Most Americans have spent November seeing Black Friday ads. But on the other side of the pond, most of their British cousins are watching Christmas commercials (aka, “advertising”).
Yes, Black Friday sales have become common in the UK over the past decade, but Brits don’t celebrate Thanksgiving. Therefore, right after Halloween, most digital marketers in Old Blighty launch their Christmas advertising campaigns.
If digital marketers in the US want a preview of creative effectiveness in December, they should find a quiet moment during the current shopping frenzy on this side of the pond to analyze and evaluate which are the most effective Christmas ads for 2023. UK
Measuring Advertising Effectiveness
In this article, I used DAIVID, an AI-powered creative effectiveness platform to analyze and measure ad effectiveness.
DAIVID has created a Creative Effectiveness Score (CES), which is a holistic metric that combines the three main drivers of effectiveness: attention, emotions, and memory.
The ads are evaluated using facial coding, eye tracking, and survey responses to determine which had the greatest emotional and commercial impact on viewers. In total, 3,600 respondents took part in the study, which analyzed 24 Christmas campaigns.
The UK’s most influential Christmas ads this year
Using DAIVID’s methodology, here are the six most effective Christmas ads from Great Britain that should have the biggest impact on the hearts, minds and wallets of Christmas shoppers during this year’s festive season (unless you’re into Festivus). .
1. “The world needs more Santas Coca-Cola,” with a Creative Effectiveness Score (CES) of 7.61 out of 10.
2. “lego group holiday hero,” with a CES of 7.55
3. “Boots Christmas Advertisement 2023 | #Give happiness shoes uk,” with a CES of 7.27.
4. “Duracell | bunny saved christmas,
5. “As good as gold Shelter,” is tied with CES of 7.11.
6. “Snapper: The Perfect Tree | John Lewis & Partners | christmas ad 2023,” is tied with CES of 7.11.
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What makes these ads effective?
I asked Ian Forrester, CEO and Founder of DAIVID, for his opinion on this year’s most effective holiday ads:
- “Coke certainly made Christmas a splash with its ‘The World Needs Santa’ campaign, which generated the strongest emotional responses of any Christmas ad this year. But this opportunity did more than deliver an emotional punch.”
- “Like the Lego and Boots ads, which make up the rest of the top three, it grabbed people’s attention by trying to do something different from the usual festive vibes and combine it with strong branding.”
- “Other ads like Shelter also performed well, but missed the top three due to poor brand recall. With so many festive ads coming out at the same time, advertisers need to do everything they can to grab attention from their competitors by doing something different and memorable.
Now, I’ve known Forrester since 2012, when he worked on Unruly. And over the years, we would discuss the most shared Christmas ads every year, until he left that company in 2019.
At the time, the retailer, John Lewis and its advertising agency Adam & Eve/DDB often created Christmas adverts to top the charts. These included “Monty the Penguin” in 2014, “Man on the Moon” in 2015, “Buster the Boxer” in 2016, and “The Boy and the Piano” in 2018.
But they seem to have lost their magic formula of creating tear-jerking (but festive) ad fare around “Edgar the Excitable Dragon” in 2019, “Give a Little Love” in 2020, and “The Unexpected Guest” in 2021 Is.
Digital marketers on this side of the pond can guess what happened next. John Lewis changed agencies. Saatchi & Saatchi and production company Megaforce, which took the creative reins for the first time this year, produced “Snapper: The Perfect Tree.”
Forrester’s advertising research company took John Lewis’ Christmas campaigns from the past 13 years and ranked them using their CES criteria. In total, 1,950 respondents participated in the study.
What did David discover?
Well, “Snapper: The Perfect Tree” was one of the top four (or five) most effective John Lewis Christmas ads, behind only “Buster the Boxer” with a CES score of 7.4, “Man on the Moon” with 7.3, ” The Boy and the Piano” tied with a 7.2, and “Monty the Penguin” tied with a 7.1.
so what does that mean?
Forrester said:
- “Although this year we saw a new agency at the top, Saatchi & Saatchi didn’t mess too much with the winning John Lewis formula, but still raised itself above the sea of sameness. ‘Snapper: The Perfect Tree’ looks and feels like a John Lewis Christmas advert.’
- “This involves incorporating many of John Lewis’s tried-and-trusted emotions – including warmth, aesthetic appreciation and joy – to good effect. These emotions played a huge role in increasing the overall effectiveness.
- “The ad also scored well for attention-grabbing, the second strongest ad we have seen since the John Lewis Christmas ad, and the good branding resulted in a strong brand recall score. Yet strong negative sentiments, especially confusion, kept the ad from rising up the charts.
- “This was largely due to the depiction of the Venus flytrap as a Christmas tree. This surprised people and many found it funny, with 14.7% of viewers finding it hilarious, but it also confused almost the same number of people (14.0%). High levels of boredom (11.2%) also kept the ad from making the top three.
There you have it: critical data and strategic insights.
And that’s a winning combination, no matter what month it is or what side of the pond you’re on.
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The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily those of Search Engine Land. Staff writers are listed here.
