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Christmas Marketing Ideas Inspired by 2017's Adverts

Read Time: 3 mins

Christmas is a time for unwrapping presents and stuffing our faces with delicious food and treats, but recently it is also synonymous with festive adverts and marketing. Brands spent a record £6bn on Christmas advertising this year, which is a 40% increase on 2010. You only have to look at the gigantic success of marketing campaigns such as the Coca-Cola Truck tour or television adverts from the likes of Marks and Spencer and Sainsbury’s to find out why.

How to plan a Christmas marketing strategy

What separates the fantastic Christmas marketing ideas – that have grown to become pillars and indicators of the start of the festive period – from the ones that achieve little-to-no reach, engagement or leads, you ask? Planning. Did you know that 40% of consumers begin their Christmas shopping before Halloween? If your customers are thinking about decorations and presents this early, you should be even more ahead of the game. The further you plan ahead, the longer you have to build, test and perfect the various elements of your campaign. A great way to get the ball rolling is to organise a strategy session with your team and bounce Christmas advertising ideas off one another based on previous campaigns (what worked and what didn’t work). Also, think about what other brands have done in the past, and any current affairs and trends you can latch onto.

The best 2017 Christmas marketing campaigns

With Christmas being just a few days away, it is more than likely too late for you to start your campaign, but there’s no reason why you can’t look at the successful adverts from this year for some 2018 inspiration. The best time to reflect on a campaign is immediately afterwards. This way, you can re-cap on what did and didn’t work while the results are still fresh in your mind. Here is a reminder of some of the most talked-about Christmas marketing campaigns of 2017:

Sainsbury’s: Every Bit of Christmas

Sainsbury’s are up there with the best when it comes to highly anticipated Christmas adverts, especially after the success of previous campaigns such as The Greatest Gift and Mog’s Christmas Calamity. This year’s Every Bit of Christmas, which featured a range of Brits singing along in karaoke style, divided social media users, as you can see below:

Marks and Spencer: Paddington and the Christmas Visitor

Many will tell you that marketing is all about storytelling. This has certainly been the case with M&S’s 2017 festive advert, which used social media, merchandise and a television advert to tie into Paddington 2 movie, a movie released in November. The advert depicted “everybody’s favourite bear” inadvertently saving Christmas by thwarting a burglar, and actually resulted in a bit of bizarre controversy among social media users. Here are some of the initial reactions on social media to Marks and Spencer’s #lovethebear campaign:

John Lewis: #MozTheMonster

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jw1Y-zhQURU John Lewis, similarly to Marks and Spencer, tried to pull at our heartstrings with their #MozTheMonster campaign. The television advert features a boy struggling to sleep due to the monster under his bed, who he later befriends and receives a present from. Again, like Marks and Spencer, this opened up a whole new stream of revenue for John Lewis, who have made what we can only assume to be thousands on selling customisable Moz the Monster plush toys. The explicit, profit-focused message behind the advert actually caused some to complain and score it lowly compared to the more festive-themed Sainsbury’s campaign.

What have we learned?

Whoever you thought came out on top of this year’s Christmas Advert competition – whether it’s one of the above options or not – there is certainly a lot we can gain inspiration from. Our Twitter followers, as it happens, favoured the Marks and Spencer campaign, which achieved 45% of the vote in our poll. In second-place was the Sainsbury’s ad with 26%, followed by ‘Another ad’ with 19% and finally John Lewis in last place with 10%. While each advert has a different message, one thing is certain. The above brands clearly spent a lot of time planning and strategising, and it is no coincidence that each advert was released as early as the first or second week of November. Which was the best Christmas marketing campaign in your eyes? And how did they compare with 2016’s? And what do you plan on doing differently next year? Let us know in the comments below. Merry Christmas! Oliver Wilkinson Content Marketing Executive Knapton Wright Ltd.
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