During crucial holiday season, some marketers meet Christmas blues head-on in seasonal ads

Supermarket Asda’s holiday ad features night shift workers cut off by snowy weather. Retailer Matalan’s focuses on the gap between Christmas as it’s presented for Instagram, and the stressful reality for parents. And grocer Tesco’s shows a grieving family going through their first holiday season without a beloved grandmother.

Though plenty of “weepy” ads have run before (in 2018, for example, John Lewis used its Christmas spot to screen an emotional mini biopic of singer Elton John), they haven’t been as closely grounded in everyday issues as some of the ads in this year’s lineup.

So, while they’re not quite as serious as Ken Loach films, they are departures from typical tinsel and carol-singing holiday fare. The first shot of Tesco’s ad, “Feed Your Christmas Spirit,” starts off at a bleak-looking gasworks, for example.

There’s good reason for that. Economic anxiety among consumers is rife on both sides of the Atlantic, while last week’s U.S. election will have left (more or less) half the country dismayed going into December.

“We’ve got a new government. A lot of our customers just had their [winter fuel allowance] taken away from them. A lot of our customers are trying to bring up a family,” said Vicki Maguire, chief creative officer at Havas London, the agency behind Asda’s campaign.

The holidays represent a key trading period for grocers and retailers in the U.K. and U.S. American brands to release holiday spots this year include Gap, Target, Etsy, Sephora, Old Navy, Ugg, Amazon and jeweler Tiffany & Co., among others.

Supermarkets in particular depend on their performance through the season. In 2023, Tesco pulled in $28.9 million (£22.8 million) in the fourth quarter, which included Christmas — a huge chunk of the company’s overall $78 million (£61.4 million) in retail revenue for that year.

In Britain, advertisers are set to unleash the largest rise in seasonal ad spend since records began in 1982, according to the Advertising Association and WARC. Brand media spending will reach $13.7 billion (£10.5 billion) this year, up 7.8% on 2023.

Despite the commercial importance of the season, Maguire said brand marketers behind national brands, particularly grocers, must be aware of their customers’ concerns. “[Asda] are literally at the cutting edge of every cost of living crisis. Every time Britain has to pull in its belt their customers, arguably, feel it first,” she said.

Jordan McDowell, strategy director at McCann Manchester — the agency behind Matalan’s work — agreed. The task facing marketers and agency creatives, he said, is to “offer a resonant representation of working class family life, with aspiration built in that does not whitewash away working class coded semiotics and values — and position a middle class ideal. Which is really hard to do in advertising, because mostly you do that.”

Not all of this year’s holiday ads will focus on dreary reality and winter worries, though. Some of the traditional cheer and escapism comes through in other creative. Tiffany’s has drafted in star power in the form of Anya Taylor-Joy for a “White Christmas”-esque campaign, while Sainsbury’s chose an animated and live-action adventure featuring Roald Dahl character The BFG, created by Ogilvy’s recently acquired agency New Commercial Arts.

When times are tough, Ogilvy UK CEO James Murphy told Digiday, brands can provide a welcome escapism. “The public want you to celebrate Christmas,” he said.

“The cultural contract at Christmas is: It’s the end of a long year, people have gone through miserable times. The last thing they need is to be reminded how shit the world is,” added Darren Savage, strategy lead at creative agency You’re The Goods.

There’s also the worry that creative referencing real-world troubles might just not land.

“The ads that wear their corporate, boardroom collective hearts on their sleeve make me squirm,” Rob Fletcher, executive creative director of Isobel, told Digiday in an email, adding: “The public knows your game and they just don’t buy it. It’s a no from me.”

Deciding on the precise tenor for holiday ads, therefore, is difficult. Jamie Peate, global head of effectiveness and retail at McCann Worldgroup, told Digiday that, “You can reference challenges at Christmas, but you have to be very careful how you do it.”

His colleague McDowell agreed. Marketers need to avoid “falling into the trap of creating documentary, because no one wants to see that. It’s not interesting or fun,” McDowell said.

Peate argued that humor is the “magic ingredient.” It’s one that McCann has leaned on for several years, with its long-running animated Kevin the Carrot campaign for client Aldi. ”One of the things that humor allows you to do is confront the un-confrontable,” he said.

McCann isn’t alone in looking to jokes as a means of resolving the tension beyond the tinsel. Asda’s ad might start with shut-in shift workers, but it ends with an all-singing, all-dancing troupe of garden gnomes.

To stay on the right side of the cultural moment, Maguire said that agencies and marketers have to lean on research and real-life feedback from customers. “You meet as many of your customers as possible. You sit in those focus groups. You watch what they watch. You get out of London,” she said. “There’s not a spreadsheet for empathy.”