The same thing happens every year: in late June and mid-December, sales rise, the marketing team credits the campaign it launched that week, and nobody asks whether it would have risen anyway. Argentina’s mandatory year-end bonus is not a side note. It is a liquidity injection set by law, landing the same day, for nearly the entire national workforce.
The bonus payout is a calendar event, not a marketing one
Article 122 of the Labor Contract Law (20,744, with deadlines set by Law 27,073) requires the mandatory year-end bonus (aguinaldo) to be paid in two installments: the first due June 30, the second due December 18, with an administrative grace period of a few business days. Each installment equals 50% of the best gross monthly pay in that half-year. Unlike a Hot Sale, which pulls forward demand that was going to happen anyway through a one-off discount, the bonus puts new money in nearly everyone’s pocket the same day, every year, without any brand having to do anything for it to happen.
That is exactly the measurement problem: if a late-June campaign lines up with that payout, the sales spike you see may have little to do with the message you sent. It is the same logic behind separating a real effect from a baseline that was already going to move on its own: before celebrating a result, confirm it was not going to happen regardless.
How to separate the bonus effect from the campaign effect
- Compare the spike against the same period a year earlier, not the previous month. The bonus is paid on the same date every year, so the right baseline is June against June, December against December.
- Check whether the spike is even across the base or concentrated among people who got the campaign. An even rise, including the share of customers who got no message at all, is the bonus moving consumption. A rise concentrated only in the targeted group points to a real campaign effect.
- Separate average order value from buyer count. The bonus tends to raise order value, since people have more cash on hand, more than it adds new buyers; an effective campaign should add buyers, not just order value.
- Log each installment’s date in your measurement calendar, not only your content calendar. Without that marker, the same spike gets celebrated, or ignored, every half-year without learning anything from the one before.
Launching a campaign during bonus week is still a good call: real liquidity is entering the economy those days. The mistake is not using the date, it is measuring the result against last month instead of the same half-year a year earlier, which is the only thing that tells a recurring pay date apart from a result that actually built something new.