Bonfire Night has been and gone, which means only one thing: it’s time for the festive deluge to begin.
Christmas adverts have long been a staple of British festive culture. Who can forget those early John Lewis ads, which reduced us all to tears from the comfort of our sofas? Or the arrival of the Coca-Cola truck on screens every year?
With ads getting fancier, more expensive and more numerous than ever before, what we need is a way to tell the turkeys from the gold-plated Christmas stars.
Fortunately, that’s what you’re reading. Without further ado, here’s our list of the best Christmas ads so far this year, in ascending order – with more to be added as they come out.
Coca Cola
The Coca Cola Christmas missive is always somewhat formulaic, with the branded trucks driving fizzy drinks through the snow to the tune of Holidays Are Coming. It’s been roughly the same since 1995. But this year there’s something... off about it.
That’s because this year’s advert was created with generative AI. If the smiles look fixed and freaky and the hands truly odd, it’s because they were hallucinated out of some computer. The polar bears are a particularly ironic touch, given that energy-hungry data servers required to make this ad probably directly contributed to melting ice caps.
Coca Cola has been embracing generative AI for a while. Last year the company launched Create Real Magic AI, a collaboration with OpenAI and Bain & Company that uploaded all the festive Coca Cola assets for people to play around with. But this year’s fully AI advert has gone down like a lead balloon with viewers. Turns out people don’t want to be served AI slop for Christmas.
Coca Cola did at least get the permission from real actors to use their likenesses, but that’s a far cry from actually casting and paying human professionals. Plus Santa doesn’t get his usual starring role, always staying out of shot. Probably because the AI made him look like some kind of eldritch horror.
Argos
It is a truth universally acknowledged that you would only wish for a noisy, light-up toy to end up under the tree for your worst enemy’s child.
Argos has decided to give every parent of small boys the Christmas from hell this year, with its festive promo slot dedicated to an extremely loud plastic T-Rex – Chad Valley Trevor Talk Back Dino to give him his full title.
The Rockstar TV slot begins with a CGI Trevor, aka Trev, stood on a mountain of amps, slamming on his guitar to the chorus of 20th Century Boy by T. Rex. But wait, it’s all a dream! Luckily for aspiring noisemaker Trev, his pal Connie has got him a nice branded Marshall speaker for Christmas. It’s a sort of sweet message about, I don’t know, fostering children’s imaginations. But mainly the message from Argos this Christmas is: buy your children these toys. Adverts are, after all, expressly here to sell you things.
With her blond hair and huge, vacant eyes Connie recalls the homicidal AI-powered doll from M3GAN, so perhaps it is a blessing that she is entirely analog. But boys getting to be noisy rockstars and girls getting to be silent fashion plates is something of a 20th-century idea of what it is to be a boy or a girl. Also, if you’re going to invoke bisexual icon Mark Bolan – Elton John’s “perfect pop star” – where are the feather boas and slinky outfits? Disappointing.
M&S Food
Tune in to see Dawn French get a Cinderella makeover, Christmas-style. A bedraggled French remembers she’s expecting festive guests, but – oh no! – she’s not ready to receive them, and the house is a mess. No worries: a slightly alarming living Christmas decoration in the shape of a fairy (also played by herself, a la Inside John Malkovich) has come to sort things out for her.
It looks gorgeous – all crackling fires and jewel-toned furniture. But it’s also hard to not to feel that French has sold out somehow, acting feebly distressed and then thrilled as the house is magicked into a festive wonderland. A cry of “pork pies!” at the end as she gazes at the M&S spread on the table is cringe-worthy. National treasure maybe; festive treasure, maybe not.
Asda
Are gnomes traditionally festive? I would argue not (in fact, they’re spectacularly creepy. Those blank cheery stares!), but Asda seems to be making a one-supermarket case for incorporating them into the traditional Christmas fare with this year’s ad.
They’re not especially successful. Apropos of nothing in particular, we open with two colleagues bemoaning the fact that snow has closed off the roads back home to Sheffield. They have vaguely northern accents, but who knows how far away Sheffield is. They could be in London, for all we know. Also apropos of nothing, one of them is making gnome puns to cheer his colleague up. So far, it’s giving less Christmas, more the overnight shift from hell.
And it’s about to get worse, because soon an army of gnomes is descending upon the store to help get things ready for the festive season. Gnomes are icing the cakes, gnomes are dancing in the aisles. And that’s it, that’s the ad. Examine your mince pies and roast turkey carefully this year for signs of tiny gnome fingers on them. But then again, given that searches for gnomes have spiked by 1572% on the Asda website since the ad came out, perhaps the UK is a nation of gnomeophiles. Food for thought?
M&S Clothing and Home
For this year’s Christmas ad, M&S seem to have veered off the ‘festive’ route and instead taken their inspiration from a perfume ad. The end result manages to feel both weakly festive and utterly soulless.
Our hero is a young girl, who seems to be enduring the family Christmas of everybody’s nightmares: nobody’s chatting. People are staring blankly at the wall. The tree lights aren’t even on, for god’s sake. But that’s all about to change when she encounters a magical snowglobe which, with a few shakes, transforms the house into an all-singing, all-dancing festive extravaganza.
That’s the idea, anyway. The reality is a bit more hit and miss. The house itself is curated to within an inch of its life but looks like nobody lives in it. Where’s the festive clutter; the cosiness? Nobody talks; everybody looks manically cheerful. The music is bland in the extreme. One to skip.
Boots
As anybody who’s ever watched Bridgerton knows, Adjoa Andoh’s presence makes anything ten times better. So it proves in the Boots Christmas ad, which casts her as Mrs Claus, and her Santa as a bit of a hopeless layabout. Look at him: there he is, sleeping in until the moment he has to go and deliver presents. Only problem: the sleigh is empty of festive gifts.
Fortunately Mrs Claus has the solution. In the blink of an eye, she whips up a ‘werk-shop’ for all the elves in her retinue to wrap the nation’s presents (from Boots, naturally) ahead of the big day.
Problematic gender roles aside (why is it that the woman does all the work for zero recognition, I ask??) the advert itself is harmless enough. A more overt acknowledgement of drag culture would be nice (and more importantly, fun) here, but it feels festive and jolly, and Andoh’s little wink at the end sells the whole thing. I think I will have a No 7 lipstick for Christmas this year after all.
Tesco
Hmmn, how to stand out in a crowded Christmas ad market? If you’re Tesco, the answer is: dial up the sweet treats by turning everything – from houses, lampshades and animals – into gingerbread. And why not?
Last year’s Tesco ad turned people into trees and snowmen by dint of ‘catching’ the Christmas spirit. This time around, the Christmas spirit isn’t transforming people (phew) but inanimate objects, which starts after a young man is given a box of gingerbread from his grandad on his way out of the house.
One bite in, and the world suddenly starts turning into baked goods. The houses are gingerbread, the trees are gingerbread. Even the stray foxes are gingerbread. It’s a Christmas paradise, but as the sounds of Gorillaz’s On Melancholy Hill inform us, all is not well in gingerbread-land. For our unnamed hero is grieving the loss of his grandmother, who (we deduce from the pictures on the fridge) loved Christmas too.
Of course, things end happily enough, with grandson and grandad making a gingerbread house (what else) together in her memory, but still, the message feels poignant. And the ad still leaves you with a sense of the warm and fuzzies, as well as a burning desire to buy a packet of gingerbread. And isn’t that what the festive season is all about?
TK Maxx
We open on a storybook farm experiencing the kind of white Christmas that has only been seen four times since the Sixties, or so the Met Office reliably informs us. The creatively named Alpaca, Lil Goat, Duck and Hedgehog have all been decked out in fluffy sliders, a shiny puffer jacket, and a bumbag.
It’s the kind of gently twee view of farming that seems to have come straight out of All Creatures Great and Small, with dry stone walls and retro tractors. The human cast, wearing box fresh clothes entirely inappropriate for a barnyard, are startled by the sight of the animals wearing clothes. But wait! It’s not the clothes that prompt a double-take, it’s the cost of such snazzy gear. Thankfully, you can “spoil your loved ones for less” if you shop at TK Maxx.
There’s no attempt at tear-jerking here, the message is a simple one: buy your loved ones big name brands for cheap. It’s a Christmas message for the cost-of-living crisis.
Plus, not only does Alpaca channel the Great British tradition of cute animals in human clothes, he could fill a looming hole in the cultural psyche. Now that Paddington is getting, dare we say it, a bit too cosy with Big Government following the passport fast-track scandal, Alpaca could be our new anthropomorphic folk hero/psychopomp. Bow down.
McDonalds
As we edge towards 4pm sunsets, there’s nothing like Christmas lights and a plan for dinner to cling to in the encroaching darkness. The McDonald’s advert knows this and exploits it to maximum effect.
A tired couple with a car full of shopping and a long to-do list look forlornly out into the night. Lo, the glowing Golden Arches appear on the horizon, a modern star of Bethlehem. As they drive through the dark streets, homes suddenly light up in full LED glory, pulsing to the beat of Benny Benassi’s Satisfaction.
There is something so undeniably cheery about a bonkers amount of Christmas lights on a house. In Iceland, the story goes that after the 2008 financial crash people were encouraged to keep their lights up all through the winter to keep morale up. Although, if your neighbours put a moonwalking neon purple Grimace on their front lawn tonight, you’d probably call the council.
Satisfaction is a clever tune to pick, subliminally reminding you that you can indeed satisfy your cravings for fries and a McFlurry with very little effort. This ad spot can’t hold a candle to the pure horniness of Benassi’s original 2002 music video, with its oiled up hotties demonstrating power tools, but it does make you want a McDonalds.
Morrisons
Morrisons wanted feel-good, and this cheerful little number has it in spades. There’s something delightfully British in the surreal vision of a choir of well-used oven gloves serenading a Turkey dinner. Before Peppa Pig and Paw Patrol achieved world dominance, we were all raised on a diet of lightly weird puppets.
Musicals are perhaps more controversial, given a slew of recent big budget Hollywood films that have done their best to hide their sing-song elements. Thankfully, this is side steps the uncanny valley of Cats and barrels headfirst towards the land of Muppets Christmas Carol – universally and uncontroversially beloved. Credit to Australian filmmaker Michael Gracey, who gave us The Greatest Showman and is about to tackle a Robbie Williams biopic with the singer played by an animated monkey. There’s no cameo from Hugh Jackman (more’s the pity) but there are moments that recall scenes from Beauty and the Beast.
As anyone who has cooked a Christmas roast – something that involves a lot of food maths around oven timings – the humble heat protective glove is the real MVP.
John Lewis
Say the words John Lewis to anybody in the UK and chances are they’ll think ‘Christmas’.
For good reason. JL perfected the formula before it was even a formula: tear-jerking story, winsome musical cover, subtle branding. And this year, they’re back – deliberately late, presumably in the interests of making a grand entrance – to show the rest of the market how it’s done.
This year, they’re going in hard with the product placement in a way they’ve not really done before.We start in a John Lewis store (gasp!) as one woman enters, presumably on Christmas eve. She's going through all the gifts on display in a desperate attempt to find something for her sister.
Nothing beckons, except suddenly the clothing rack has become a Narnia-like doorway into her own past. Along with her, we hop back and forth in time, meeting her sister at different stages of her life – but getting no closer to figuring out what it is she wants.
I won’t lie: this bit gets properly emotional. Anybody who has a sibling can relate to that love/hate feeling. One moment, it's all hugs and laughter; the next there’s a screaming match over who’s borrowed or stolen something off the other.
Nice and sentimental stuff (and it looks gorgeous), though lacking the sense of escapism of previousyears. It’s easy to picture oneself in a John Lewis store – where are the hand-drawn animals or men living on the moon? Next year, more Venus flytraps please.
Sainsbury’s
You think that you have become inured to the Christmas-advert-industrial complex’s attempts to move you. Your heart is hardened to adorable storybook characters going on a journey, tear ducts stay bone dry at melancholy covers of pop songs.
Then a supermarket sneaks up and bops you over the head with a nostalgia-bomb so targeted you wonder if the ad execs have been personally mining your own childhood for content.
Enter the Big Friendly Giant or BFG, an animated imagining of Roald Dahl’s overlarge purveyor of nice dreams. Resigned to another Christmas of disgusting snozzcumbers (the BFG having canonically forsworn eating humans), he ventures to Sainsbury’s in an attempt to find a more palatable spread (still not humans, he remains friendly at all times).
This is no CGI-heavy, green screen cop-out. You can almost feel the ground shake as the BFG lopes across the landscape. The creative team used puppets and scale sets to create genuine interaction between Sophie and a fictional giant. It doesn’t try to overly smooth over the seams either, giving everything an almost stop-motion feel.
It’s a warm tale full of good old-fashioned magic, achieving more in a tight advert than Steven Spielberg managed in his underwhelming BFG adaptation in 2016. Consider my cold, cold heart warmed. Just don’t make me look at those gross snozzcumbers again.
Barbour
In a market that is already becoming oversaturated with Christmas adverts, gosh darn it if Barbour’s don’t conjure up the warm and fuzzies every time they come on.
The reason, of course, is the brand’s collab with Shaun the Sheep, who took centre stage for last year’s ad and (because Barbour and Aardman both know a good thing when they see it) is back for more.
This time around, Shaun’s shenanigans are slightly less disaster prone. Not for Shaun the stress of repairing the Farmer’s old Barbour jacket with combs, odd buttons and bits of wool (ie. the fare of the 2023 Christmas ad). This year, we return to Mossy Bottom Farm to find the flock being marshalled into a choir by Bitzer, the German Shepherd farm dog.
All they want is to sing a couple of Christmas carols, but there’s a problem: it’s so cold that the flock are freezing solid where they stand. Clearly climate change isn’t a thing in this universe (when was the last time we had snow south of the Scottish border?) but fortunately, Bitzer has a solution.
Three guesses as to what it is, but of course, it’s Barbour branded, and soon enough the flock are singing away merrily. And before the curtain falls, there’s still time for a couple of gags at the expense of the hapless Farmer.
It’s only a minute long, but such is the power of the Shaun brand that it’s still a gorgeous little minute of stop-motion goodness. And don’t worry: if the ad doesn’t scratch that Wallace and Gromit itch, there’s still Vengeance Most Fowl to look forward to later this year.
And the winner is... Waitrose
A stacked cast, a cosy mystery surrounding a missing dessert, and a daring cliffhanger make the Waitrose Christmas advert a winner on all fronts.
It’s Christmas day and tensions are already high when there is a blood-curdling scream. There’s not been a murder (that would be too Scandi noir) but the centrepiece dessert has vanished from the fridge.
The missing pudding is not – shock horror – your trad figgy pud, but rather a new frankenpudding (No.1 Waitrose Red Velvet Bauble Dessert to give it its full title) offering that does admittedly look extra festive.
Enter the Detective, a grizzled Matthew MacFadyen who is Succession’s chief wetwipe Tom Wambsgans to some, the ultimate Mr Darcy to others. He’s determined to sniff out the culprit, but everyone has an alibi – and a motive.
Eryl Maynard, of Miss Marple fame, is the posh grandmother whose nose has been put out of joint at being relegated to the cranberry sauce. Sian Clifford, Fleabag’s uptight sister Claire, is sneaking around with cheese dips while swearing she’s been prepping the parsnips.
With such an array of experienced thesps there’s stiff competition for scene-stealer status, but Fig has it in the bag. The fluffy moggy has nailed the poker face, rattling Mcfadyen's Detective. And yes, Fig is their real name, I asked. The backup cat they had on set was, serendipitously, called Pudding.
Detective mysteries have always been a mainstay of British culture, from Sherlock Holmes to Poirot, Miss Marple to Inspector Morse. Cosy crime is dominating the charts – just look at Richard Osman, presumably diving into his £10 million advances for the Thursday Murder Club like a literary Scrooge McDuck.
Waitrose have been smart to ride the wave, but they pulled it off with so much aplomb and heart that it never feels mercenary.
