Christmas TV ads continue to captivate audiences and dominate the creative spotlight.
Advertisers are expected to spend a record £10.5bn during this year’s festive season, according to data released this month by the Advertising Association and WARC. This marks a 7.8%increase from last year’s spend of £9.7bn.
Read the pages of Campaign at any time in the past few weeks and they have been filled with TV ad after TV ad competing to be this year’s Christmas No 1. It’s a festive feast for anyone who loves the art of TV advertising, with the great and the good proclaiming their love (or hate) of the next carrot, cashmere, fairy, oven glove sock puppet (is that even a thing?) or giant to hit our screens.
It’s the golden quarter for consumer spending, so no wonder everyone is fighting for their share of the pie – and TV’s still unrivalled position as the OG of brand effectiveness means it remains the battleground for our hearts and minds. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have a blended media approach, of course, you should, but when it comes to grabbing attention TV is still king – not TikTok, not X, not Insta, not anything else.
And research from Kantar reinforces this unequivocally. It shows positive sentiment towards Christmas ads is the highest since measurement began, with 59% of people saying they "love" Christmas TV ads, up from 51% in 2023. While 48% of consumers last year were "really looking forward to seeing Christmas ads on TV", this figure has now lifted to 56%.
It’s a time of year when everyone needs a much-welcomed feeling of Christmas joy. Everyone.Whether you’re in an agency and have been staring at too many pieces of blank paper for the past few months, looking for the inspiration to go again. Whether you’re a client worrying about hitting that next forecast. Or a consumer worried about how much Christmas is going to cost(again).
Despite all the worries and pressures that come with it, Christmas and that holiday feeling it brings is the national antidote to the sometimes mundane day-to-day. And ads have to reflect this if they want to resonate – beware being dull at Christmas.
Scroll through Campaign and you can’t help but see headlines such as “How would you rate this year’s first wave of Christmas ads”? or “Christmas 2024 round-up: Watch all the festive ads”.
As an industry, we’re talking about the ads. Brilliant. Why? Because commercially, they matter at this time of year. Well yes. But mostly because they’re a feast for the creative senses. We’re enthralled by the debate. Who has truly captured the spirit of Christmas this year? Which creative is the most original? Has someone unlocked an insight I hadn’t thought about? Who is taking the craft cup home this year? Or which ad just made me feel good about life more than any other?
But it’s not just us (or our clients) talking in our own echo chamber. Christmas TV ads are anticipated and looked forward to by the very people we want to take notice. Which means Christmas TV ads break out of our world and into the mainstream media.
A quick Google (other search engines are available) brings up news stories across every media title you can think of… The Daily Mail, The Sun, Hello, The Express, Gloucestershire Live... they’re all at it. TV ads are themselves news. And this happens because the ads are in themselves entertainment.
(For reference, Tesco is currently winning the battle of the heartstrings and Kevin the Carrot the populist vote… but there are still plenty of days before Christmas, and that could all change).
And there’s a lesson there, I think. People still want to be entertained by TV advertising as much as by the programmes on TV. It was ever thus (but maybe it got forgotten a little along the way).
According to research published through Thinkbox, Nielsen’s analysis of 500 campaigns to quantify the impact of advertising elements on sales showed that Creativity is the key sales driver. It accounts for 47% of the overall contribution to sales delivered by advertising elements.
And, effectiveness guru, Peter Field’s latest white paper, Why TV is at the Heart of Effectiveness, highlights that TV advertising – even for 16- to 34-year-olds – accounts for the vast majority of video advertising time.
But why are we mostly achieving those break-out moments at Christmas?
We have a value in our agency that is “We’re not the Tax Office”. It is a reminder to everyone that we should each play our part in making work fun. Our role is to capture the attention of our audiences, surprise them, entertain them and be talked about. Never dull.
Maybe it’s time to take the momentum of Christmas ads into the rest of the year. What will the breakout news headline be for your brands’ ads when Christmas is gone and your next 30" is about to launch? It’s not all about Xmas.
Fergus McCallum - Chief Executive Officer
As featured in Campaign