This Christmas, Don’t Let Emotion Outshine Your Brand 🎄💖

Okay, first things first: We’re slightly disappointed in ourselves that it’s still a few days out from 🎃 Halloween and we’re already talking about 🎄 Christmas ads! But, truth be told, as a research agency dedicated to maximizing the effectiveness of advertising, the holiday season for us is akin to children in a candy store 🍭 Eight weeks of dissecting the season’s biggest blockbusters from the world’s leading brands created by the most prestigious creative agencies? Yes, please! 🤩

But what’s important to remember is that the fundamental ingredients for making effective advertising don’t change based on the time of year. And with the holiday season inherently being one where people experience heightened emotions, if we were to—for example—judge advertising success based on creative elements alone (i.e. the emotional response elicited), then we would inevitably arrive on the very blunt conclusion that every Christmas ad is a winner. (And consequently award them all gold stars! ⭐️)

Think about your own experience last Christmas: Did holiday ads, overall, strike a chord and make you feel the feels? But fast-forward to January and how many of them could you still link back to the correct advertiser? Aldi’s Kevin the Carrot (for those of you in the UK)? The Coca-Cola Christmas Trucks? Who else? Or did they all start blending into one big seasonal “sea of sameness”?

The thing is, even marketers who are deeply engaged in all industry happenings still have a hard time remembering the advertiser behind some of the season’s biggest blockbusters. So if you then took a step back and put yourself in the shoes of the average consumer, what would suddenly dawn on you is the sheer volume of advertising wastage at Christmas. It’s why the quote below rings so true…

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Put simply, the danger with placing a disproportionate emphasis on creativity (or more specifically, “emotion”) is that it’s at odds with what the empirical evidence tells us about how advertising works. In short, if people can’t remember who an ad is for then it’s failed to do its primary job: Building “mental availability” (a term popularized by Byron Sharp in his highly influential publication, How Brands Grow).

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With that in mind we took a closer look at the near decade of data we’ve accumulated on Christmas ads to understand how they perform on the two key components for building mental availability:

1. Creativity (strength of emotional response)
2. Commerciality (strength of brand linkage)

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The results paint a stark picture: There is zero relationship between how creative (i.e. emotional) a Christmas ad is, and how successfully it encodes the correct advertiser in people’s memories.

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By the same token, this doesn’t take anything away from the fact that emotion is mandatory for advertising success—given it enhances the depth of mental processing and strengthens memory encoding. But marketers must remember that this is ultimately only one half of the equation when it comes to the pursuit of advertising effectiveness. What distinguishes advertising from art is that it serves a commercial purpose—which means that advertising is ineffective if it doesn’t forge an indelible link to the brand.

Therefore, neither the short- or long-term impact of an ad can be predicted with any level of accuracy through creative elements alone. And while we can already hear many of you out there saying “Duh!”, we can assure you that this unfortunately needs to be said… and often repeated ad nauseum!

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Today we’re excited to formally launch our annual deep dive into the year’s most creative and effective Christmas ads. So it’s time to unpack those ugly Christmas sweaters and get yourself strapped in, because this Christmas we’re celebrating the crème de la crème and those who successfully elevated themselves above the season’s dreaded “sea of sameness”. To provide some early insights into what we have in store, stew on this: Defying conventional wisdom, Christmas ads are in fact (significantly) less likely than average to deliver on both of the core pillars necessary for building mental availability. Which brands defied the odds and created a Christmas Cracker in 2024? Stay tuned…!

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