Every November, something strange happens. The British public starts looking forward to adverts.
Not a new TV series, not football, Christmas adverts. In 2024, Kantar found that 56% of people were really looking forward to Christmas ads on TV, and 59% said they love them.
Brands are set to spend a record £14bn on UK advertising this quarter, and plenty of that will be fighting for a second of consumers' attention. But there are a few Christmas ads that don't have to fight; their audience is already waiting.
It's easy to think the magic is in the film. The song, the slow motion, the lump in your throat. But the value of emotional storytelling isn't one Christmas advert making people cry. It's years of stories, building a brand people actually look forward to hearing from. You can't buy that in a single campaign.
Think of Coca-Cola's lorries, Aldi's Kevin the Carrot and Cadbury's Secret Santa. Then there's John Lewis, which has been making Christmas ads since 2007. In 2024, one in four people told Kantar its ad was the one they were most excited to watch. This week, the country is arguing about a wooden dog.
The evidence backs this up. Les Binet and Peter Field's The Long and the Short of It looked at 996 campaigns and found that long-term growth isn't just a pile of short-term wins. Emotional campaigns were almost twice as likely to deliver top-tier profit growth over the long term. When the IPA looked at Christmas specifically, fame, emotion and TV kept coming up as the ingredients of success.
Yet most of us know all this and still do the opposite. Binet and Field put the best split at around 60:40 between brand building and sales activation, varying by category. Their later work landed on almost the same answer, and found that short-term campaigns were growing while effectiveness fell.
You can probably see it in your own numbers. Growth stalls, so the budget moves to whatever can prove itself by Friday. The dashboards look like they’re performing and the spend looks efficient, but you're mostly reaching people who were already interested and probably going to buy from you anyway, not catching the attention of new audiences.
The good news is that you don’t need a John Lewis sized budget to start. As Rory Sutherland has pointed out, we invite people to weddings with a carefully worded invitation, not a group email, because the effort is part of the message.
Brands work the same way. Taking care shows you mean it, and care doesn’t have to cost millions. So find a story that’s properly yours, and keep telling it for longer than feels comfortable. You’ll get bored of it years before your customers even notice.
Nobody's going to wait for your ad this Christmas. Keep going, though, and one day someone might.
