California. 

The results revealed a clear pattern of a national holiday being steadily absorbed into the retail calendar – and a tension regarding how brands embrace the sentiment behind it. 

Patriotic language has nearly tripled in under a decade

Core patriotic references – mentions of America, the 4th of July, freedom, and red, white and blue – have grown more than 25 times since 2016, with 2025 already the highest rate on record. The jump from 2024 to 2025 alone was 116%, the largest single-year increase in the dataset.

The 4th of July accounts for roughly 60% of all patriotic language across the dataset. During the core promotional window of 25 June to 7 July, brands are 50 times more likely to use patriotic language than at any other point in the year, with June standing out as the peak month as brands build momentum ahead of the holiday itself.

The promotional window keeps getting longer

Phrases like “Epic 4th of July Sale” now appear as early as June, having previously been concentrated in the final days before the holiday. Based on the trajectory of the last few years, promotional activity around Independence Day could now realistically begin as early as May.

Memorial Day is following a similar path. It’s grown from essentially nothing before 2019 into the second-largest patriotic commercial moment, now rivalling Labor Day as a major marketing occasion in its own right.

Words, not images

Despite years of investment in patriotic language, patriotic imagery is almost entirely absent. Across all 368,000 subject lines:

• The US flag emoji appeared fewer than 10 times
• The Statue of Liberty emoji appeared just five times
• The eagle emoji didn’t appear at all until 2024, tied to a Presidents’ Day campaign

The data also points to a clear preference for celebratory rather than ideological patriotism. References to BBQs, cookouts, fireworks and the backyard have grown steadily, while explicitly political language remains rare. Brands appear to have gravitated, largely without coordination, toward the more inclusive end of the patriotic spectrum. 

What this means for the 250th

Ahead of the 250th, our CPO, Toby Coulthard, said: “What we’re seeing is the Black Friday-ification of Independence Day – a national holiday that has been steadily absorbed into the commercial calendar.”

Ariela Nerubay Turndorf added a note of caution for brands tempted to lean harder into imagery for the sake of it: “What this data reflects is a broader tension in American marketing – brands want to tap into patriotic sentiment, but they’re cautious about what that sentiment means to different communities right now. Defaulting to transactional language like ‘5th of July Sale’ is the path of least resistance. The brands that will stand out around the 250th are those willing to engage with American identity in a more considered, culturally nuanced way.”

The takeaway

The data suggests two things are true at once: patriotic marketing is intensifying, and it’s doing so through transaction rather than meaning. Brands are zeroing in on consumer interest in the holiday rather than necessarily on the sentiment behind patriotism itself.