The best Christmas ads of all time

In the pantheon of great vintage Christmas ads, there’s a wide range of approaches a brand can take when connecting with consumers. However, there do tend to be a few through lines that elevate a run-of-the-mill holiday advert and launch it into the status of greatness, becoming as synonymous with the season as saying, “Merry Christmas.”

Part of that experience is paying attention to what customers want. “Christmas has been an iconic moment for Coca-Cola since 1931,” says Raluca Vlad, Marketing Director of Coca-Cola Italy and Albania. “Every year, we’re trying to bring more freshness, while keeping the iconicity of some key assets while trying to reinvent ourselves.” Whether that’s converting the classic Coca-Cola truck into an electric vehicle or partnering with Christmas markets, Coca-Cola focuses on embracing tradition while also meeting customers where they are.

With the holiday season often tied with emotion, the Christmas advertising season is an opportunity for your brand to demonstrate its emotional range and its values. When we’re talking about Sainsbury’s or Campbell’s or Folgers, all three brands have established a sense of emotional connection with their audience, welcoming them into the holiday season while also making sure to highlight their products.

On the other end of the spectrum, John Lewis & Partners has created a holiday expectation that they will tell a story, eventually tying the narrative to a product you can find within their stores—whether that’s Elton John’s first piano or an alarm clock that wakes up a bear just in time for Christmas. And with Coca-Cola, the brand has managed to integrate their own imagery into the culture of the holiday season. By consistently leveraging the snowy polar bear popping a bubbly, cold Coke, Coca-Cola has made their brand story a piece of Christmas canon.

Most businesses consider the holiday shopping season an essential time of the year—look at 2021, when retail holiday sales in the US reached $886.7 billion, an increase of 14.1% over 2020.¹ In terms of digital shopping, online holiday sales in the US reached $257 billion last year, an increase of 9% over 2020.² In 2021, Black Friday sales alone accounted for $8.9 billion in online spending, though that was a decrease of 1.3% from the year prior.³ Worldwide, holiday buyers spent $1.14 trillion in 2021, a 5% year-over-year increase.⁴

With so many shoppers ready to buy, holiday advertising can help your brand reach the right audiences.

Christmas advertising and holiday marketing strategies have historically ramped up in the fourth quarter, but in recent years, holiday advertising has been pushed back well into early fall. In fact, over 49% of shoppers surveyed in a Kantar Quickfire Survey responded that they begin shopping for the holidays beginning in October.⁶ In response, Christmas adverts have started debuting earlier and earlier—earning its own phenomenon name of “Christmas creep.” ⁷ In the US, the lead-up to Thanksgiving (and thus, Black Friday and Cyber Monday) serves as a nice runway for holiday marketing campaigns, but even in the UK, the spots are rolling out in early November.

In a study of John Lewis & Partners’ past five years of Christmas adverts,⁵ findings showed that the 2021 release date of November 4 (the earliest release of the John Lewis & Partners advert) had a greater week-to-week brand ad awareness score than the 2020 release, showing a greater return when factoring in the full-funnel marketing experience. Considering that holiday shopping kicks off in earnest in late November, the brand awareness campaigns that launch in early November give audiences three weeks or so with ad spots before making purchasing decisions.

In 2021, Amazon Ads and Kantar conducted a survey of 500 US consumers to learn more about how they’re planning to shop for the holidays in 2021. The majority—67% of respondents—said they planned to complete their gift shopping after Black Friday and Cyber Monday. If you do the math, that’s $737 billion in industry-wide retail sales for the post­Black Friday/Cyber Monday holiday shopping period, alone—all in the 30 days leading up to Christmas.

All that said, the final two months of the year are the most traditional time for Christmas adverts to begin. While early adverts can help start conversations earlier, John Lewis & Partners’ best-performing commercials have ultimately been released later in November.