Neil Freiman

Today is the first day of December, which means it's time for the annual game of Whamageddon.

What's that, you ask?

It's an annual contest in which players try to avoid hearing Last Christmas by Wham from December 1st through Christmas Eve.

You're going to want to stay away from department stores, holiday markets, cars playing on the radio, or really any outdoor event in general because there are some devious people out there.

Two years ago, the DJ at a soccer stadium in England played Last Christmas to a crowd of more than 7,000 people with the explicit intention of causing them to lose Whamageddon.

And now a word from LinkedIn ads.

Toby, what do you search for?

It is very deep, Toby.

What I was going to say was, what do you search for in professionals when doing B2B advertising?

Because with LinkedIn ads, you can target your buyers by job title, industry, company role, seniority, skills, and company revenue, so you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience.

Plus, LinkedIn ads generates the highest B2B, that's business to business, return on ad spend of all online ad networks.

I was going to be polite and ask you what you all did Thanksgiving weekend, but I already know.

You woke up Friday morning, opened up your laptop, and loaded up your cart with clothes and electronics.

Despite feeling down about the economy, Americans spent more than ever this Black Friday.

Retail sales on the day after Thanksgiving, excluding cars, jumped 4.1%, outpacing last year's 3.4% growth, according to MasterCard Spending Pulse.

a separate report from adobe analytics found that online shopping drove most of that growth americans spent 11.8 billion dollars online on black friday a 9.1 percent increase from the year before meanwhile malls were busy but not so busy in-store sales rose 1.7 percent a small bump but still above last year's gain this black friday was like the sec's slogan it just means more

Because of the record-long government shutdown, economic data reports have been canceled or delayed, leading to tougher whiteout conditions than the Midwest this weekend.

Economists, investors, and the Fed are using alternative pieces of data, like these Black Friday numbers, to plug those gaps in our understanding of the health of the consumer.

So what do we learn?

Americans are still feeling flush enough to spend big on the holidays, despite plunging consumer confidence, sticky inflation, the shutdown and a weakening jobs environment.