THE WORLD OF EFFECTIVE CHRISTMAS ADS BY JON EVANS

While it may be too early to start putting up the Christmas tree, decorating, and shopping for Christmas presents, the ideal time to think about Christmas campaigns is the earlier the better, according to Jon Evans, Chief Customer Officer at System1. In his seminar, The Gift of Great Christmas Creative, he looked at the principles of effective creative and campaigns that resonated with the British public in 2023.

Learn from the best Christmas ads of 2023 and take time to think about this year’s Christmas campaign strategy.

System1 focuses on emotions

System1 is a creative effectiveness platform harnessing the power of emotion to drive profitable growth for the world’s leading brands. With a database of over 100,000 ads, System1 enables brands to benchmark their ads against their competitors. In addition, it offers expert advice to help brands improve the effectiveness of their ad campaigns and creative ideas.

“At System1, we measure emotions because emotions have been shown to predict behaviour better than anything else. We’ve studied emotions for many, many years and we like to look at both the long-term and short-term impact of advertising,”

says Jon Evans, Chief Customer Officer and host of Uncensored CMO.



System1 focuses on three main measurements:

• Star rating: Star rating measures people’s emotional response to an ad.


• Spike rating: A forecast of the short-term impact indicates the probability that a given ad will trigger an increase in sales.


• Fluency rating: This rating shows how well the public can recognise who the advertiser is.

When combined, these three measurements provide an excellent overview of who is doing the best job at Christmas. “How are we doing it?” Jon Evans asks, answering the question: “We ask people how they feel, and we use basic human emotions – happiness, surprise, anger, contempt. Sometimes people don’t actually feel anything. In fact, quite often people feel nothing after seeing an ad. So, we add neutrality as well,” he adds. After weighing the emotions and applying the coefficient, System1 gets a relevant star rating.

“About half of the ads we see elicit no response at all.”

Jon Evans

In fact, the biggest challenge for advertisers is to evoke a feeling in people. So why not learn from last year’s superstars?

New trends

According to System1, the level of creativity has been steadily improving over the last four years. This is amazing given the recent troubles the world has faced (such as the Covid-19 pandemic). Another trend is the large number of new advertisers and the increasing diversity of advertisers and segments. “For some reason, retailers seem to be very, very good at creating emotive advertising at Christmas. It’s naturally the most competitive time of the year and many retailers focus on Christmas to attract new customers,” says Jon Evans.

Top scorers

Another specificity of last year is the number of top scorers. According to Jon Evans, it’s rare to see a five-star ad at Christmas. And to see so many 5.9 ratings, which is the maximum on the System1 scale, is truly exceptional, he says. “It's a bit like the 100m final at the London Olympics in 2012, where just about every record was broken in the final.”

It seems that 2023 was an exceptional year with exceptional performance and lots of advertisers doing a top-notch job.



Beyond star ratings, System1 also focused on how easy it was to recognise the brand. The image below shows the ranking of brands that stood out and those that people remembered. In the top right, you can see that brands like Coca-Cola, Aldi and Amazon did an amazing job of being memorable.



How did they do it? One reason is fluency and consistency allowing the audience to instantly recognise who they are seeing.



Star ratings are far from all-inclusive. In fact, it is easier for some categories to evoke a “feeling” in people. These are, for example, the confectionery, pet equipment and other segments. These categories usually have higher star ratings. “Of course, retailers selling batteries, for example, have a much harder time. For such categories, the average might be at two stars,” says Jon Evans. Brands that have stood out despite being in an unfavourable category include Barbour, Duracell and Sky. These brands perform much better than the average in their category. “We owe a big round of applause to these advertisers, who may not be at the top of the list but are actually performing exceptionally well, relatively speaking in the context of their category,” concludes Jon Evans.

Advertising that brings happiness

The stronger the emotion people feel, the more likely they are to make a purchase decision. Last year, Amazon provided the greatest intensity of happiness. Amazingly, it made more than 80% of its audience feel happiness on a very intense level.

This success was due to the great story, the evocation of strong emotions through the soundtrack, the way the story was told and the characters used within the ad.

In the video, you can watch the evolution of emotions during the ad in the top right corner. The green colour is positive, the blue colour represents sadness, the red colour is negative, and the grey colour is neutral. The bottom part (pink line) shows the percentage of viewers who recognised the brand:


Video: Amazon – Joy is Shared

Five golden themes of Christmas advertising

According to Jon Evans, the five proven leaders of Christmas campaigns include a story with a punchline, the ability to take “a little different” approach, a consistent strategy, festive humour and human contact.

1. A story with a punchline

The most consistent Christmas advertiser in recent years has undoubtedly been Aldi with its popular Kevin the Carrot.


Video: Aldi – Kevin and the Christmas Factory

Five years of five-star Christmas ads from Aldi – something no other brand can boast except Coca-Cola with its trucks. The phenomenon of the Aldi ad is Kevin the Carrot. The Kevin ads combine several elements that are particularly effective in advertising: vivid characters, cultural references, humour and consistency.

2. The ability to take “a little different” approach

There are often debates about how to turn the whole Christmas thing on its head and do something surprising. And the TUI travel agency has managed to turn this idea into reality:


Video: Happy Holidays from TUI

Its debut Christmas advert tells the story of Christmas elves enjoying a well-deserved holiday after delivering their presents. In the short film, the elves are on holiday at the beach. They indulge in cocktails and massages and successfully ignore phone calls from their “boss” Santa Claus. The light-hearted ad, created in collaboration with Leo Burnett and model Andy Gent, is set to the song “Livin’ La Vida Loca” by Ricky Martin.

3. Consistent strategy

“We did a little research a few years ago, looking at advertising wear-out. We found almost no evidence that advertising actually wears out,” says Jon Evans. The study found that ad ratings increased by 0.7 stars when repeatedly tested over different time periods. So, it’s clear that consistency can indeed pay off.

Coca-Cola is undoubtedly one of the most consistent brands. But it’s not the only one that relies on consistency. For example, a newer advertiser – TK Maxx – is hard on Coca-Cola’s heels:


Video: TK Maxx – A Festive Farm

TK Maxx earned five stars from System1 for their original Christmas ad featuring animals showing off branded clothing bought to them as gifts by a farmer. In addition, the star of TK Maxx’s 2020 Christmas ad – a small goat – returned to the campaign.

4. Festive humour

Christmas is a time when it’s good to change things up a bit. And it’s certainly possible to inject a little humour into the festive season:


Video: Morrisons Christmas Ad 2023

Morrisons’ campaign focuses on one of the important but very subtle helpers in the run-up to the Christmas celebrations – kitchen mitts. They dance and sing in the ad. The ad used two big themes for 2023 – Christmas traditions and animation.

5. Human contact

According to Jon Evans, the most important role of Christmas is human relationships. “We noticed this when we tested Christmas ads during the Covid-19 pandemic. That’s when we saw the power of togetherness at Christmas, of time spent with friends and family, and the power of the emotions that togetherness creates,” he says, citing Boots, which has done a great job of showing the power of interpersonal contact at Christmas:


Video: Boots – Give Joy

In its Christmas ad, Boots tells the story of a mum and daughter who set off on a journey to the North Pole to make sure Santa gets his present. Like most of the best festive ads in 2023, it’s a feel-good ad with plenty of traditional Christmas magic, but it has something extra: a modern, action-packed twist.

At the end of the seminar, Jon Evans developed a discussion on the Christmas adverts seen, joined by Kate Waters, Director of Client Strategy & Planning at ITV, Ed Smith, GM Integrated Marketing Europe at Amazon, and Alison Hoad, Chief Strategy Officer at Publicis London.

Source: system1group.com