Every year the big brands save their best work for Christmas, so we thought we’d sit down with a brew and watch the 2023 crop for the very first time, with the camera rolling. There’s a lot of money riding on them. The Advertising Association and WARC, who keep track of what’s spent on advertising in the UK, expect a record £9.5bn to be spent in the last three months of this year, and the Christmas adverts are the part of it that everybody talks about.
In this video, Mark and Peter give their first impressions of a whole range of festive commercials from the leading brands, including M&S, John Lewis, Asda, Aldi, Amazon and Barbour. Nothing was planned and nothing was scripted, so what you’re getting is our honest, unfiltered reaction to each one as we see it.
If you haven’t caught them all yet, this year’s adverts take some very different routes to the same place. John Lewis has a Venus flytrap called Snapper growing where the Christmas tree ought to be, in its first Christmas advert from Saatchi & Saatchi, the agency that took over this year from adam&eveDDB after more than a decade. Asda has given Michael Bublé a job as its chief quality officer, Aldi has sent Kevin the Carrot round a Christmas factory that owes a lot to Willy Wonka, and Amazon follows three old friends who decide to go sledging again. M&S has filled its adverts with famous names, and Barbour, a fellow North East business based in South Shields, has left a well-worn wax jacket in the care of Shaun the Sheep.
Along the way we talk about the stories the adverts are telling, how well they pull at the heartstrings, and the marketing thinking that’s gone on behind them. Some of them we loved and some of them we weren’t so sure about, and you may well disagree with us on a few.
If you have a business of your own to advertise, try watching them with a couple of questions in mind, whichever ones you end up liking. One is whether you’d still know whose advert it was if you missed the last five seconds, and the other is how much the story has to do with what the brand sells.
Have a watch and see whether your favourites match ours, and if it leaves you wondering why some adverts stay with you long after the decorations have come down, we’ve written about what makes a TV advert memorable.
Keep reading.
Pepsi, where’s my jet? The ad that ended up in court
In the 1990s a Pepsi advert jokingly priced a fighter jet at seven million points, and a student sent a…
The UK’s ten most memorable ad slogans, and what they have in common
The ASA asked the public which advertising slogans they remember best. Here is the top ten, and what any business…
The government wants a closer look at Sky buying ITV
The Culture Secretary says she is minded to intervene in Sky’s takeover of ITV. Here’s what she has said, what…
Ready when you are.
Tell us a little about what you're hoping to achieve and we'll take it from there.
Let's talk about your campaign