Is The Golden Age Of The Great Christmas Ad Over? đ€
Marketing Unfiltered #55 - Time To Retire The Xmas Carrots, Boxers and Penguins?
Good morning leaders, today Harry breaks out the festive spirits and questions whether we have lost the art of making a great Christmas adâŠ
maybe this weekâs Waitrose 4minute âadâ with Keira Knightly might lead a change for next yearâs line up.
Thanks for the DMs on last weeks how to plan for AI and Agentic traffic in 2026 - I have expanded out to give you a guide & the 6 recommendations action to take.
Have a great weekend and let us know what you think below
Danny & Harry
Long ago, in a cosy alley off Memory Lane, there lived a number of brands whose houses came alive at Christmas, heralding a time of good cheer with the advent of adverts so heartwarming they could power a whole nation.
FMCG, lifestyle, and F&B all got into the spirit of the season, but the big retailers were the champions, led by their messiah, John Lewis & Partners.
Calendars across Adland would be opened in anticipation until the hallowed moment (usually around four minutes past Halloween) when that seasonâs crop of high cost, celeb featuring branded masterpieces could be brought out to play the UKâs heart strings like an emotionally supercharged harpist whoâd been at the Baileys.
But do these costly efforts have the same cultural and commercial relevance that they once did?
The Case For The Prosecution
We live in the most fractious media landscape in history. Traditional media was matched, then superseded by digital then AI has come in to cannibalise everything from content creation to natural search. There are more TV channels, social networks and content platforms than ever before, and brand advertising budgets are more likely to be spent with young pup KOLs, creators and influencers or on YouTube and TikTok than with the old dogs of ITV and Channel 4.
We also live in a post-woke world led by a divisive narcissist and his cronies but populated by cerebral and socially active consumers. Itâs a world in which opinions around themes of love, loss, identity, gender, class and mental health mean advertisers have to tread an increasingly brittle tightrope if they want to spark an emotional reaction without risk of being cancelled.
Whilst the advent of AI in the creative industries should allow hand crafted brand ads to stand out for their quality, itâs done the opposite. The tech is already so good you can create a CGI style ad in the themes of your choosing in no time, so itâs the nuance of the copywriters and talent of the director that needs to elevate Christmas ads by being Oscar-worthy in their excellence thus enhancing their ability to influence cultural sentiment and become the zeitgeist.
Authenticity â in the execution, celebrity stars and music choices â is paramount.
Finally, thereâs the driving force â the big creative and media agencies who have been the armourers of the Christmas ad wars over the past two decades. Theyâre in trouble, teetering Goliaths smitten by a thousands Davids armed with rocks of AI, budget cuts, in-house teams and progress.
I always suspected that the biggest winners from the Christmas ad Love-In werenât the brands whoâd paid for them, but the agencies who got to carry the glowing adoration like a creds shield engraved with the words âLook How Clever We Are â Hire Us!â, ready to be wielded in pitch meetings, articles, PR guffery and awards submissions for the next eighteen months.
The Case For The Defence
âChristmas is a time for givingâ is a lovely, if hopelessly naĂŻve sentiment. Itâs a time for receiving. A time of presents, overindulgence, sentimentality and gluttony, except if youâre a marketer in which case youâll give out a sizable chunk of your quarterly media budget. Itâs Seven Deadly Sins incarnate with a religious backdrop and, for some reason, a tree garbled in more baubles than Liberaceâs boudoir with an angel being rectally probed up top.
Christmas is odd, but itâs also a time of glorious commercialism. Itâs the Champions League Final of the shopping calendar, and marketers know that despite the prohibitive media costs, they need to be in the game.
The purpose of brand advertising, as with any brand marketing, is to generate fame and the warm embrace of positive sentiment from the masses (I talk about this in more detail in our 1st Birthday Special Podcast). What a gangbusters Christmas ad can deliver is the above in owned, earned plus the original paid media channels plus you get what used to be called the water cooler moments â the word-of-mouth chatter that takes brands from anonymised entities and turns them into consumerâs friends.
Differentiation is difficult from brands, especially supermarkets. Waitrose and M&S are expensive but good. Sainsburyâs and Tesco are less expensive and pragmatic, but less socially enhancing â the like Volvo of supermarkets. ASDA, Aldi and Lidl are cheap and surprisingly good, but for some more snobbish shoppers, theyâre as socially acceptable as a verruca at a pool party. There really isnât that much to tell them apart until you get to Christmas, when they get to perform a richly narrative pantomime positively teeming with brand attributes.
âYes, weâre Waitrose/John Lewis â our ad IS this seasonâs âmust haveâ. Donât you feel all gooey and sentimental? Go on, itâs Christmas â treat yourself!â
The Christmas ad is THE brand performance of the year for the big retailers, reminding consumers of who they are and, crucially, who theyâre for not only now, but in the months to come.
What makes a good Christmas ad?
You can break down the standard crop into four categories:-
Iâm not much of a shopper, and Iâm a horrible cynic when it comes to seasonal ads, so subjectively I have no dog in this fight. Objectively, and with my day job hat on, Iâd suggest the classics, the big hitters - the ones that appear in the feature columns in the papers and get a shout out on GMTV - are consistently sentimental.
They pull on the heart strings of sadness, love, reflection and hope more than those linked to joy, humour and frivolity. They demand an emotional response, and if you can get celebs and influencers to admit to shedding a tear then you know youâre onto something.
This isnât the domain of the aggressive price promotion, the gawdy discount nor the demanding CTA â this is the peak of the brand building mountain, where âshow donât tellâ is the unequivocal rule.
The Silly Season is upon us (at least four weeks early IMHOâŠ) but the gates are open to this yearâs crop of tear jerkers and rib ticklers. I suspect they do enough heavy lifting in Q4 plus the doldrums of January to ensure theyâll be around for a while yet.
Ho Ho Ho⊠Harry Lang đ
» PS if you are struggling with understanding how to plan for human, bot, AI assistants and browser agents here is a free guide I created for you. â Danny
Often in editing, I'll use ElevenLabs to hear what the article sounds like, often imagining how readers will react & this week I imagine a laugh, a gasp and head nodding!
It definitely sounded like a vintage Harry article!
The fragmented media landscape point really hits. You cant create a monoculture moment anymore when everyones attention is split across TikTok, YouTube, and a dozen streaming services. The old John Lewis formula worked becuase everyone was watching ITV at the same time. Now the best you can hope for is that your ad gets picked apart on Twitter. I think the sentimental formula still works, but brands need to accept that the reach and impact wont be what it used to be.