In this op-ed co-authored by Thinkerbell’s head behavioural science and Ai thinker Matt Plant and behavioural sciences thinker Maddy Ross, the pair argue whether or not Christmas advertising actually works.
Every year, marketers panic. Where’s my Christmas ad?
Logos get Santa hats. Packaging turns red. Ads fill up with snow, choirs, children, slow piano covers and the same emotional shorthand we’ve all seen a thousand times before. And almost no one stops to ask the obvious question:
Does associating my brand with Christmas increase sales?
Christmas is one of the most culturally embedded events on the planet, and every year marketers have the same thought—‘how can I promote my brand by promoting Christmas? You don’t have to—and not only that every dollar you spend promoting Christmas could be a dollar spent – not promoting yourselves.
Let The Category Do The Work
Most effective advertising either:
1. Creates a new association, or surfaces existing ones. These associations are linked to the goals people have when shopping the category.
or
2. Makes a brand easier to choose in the moment, by reinforcing that brands salience in the mind.
Generic Christmas motifs rarely do either of these things. Adding tinsel to your logo doesn’t make your brand more distinctive. It probably does the opposite. It collapses you into the same visual and emotional space as everyone else. Snowflakes are not a memory structure. Santa is not your brand asset.
Right now consumers are swimming in festive signals. The marginal value of one more Christmas cue is close to zero—and sometimes negative. We set out to test the impact of putting a culturally relevant message into a regular ad to see if it had a positive, negative or neutral impact on sales—can you guess the result?
The Research
We created two ads to sell ‘Bachelors Handbags’ (side note, these Bachelors Handbags were created by Thinkerbell and Size 11 via our Pot of Gold Initiative and make a great Christmas present for your loved ones, or maybe for people you don’t love but hang out with from time to time. Anyway, you can buy one here and it’ll get delivered just in time for Chrissy).
Both ads were near identical, with a person extolling the virtues of the bags, whilst standing in a chicken shop. Ad One featured Santa doing the selling, Ad two featured a relatively normal (if not slightly artificial looking) guy doing the selling. Both ads were then run on the meta platform with the same amount of spend per ad, with exactly the same settings used.
Santa Ad:
Regular Man Ad:
The results were startling—it was about twice as expensive to use Santa with a $26.77 cost per acquisition at checkout compared to $13.13 for the ad with the normal guy.
So What?
Our results are not an anomaly, they reflect a broader pattern in how Christmas advertising actually works. Researchers found that product-focused Christmas advertising delivers no improvement in brand attitudes over simply running normal advertising during the festive period (Gierl, 2021).
Academic research also shows that people can enjoy the emotion of Christmas ads without that feeling transferring to the brand (Cartwright, McCormick, & Warnaby, 2016). Festive cues generate warmth and attention, but they don’t automatically strengthen brand attitudes or drive choice.
System1 Group’s effectiveness data (2024) tells the same story at scale. Many Christmas ads attract attention yet fail to deliver short-term impact, often because the brand gets lost inside the story. Festive characters and symbolism belong to the season, not to any one advertiser which makes them poor tools for differentiation. That’s exactly what we saw. Santa got more reach, but the normal guy translated into more action.
Which brings us to the uncomfortable truth.
Be more interesting than Christmas.
If you’re going to do a Christmas ad then go beyond the stereotypes, and the motifs that signify Christmas to your audience, remember Christmas doesn’t need promoting. This is about what the time means, and how this is significant to your brand, and how your brand meets the need of the occasion. Christmas is not your idea (maybe unless you are Coca-Cola and have around a 100 years of paired association between Santa, Polar Bears and your brand), find a more interesting way to be relevant.
