The race to make the greatest Christmas ad

Every New Year’s Day, Emma Bisley starts asking herself the same question: who is going to win Christmas this year? Since 2023, the cherubic 34-year-old has been head of campaigns for Sainsbury’s, Britain’s second-largest supermarket chain. She thinks about winning Christmas the same way the Grinch thinks about stealing it, which is to say nearly all the time.

When Bisley’s friends think of her, they often think of Christmas too. For her hen do, someone dressed as a giant electrical plug after the breakout star of “The Big Night”, the first Christmas campaign Bisley worked on, back in 2018. It featured an elaborate school musical, in which a little boy dressed as a plug launches himself, prongs first, into a giant socket, thereby turning on all the lights on the stage.

Plugboy became a minor celebrity. Sainsbury’s had him turn on its Christmas lights in a car park in Cornwall, even as some anxious parents complained about the ad. (What if their children attempted to plug themselves into real sockets?) That year, most in the advertising world agreed that Sainsbury’s won Christmas. Ever since, Bisley has been hunting for the next big idea.

Nine months out from the 2024 season, Bisley arrived for a meeting at the London-based advertising agency New Commercial Arts (NCA). It was March, so mince pies and Quality Street chocolates had been laid out to get everyone in the festive mood. A team of executives had assembled to detail four possible plans of attack.

Last year, Sainsbury’s had not won Christmas. Its ad featured a cameo from the 1980s singer Rick Astley. “It’s stodgy as an undercooked stollen,” was the Evening Standard’s verdict. It had been outdone by rival Marks and Spencer, which persuaded Ryan Reynolds to be the voice of a woollen mitten. Still, New Commercial Arts had only won the Sainsbury’s account in April that year. By its own admission, the process had been rushed.

The other supermarkets had a mixed 2023. Asda had definitely not won Christmas, splashing out on Michael Bublé for little reward. John Lewis, the Manchester City of Christmas in the 2010s, had all but surrendered, putting out an ad starring a giant Venus flytrap that proved so divisive that an argument broke out about it on Good Morning Britain. The clear winner had been the German megachain Aldi, with the latest instalment in the adventures of its festive mascot, a daredevil carrot called Kevin. Kevin has added £618mn in sales over the past six years, according to the World Advertising Research Center. Aldi had crushed Christmas.

In Britain today, first screenings of Christmas adverts are treated like film premieres. One-third of us are more excited by that year’s Christmas ads than whatever’s arriving at the movie theatre. Newspapers review and rank them. Topics trend on social media because of them. Links are forwarded, sides taken. When a dog from a John Lewis ad died, it made the news. In an age where Britons feel more divided than ever, arguing about Christmas advertising brings the nation together.

The Christmas ad season is often described as the UK equivalent of the Super Bowl, America’s premier advertising event. For this year’s Super Bowl, some £500mn was spent to target 335mn Americans. This Christmas, UK advertisers will spend £1.4bn to reach a population one-fifth of that size, admittedly over a number of weeks rather than all in one day. “Napoleon derided us as a nation of shopkeepers,” says James Murphy, NCA’s bespectacled co-founder. “I think we’re actually a nation of shoppers. Retail brands feel like public property. They belong to us.”

For a general goods retailer like John Lewis, the Christmas season can be as much as half of annual turnover. For a supermarket like Sainsbury’s, which makes its highest profit margin on its “Taste the Difference” premium range of food and drink, the difference between winning and losing Christmas can be hundreds of millions of pounds. The success of Kevin the Carrot had helped nudge Aldi into the supermarket “big four” in 2022. Sainsbury’s needed a response. A review at HQ had alighted upon the following battle tactic: “Do less. Do it bigger. Do it joyfully.”

This was the dilemma facing Bisley at the March meeting, as four senior agency staffers stood up to present ideas to their colleagues. Each read out a script in turn, switching between various voices as best they could. The reality of TV pitches, it turns out, is often more am-dram than Mad Men. One idea was about the roles we each play within our family at Christmas. It was joyful, thought Bisley, but was it big enough? One was a bit slapstick, a bit out there. It was big, but was it joyful enough? A third was both big and joyful, with a warm message to boot but to Bisley, who thinks about ideas in terms of trying on wedding dresses, it just didn’t feel right.

Then, NCA’s lightly bearded chief creative officer, Ian Heartfield, stood up. His idea was about the BFG, Roald Dahl’s jovial giant, and how he would help Sainsbury’s save Christmas. Heartfield had been practising his West Country accent for the part. Big? Absolutely. Joyful? You bet. But, crucially, big and friendly — just, the executives felt, like Sainsbury’s. The BFG even had what marketers like to call “stretch”, the ability to reach across several formats. “You could imagine him on the radio,” Bisley told me. “You could imagine him on a big poster.” This was it, thought Bisley. This was how Sainsbury’s would win Christmas.

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The tale of Christmas advertising can be divided into two chapters: before John Lewis and after. In 2011, when the venerable high-street brand released its seminal Christmas advert, “The Long Wait”, a whole new industry was born. The ad told the story of a young boy impatiently counting down the days until Christmas morning, rushing through his meals, gazing out the window at the snow, staring forlornly at the clock, only to reveal, in the final few seconds, that all along he’d been desperate to give a gift rather than receive one.

It was an emotional breakthrough. Just a few years before, it had been perfectly acceptable for Woolworths to rattle through nine product plugs in 40 seconds via the medium of a singing dog. Suddenly that approach seemed cloth-eared. Suddenly, we all wanted Christmas adverts that made us feel something. And the British high street, seeing the money to be made, wanted that for us too. John Lewis soared, growing at four-and-a-half times the industry average over the 2010s, according to a report by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. For every £1 it spent on Christmas ads, it got £10 back.

By the middle of the decade, Christmas advertising had become an arms race. Sainsbury’s was making short films about the first world war Christmas Truce, when British and German soldiers had a kickaround in no man’s land. M&S had Mrs Claus delivering presents by helicopter. Waitrose made a poignant love story about two robins. Budgets were in the millions. A national obsession was born and the man behind it all was Ben Priest.

Priest was always going to be an adman. He is 56, slim and manages to be both serene and intense at the exact same time. At school, he’d act out the lines from his favourite commercials: the Honey Monster, Cresta Bear, ads for milk starring Sid James or for “lip-smacking, thirst-quenching, ace-tasting, motivating” Pepsi. This was the 1970s, when ads went playground viral. It was only later that he realised they originated from the same person, the British advertising legend John Webster. Priest’s godfather was advertising icon Alfredo Marcantonio, known for his pioneering work on Volkswagen in the 1960s. They’d write ads together when Marcantonio came over for Sunday lunch.

When Priest’s start-up agency, adam&eve, won the John Lewis account in February 2009, they were given a single task: bring the emotion back. People knew the brand, but it felt like a relic, both nostalgic — where their parents had their wedding list, where their best towels were from — and practical, the place you went to buy an ironing board. “There was a big emotional attachment that had been forgotten,” he says.

The first Christmas ad Priest made for John Lewis, later that year, was based on the premise that Christmas never felt as good as when you were a kid. How could they bring that feeling back? It showed children opening incongruously grown-up gifts, a laptop, an expensive camera, an espresso machine, only to reveal they were adults all along. A soulful cover of Guns N’Roses’s “Sweet Child O’ Mine” set the tone. It was not a viral hit, but they were on to something.

By winter 2014, when Sainsbury’s pitted their Christmas truce ad, “1914”, against John Lewis’ “Monty the penguin”, the press treated the rivalry as something akin to a new Blur vs Oasis

The next one, a montage of various people wrapping gifts set to an Ellie Goulding cover of “Your Song” by Elton John, was less successful. But it taught them a lesson. They needed to focus on a single story. Earlier that year, they’d made their first viral hit for John Lewis, the story of one woman’s life from crib to old age, in a single seamless cut, to a cover of Billy Joel’s “She’s Always a Woman”. The tagline: “Our lifelong commitment to you”. People mentioned the ad to Priest at dinners. Old friends got in touch on Facebook. “The internet opened up,” he tells me. This, he felt, was the way to go. The first two Christmas ads had both been about gifts — first unwrapping, then wrapping — but if you wanted to sell emotion, maybe the products were getting in the way.

The gift in “The Long Wait” is shown right at the end, with its childishly haphazard wrapping yet to be removed. (Though, as Priest points out, every stitch of clothing and item of furniture we see is from John Lewis.) They did no market research.

“We knew the brand. We knew what we wanted to do.” The ad debuted on TV during The X Factor, but it didn’t need the help. Millions sought it out online. It was a topic at school assemblies. It was Radio 4’s “Thought for the Day”. The comedian Jack Whitehall presented Priest with an industry award and DMed him the next day: what would he do next year?

Priest’s team began to challenge themselves. Could you do a Christmas ad without people? “The Journey”, in 2012, followed the long trek of a snowman to get a hat and gloves for his snow woman. You never actually saw him move. Could you do an ad where Christmas itself was the present? In 2013, “The Bear and the Hare” envisioned waking up a hibernating bear, who had always slept through the season, on Christmas morning. It was addictive, says Priest, the thrill of it. Every year, he made the country cry.

The soundtracks took on a life of their own. Some became number one hits, and artists began pitching themselves. Ellie Goulding performed “Your Song” at the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. Soon, “every other ad on TV had a weepy Swedish recording of a song” and every high-street brand wanted a John Lewis-style Christmas ad. By winter 2014, when Sainsbury’s pitted its Christmas Truce ad, “1914”, against John Lewis’s “Monty the Penguin”, the press treated the rivalry as something akin to a new Blur vs Oasis.

Then something strange happened. Emotional ads that featured no products were creating sales of their own. John Lewis sold enough toy Monty the Penguins to pay for the ad itself. As online shopping began to bite, the possibilities for spin-off sales became a key consideration. Could the ad create toys? Wrapping paper? Onesies? In 2016, when John Lewis made “Buster the Boxer”, about a dog watching on while squirrels, foxes and badgers bounced on his owner’s new trampoline, every animal character became its own plushie. An ebook version was narrated by the radio DJ and presenter Lauren Laverne.

But success meant Priest no longer had the same creative freedom he once enjoyed. One year, he pitched a story about two elderly men, neighbours and bitter rivals who attempt to outdo each other every Christmas when decorating their homes. Finally, one moves out, leaving the other deflated. Without his enemy, it’s all meaningless. Then one night, the doorbell goes. A present is on the stoop: a framed picture of his former neighbour beaming in front of his new house. It’s covered in Christmas lights.

“And I was like, we should do this,” Priest says. “There’s no cuddly toys, no pyjamas. It’s about two old men who hate each other. It’s a love story.” It was, in many ways, a classic John Lewis ad. Emotional, sure, but surprisingly so. Like a good joke, when you don’t see the pay-off coming. John Lewis declined. The idea had no stretch: nobody was going to buy plushies of two old men.

Priest decided to go out on a high. He left the agency he’d founded in 2018. “I’d been in advertising for 30 years,” he says. “And I felt I’ve done this now, really done this, and I didn’t want to keep doing it in smaller or different ways. I wanted to go home.” His co-founder, James Murphy, went soon after.

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Once upon a time, advertising was a simple business. Give the customer the facts; tell them what sets you apart. But over the course of the 20th century that began to change, as advertisers understood they were really selling a better you. By 1983, the godfather of modern advertising, David Ogilvy, said he had come to believe TV adverts with “a large content of nostalgia, charm and even sentimentality” can be “just as effective as any rational appeal”. The problem was that there was no “way to quantify the effectiveness of emotion”.

In his 2003 book, How Customers Think, Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman wrote that 95 per cent of all purchasing decisions took place in the subconscious. (This would be swiftly transposed to marketing presentations everywhere, often next to clipart of an iceberg.) But the real shift came in 2011, the same month “The Long Wait” aired, with the publication of Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. Building on research from psychologists Keith Stanovich and Richard West, Kahneman described our two systems of thought. System 1 is automatic, emotional, fast and System 2 is effortful, cognitive, slow. The concept mapped perfectly on to the rival theories of advertising. And System 1, it turned out, was steering the ship.

Two marketing experts, Les Binet and Peter Field, had a revelation. They looked through the business effects of almost 1,000 campaigns, from 1980 to 2010, and were startled by the results. “We found was the more you moved away from rational messages to pure emotion, the more effective advertising was,” Binet later told Marketing Week. They identified a further subcategory: so called “Fame” campaigns, ads so emotional people felt compelled to share them. These were almost four times more effective than every other form of advertising. Their subsequent paper, “The Long and the Short of it”, was published in 2013. It had a picture of an iceberg.

Christmas, it turned out, was the emotional mother lode. Family, sharing, loss, love, giving, receiving. Ad agencies barely knew where to begin. One place to start was the tagline. “There’s a basic rule of advertising,” says Rory Sutherland, the vice-chair of Ogilvy & Mather. “You can be as emotional as you like, but you have to have a gossamer thread tying it back to your business.” The tagline, he says, “had to touch the tarmac.”

From 2014 to 2016, Sainsbury’s went with, “Christmas is for sharing”. The “1914” advert, in which a British soldier smuggles a bar of chocolate into the pocket of a German trenchcoat after the Christmas Day kickabout was the perfect start. Sainsbury’s produced a replica of the chocolate bar. At one point, it was selling 5,000 every hour. Other ideas were discarded along the way. Tim Riley, creative partner of AMV BBDO, tells me that the initial plan was to get the football managers, and notorious rivals José Mourinho and Arsène Wenger, to share a Christmas lunch. (“We were thinking, OK, who are the most unlikely people you could get to share something at Christmas?”)

Competition between agencies had reached fever pitch. You could feel it, remembers Priest. “You’d have strange, not always pleasant encounters with people when they felt like they’d made a real corker.” With so many emotional ads, there were almost pile-ups. Dave Price, chief creative officer of ad agency McCann, says he pitched the same first world war ad to Aldi, but from the perspective of the German troops. (“We don’t talk about Aldi as a German brand, but we were thinking, could we?”)

The criticism intensified too. Should Sainsbury’s use the war dead to sell its sprouts? Should John Lewis be allowed to suggest that Santa isn’t real? One year, the supermarket Morrisons was investigated by the Advertising Standards Authority twice. Once for alleged sexism (its ad showed a woman doing all the work), and once over the risk of poisoning pets (a dog was given Christmas pudding). Morrisons was cleared on both occasions.

At some point, the impact began to wane. By 2017, John Lewis admitted its ads were “no longer as groundbreaking” as they had been. By 2018, its profits had dropped 56 per cent from the previous year. We had reached, as Murphy, Priest’s adam&eve co-founder, put it to me, an era of “emotionally incontinent advertising”. By then, the agency that had produced eight John Lewis ads in a row, had been bought up by the global marketing company DDB. Murphy watched on as Covid-19 hit and brands struggled to produce ads for a possible Christmas lockdown. Sainsbury’s made three 30-second home movie-style slots riffing on Christmases’ past. John Lewis made a medley of eight stories in the same ad, covering all bases. “There was a real dilemma in the industry,” he says. “Do you reflect the fragility and uncertainty of the times, or is it the job of brands to issue a rallying cry?”

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Andrew Tindall can tell you, with surprising accuracy, just how good a Christmas it will be for retailers, based on the reaction to that year’s Coca-Cola ad. Tindall is the senior vice-president of global partnerships for System1, a marketing research company which has taken the academic idea of System 1 pathways — the emotional, non-rational part of the brain that really calls the shots — and digitised it. He is 28, wears a loose tan suit and is so obsessed with advertising that, at Christmas, his mum becomes his market research. After each ad, he’ll quickly ask her what brand did that advertise?

System1 asks the same question and many others too. Over the past five years, it has come to dominate the industry. Every retail brand I spoke to for this story tests its advertising with System1. The company sends each ad via an app to 150 testers, who are paid £2 per advert. They will watch the ad once and answer a series of questions: what’s the key emotion you felt? How intense was it? How happy are you feeling? Finally, what brand did it advertise? They then watch a second time with a series of buttons on screen — Contempt, Disgust, Anger, Fear, Sadness, Neutral, Happiness, Surprise — and press for every emotion they feel.

Christmas, it turned out, was the emotional mother lode. Family, sharing, loss, love, giving, receiving. Ad agencies barely knew where to begin. One place to start was the tagline

From this data, an algorithm will give the ad a rating between one and six, reflecting how successful it was in bonding the viewer’s subconscious to the brand and, therefore, how likely they are to spend money. Around half of all five-star adverts are Christmas ads. The Coca-Cola one, a Christmas truck bowling along to the tune of “Holidays are Coming”, is always basically the same so it acts as a kind of annual bellwether, predicting the general consumer mood. It dipped to 3.9 during Covid. People didn’t want to think about Christmas. But for the past two years, as Christmas spend has rebounded, “it’s off the charts again”, says Tindall.

The ideal Christmas advert, Tindall says, should leave you feeling “intensely happy, because that will tap into the System 1 pathway, it will lead to more profit gain as a business, it will work your TV spend harder, it will literally change your behaviour”. System1 calls this the “peak-end effect”. But like any emotional journey, it requires a rising spike of sadness before the pay-off, something he says brands are still wary of creating.

On the System1 website, I watched John Lewis’s 2014 ad “Monty the Penguin”. As the ad plays, and the boy’s pet penguin begins to long for a partner, a screen to the right charts viewers’ emotional journey in a series of coloured lines, the blue of sadness spiking before it’s overtaken by the dark green of surprise (Monty gets a penguin friend for Christmas) and, finally, a tsunami of light green — happiness! — as we realise Monty was a stuffed toy all along, imagined into being by the child. “Monty” got one of System1’s highest-ever scores, a 5.9.

Most brands use System1 while they’re still making their ads to check they’re hitting the right emotional beats. The success of Aldi’s Kevin the Carrot campaigns, which feature Kevin getting into superhero-style scrapes across the dinner table, can largely be put down to System1. Aldi will send in 20-minute rough cuts of a 90-second advert, whittling it down accordingly. Is there enough peril (yellow line) when he battles an evil Swede? Does the “I pee-d” myself pun work? “We’ve taken them from three-star to 5.9,” says Tindall proudly.

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By Christmas 2021, mindful of stretched budgets as the pandemic hangover and a cost of living crisis gripped the country, the focus was once again on value. Campaigns aired earlier, letting people spread their spend. Christmas ads began to openly sell “stuff” again.

There were other shifts. In an age of social media, brands could no longer, as Murphy says, “win Christmas on a single piece of film”. YouTube had sent ads viral in the first place, but TikTok now demanded 10-second edits. At Sainsbury’s, Bisley would look at pitches and think, how does this cut down? When I asked Ian Heartfield, the NCA executive who pitched the BFG to Sainsbury’s, if they could make “The Long Wait” now, he said simply: “It’s got ‘long’ and’ wait’ in the title.” Like so many things, what the internet created it soon reclaimed.

The industry was faced with a conundrum: can you flog sausage rolls and also win hearts in the TikTok age? Murphy thought you could, and he set up NCA in 2020 with just such a task in mind. Sainsbury’s was the first retailer to sign up.

The new pitch was broader. NCA would do the big TV spot, sure, but they would offer a more holistic approach, looking after everything from social media to the feel of the Sainsbury’s app. They would even oversee the packaging of that year’s products, ensuring it matched the campaign. It’s not uncommon, Murphy told me, for him to be sitting in a meeting in spring about the design of mince pie boxes. At a meeting I attended in October, someone uttered the sentence: “I have an update on mince pie activity.”

For Sainsbury’s, the BFG campaign was a chance to put Murphy’s promise to the test. The big and friendly hero would stride over the land bringing provisions from Sainsbury’s suppliers to people’s homes, saving Christmas and showcasing the Taste the Difference range while he was at it. Sainsbury’s did its research: 87 per cent of the population had heard of the BFG. Tick. Both Sainsbury’s and the BFG were seen as “warm, friendly” and “honest and trustworthy”. Green light.

By March, they had sign-off from the Roald Dahl Story Company, on the strict condition they only use words of the BFG’s Gobblefunk language that appeared in the book. (The NCA creatives had initially had fun making up their own). A director, Sam Brown, was hired in June, at least in part for his background in food photography. Tastings took place at Sainsbury’s HQ in July to decide which food to showcase. There was a log fire.

They shot over two days in August. Brown had to reduce the BFG’s height from 100ft (imagined) to 24ft (actual). At the end of September, 54 brass and woodwind musicians entered Studio One in Abbey Road, signed NDAs and, upon learning from composer Alex Baranowski that they were there to soundtrack the BFG, grinned en masse.

Over the autumn, Bisley watched the rough cuts. She wondered: was there enough Sainsbury’s orange in it? She worried about the giant’s dirty feet. He was next to food, was that a hygiene issue? (The feet were digitally cleaned). They sent versions to System1. Bisley studied the coloured lines that came back. “When do they know it’s our brand? When do they start to feel happy?” The music was added. The green lines rose. In October, at a studio in east London, a sound effects editor wondered: is this what the BFG’s dreams sound like? He was advised to consult the book.

The finished ad launched on November 1, just after Halloween, during Coronation Street. Then the scores started to come in. Greggs had aired its first-ever Christmas ad, featuring Nigella Lawson: 4.5 stars. Asda featuring gnomes that saved Christmas and were yours for £7: 5.4 stars. Tesco went emotional as a man saw his grandfather: 4.7 stars. John Lewis didn’t go emotional enough, as a woman shopped for her sister: 4.6 stars. Waitrose went multi-part for a star-studded murder mystery that was yet to have a conclusion when it was tested: 3.6 stars — no peak-end.

Sainsbury’s BFG ad got a whopping 5.9, the second-highest rated Christmas ad on System1. The highest was Coca-Cola, with the same “Holidays are Coming” ad it had been running since 1995, albeit with an AI tweak this year which was widely mocked on social media. Bisley was thrilled, but when we spoke last month, she was wary about declaring victory too soon. “We don’t yet know who won Christmas,” she said. That will come, naturally, from sales figures in January. Next year’s pitch meeting will happen not long after. Murphy already has an idea.