Christmas ads: where are the ideas?

Year after year, brands give their agencies essentially the same brief: make me a Christmas ad. Christmas ads have become the equivalent of the Super Bowl – the pressure is huge. 

And so is the difficulty. Not only are your competitors all doing the same ad at the same time, but there’s a limited number of things to be said. 

We’re all rifling through the same box of tricks that was picked clean years ago. 

You’ve got Santa, gift-giving (‘be thoughtful!’), the family coming together… and that’s it. Everyone is scrambling to come up with something different, but we’re all rifling through the same box of tricks that was picked clean years ago. 

Above: This year's John Lewis Christmas spot, says The Moon Unit, has echoes of JL spots past; but is that because we're all 'rifling through the same box of tricks that was picked clean years ago'?

For example, this year’s John Lewis ad [above], in which a boy inadvertently grows a giant Venus flytrap instead of a Christmas tree, is written to the same formula – kid makes weird friend – as the brand’s previous efforts, like Monty the Penguin from 2014, and Unexpected Guest of 2021. Frankly, we’ve run out of ideas.

The website of Joe La Pompe, the Paris-based advertising plagiarist detector, features a rogues’ gallery of Christmas ads that are direct rip-offs of other ads. For example, he points out that this 2020 ad for a German pharmacy is similar to this one for an Italian energy company, which was made three years earlier. 

Frankly, we’ve run out of ideas.

Both films feature a grandfather working-out with weights, who then visits his family for Christmas and is strong enough to lift up his grandchild so they can place the star at the top of the Christmas tree.  

Above: This spot for Fussy, featuring carolling armpits, is 'probably the weirdest Christmas ad ever made'.

Unfortunately, the urgency to avoid what’s already been done has driven some brands to create work that’s so ‘out-there’, it would have been better if they hadn’t tried. 

The 2022 spot for Fussy [above], featuring carolling armpits, is probably the weirdest Christmas ad ever made. And this 2016 film, featuring 10 hours of US actor Nick Offerman sitting in front of a log fire for Lagavulin whisky, is the very definition of what you do when there’s nothing left to say. 

Very few ads have successfully broken the mould.

Very few ads have successfully broken the mould. Britain’s flagship clothes-and-food retailer M&S’s 2016 spot featured Mrs Claus instead of Santa. While this 2022 Christmas ad, created by and for a UK production company, showed a family losing a member instead of coming together. Meanwhile, British supermarket Tesco’s 2020 effortcelebrated naughty behaviour instead of thoughtfulness.

Being different may be slightly easier in the southern hemisphere, where a particularity of the Aussie/Kiwi Christmas (it’s summer) leads to ads like Aldi’s surfing Santas that could never be replicated in northern climes.

But these are rare exceptions.