MediaMarkt says Black Friday in Benelux. Coolblue, so far, says vouchers

MediaMarkt had a Black Friday label on its Belgian and Dutch homepages on 31 October, 27 days before the day itself. It showed the same four claims in both markets. Coolblue, its Dutch electronics rival, showed voucher codes and no event label. That fits the pattern: in each of the last three seasons, the Dutch-language press wrote about MediaMarkt's Black Friday deals before Coolblue's.

One script, two countries

On both 31 October and 1 November we recorded four promotions on each MediaMarkt homepage, Belgium and the Netherlands. They were the same set each time: a flat 15% off electronics, up to 25% off electronics, a clearance offer and a Black Friday sale.

The one visible difference is scope. In Belgium the Black Friday label covered electronics. In the Netherlands it also covered computers and phones, gaming, and DIY and garden. The claims, the depth and the timing were the same.

This is what a group-level campaign looks like from the outside: one calendar and one set of headline offers, rolled out across the Benelux storefronts at once. The "up to 25%" is a headline claim, not a measured average across products.

MediaMarkt is not waiting for Black Week. It has put the words on the homepage four weeks before the day, in two countries at once.

What is Coolblue doing instead?

On the same two mornings, Coolblue Netherlands showed voucher codes on electronics: two on 31 October and one on 1 November, a Samsung-branded code that was there on both days. There was no Black Friday label, no Black Week label and no percentage claim. Our data does not record a discount value for either voucher.

A brand voucher is a quieter tool than a sale banner. It discounts selected products without starting the event clock, and without committing the retailer to a depth it then has to beat in late November. Whether Coolblue is holding back on purpose or simply has not changed its homepage yet, two days of data cannot tell us.

What we can say is what we could not see. Coolblue Belgium was readable on both days but showed no promotion we could extract. Bol, the marketplace, blocked our visits in Belgium and the Netherlands on both days, so it is missing from this comparison. We never get round a block.

By 1 November MediaMarkt had company: Shein's Belgian and Dutch storefronts also showed a Black Friday label. Among the Belgian and Dutch retailers we could read, nobody else did.

Four comparisons, four times MediaMarkt first

To see whether this year's head start is unusual, we went back through the Black Friday and Black Week press coverage that our news radar collected for 2023 to 2025. We looked for the first article in each season about MediaMarkt's own Black Friday deals, and the first about Coolblue's.

Both retailers appear in four season-market pairs: the Netherlands in all three years, and Belgium in 2025. In all four, MediaMarkt came first.

Market and season	MediaMarkt first named	Coolblue first named	Lag
Netherlands 2023	10 November	24 November	14 days
Netherlands 2024	27 November	28 November	1 day
Netherlands 2025	6 November	10 November	4 days
Belgium 2025	4 November	24 November	20 days

The 2025 Dutch start stands out. On 6 November 2025 MediaMarkt's Black Friday Weeks campaign appeared on ANP's press release service and in the gaming press on the same day. That is an announcement, not just a deals round-up. Coolblue's first Black Friday deals story followed four days later. In 2023 the first MediaMarkt item was an advertorial, which still shows the retailer wanted its Black Friday message out early.

The four-week gap that wasn't

A first pass over the 2024 data suggested a gap of four weeks in the Netherlands: MediaMarkt named on 31 October, Coolblue on 28 November. Read the headlines and that gap disappears. The 31 October article, and another on 13 November, were about crowd trouble at a MediaMarkt store in Rotterdam and the debate over crowd rules that followed. Neither was about a campaign.

Count only articles about the retailers' own deals and the 2024 gap shrinks to one day. Both stories were deals round-ups from the same tech site, published on 27 and 28 November 2024. We also excluded a Belgian article from 3 November 2024 that examined Coolblue's sales techniques, not a Coolblue campaign.

The lesson for this series: being named in the press is not the same as being on promotion. That is why the storefront readings, not the headlines, will settle the question this year.

Earlier than last year, on a different measure

In the Netherlands, the first press article on MediaMarkt's Black Friday deals ran 22 days before the day in 2025, and 14 days before in 2023. This year we saw the label on the homepage 27 days before. That is not a like-for-like comparison: the past years are press dates and this year is a storefront reading. Still, it points to a start at least as early as last year's.

Coolblue's Dutch start moved forward over the same period. Its first Black Friday deals story ran on Black Friday itself in 2023, one day before in 2024 and 18 days before in 2025. If that trend holds, its label could appear well before Black Week, which our calendar estimates will start on 20 November, 19 days from now.

What to watch

• The day Coolblue says it. We read Coolblue Netherlands every morning. The first day it shows a Black Friday or Black Week label gives this year's lag in days, measured on the storefront rather than in the press.
• Depth, not just dates. MediaMarkt is at "up to 25%" in both markets. If it raises that ceiling before Coolblue moves, the head start is in price as well as timing.
• Belgium and bol. Coolblue Belgium is readable but quiet, and bol is blocked. Any Belgian Coolblue promotion we record will be the first one we can set against MediaMarkt Belgium.

How we measured this

Storefront data comes from Dealmeteo's daily automated readings of retailer homepages in Belgium and the Netherlands on 31 October and 1 November 2026, classified by a rules-based extractor at moderate confidence. Bol was blocked and Coolblue Belgium returned no promotions. Press dates come from our news radar's backfill of Google News for Black Friday and Black Week 2023 to 2025. We merged both event files, kept relevant Dutch-language articles that name MediaMarkt or Coolblue (no French-language Belgian article named either), and excluded four stories that were not about a retailer's own deals. The sample is small, at 20 article entries over three years (one IGN Benelux story is filed under both markets), so treat the press dates as indicative. Two days of storefront data show who has started, not yet how long the other takes to answer.