Christmas history repeats itself!
Every November, without fail, the creative industry plays a bizarre collective game. The industry lines up its multi-million-pound festive campaigns like Oscar frontrunners on the red carpet, waiting for the golden envelope just so we can argue over who won in the Christmas Advertising winners league. Oscar frontrunners on the red carpet and argue over who won Christmas. We debate the nominations, pick apart the acceptance speeches, and dissect who truly deserves Best Picture.
Not this year.
When Visual Identity looked at the sheer brilliance of the 2026’s festive adverts – crowning a single brand felt wrong. The real winners weren’t the balance sheets – they’re the eccentric humans who dreamed them into life. The real story isn’t who got the most retweets or the highest Tear-Jerker Index. It’s the sheer, unhinged brilliance of the advertising brains that dreamed them up in the first place.
Where else on Earth does a room of grown adults sit in a windowless, 32-degree Soho pitch room in the middle of a July heatwave, drinking lukewarm filter coffee, and say with deadpan sincerity:
“Right. What if a talking vintage pull-along dog tells an aristocratic grandmother her cash-filled envelopes are emotionally lazy?”
Or: “Hear us out. A six-minute Hollywood blockbuster where Keira Knightley shuns her billionaire fiancé to run off with an unkempt Joe Wilkinson – soundtracked by the Prague Philharmonic and Jennifer Rush – all to sell a frozen Beef Wellington?”
It is glorious ‘Ad Man’ madness. Advertising is often dismissed as pure commercial mechanics, but at Christmas, it morphs into something far more human. It is an annual showcase of the Christmas Advertising’s most eccentric, ad hoc brilliant minds taking massive, theatrical risks – to somehow land a few minutes of cinematic gold, every single second strictly on brand.
A masterclass in creative curveballs
Let’s consider the sheer range of what these creative teams have delivered this season:
- The Cinematic Blockbusters: Waitrose gave us The Perfect Gift 2, a budget-busting, tongue-in-cheek cinematic spectacle with A-listers, movie trailers, and sweeping tracking shots that treats a holiday dinner like an Oscar contender. Meanwhile, Debenhams staged their own four-minute cinematic romcom, trapping Emily Atack and Mathew Horne in a village hall snowstorm before having Gabrielle turn up to belt out ‘Dreams’.
- The Nostalgia Alchemists: Over at John Lewis, Saatchi & Saatchi traded teary melancholy for pure magic, teaming Dame Kristin Scott Thomas with a cheeky puppet voiced by Paul Whitehouse to celebrate the messy joy of giving. Barbour wrapped Wallace & Gromit in wax jackets to test out armchair snowplows, while Argos let Richard Ayoade play the deadpan Scrooge we didn’t know we needed.
- The Pure Energy Shifts: While some brands went for fairy-tale warmth – like Morrisons’ wonky-tree family bear dinner or Sainsbury’s packing a van for Giant Country to cure a sneezing BFG – others tore up the festive rulebook entirely. Asda bypassed the mush to stage an unapologetic kitchen rave set to Martin Garrix’s Animals. Meanwhile, Lidl brought sheer laughter, unpretentious high-energy joy by setting festive cheer to the roaring anthemics of Slade.
On paper, putting these campaigns next to each other makes no sense. One asks you to shed a tear over an old school friendship on a rainy delivery route; another asks you to bounce around the kitchen table to electronic beats; another sends Erling Haaland and UK rap stars into a store to calculate the exact gift equation for an aspiring athlete.
Yet every single one works.
The weird magic of agency life
What makes these brilliant, completely mad individuals able to invent concepts so wild yet so culturally resonant. Not just this year but every year? Proof that these great advertising minds are expert observers of real life. They don’t just study market demographics. They understand the awkwardness of introducing a partner to your chaotic family. The guilt of slipping twenty quid into a Christmas card because you ran out of ideas. And, the genuine relief of knowing the food tastes brilliant even if your forgot to buy crackers!
They take those slivers of human truth and blow them up with cinematic craft. Whether that’s through stop-motion clay, hand-drawn animations, or a bespoke disco wonderland in an attic.
Why the advertisers nailed it
To judge these campaigns against one another in a pointless popularity contest – entirely misses the point. Christmas has never been a single emotion; it’s a collision of contradictions. It’s genuine warmth and sharp nostalgia mixed with festive panic, kitchen friction, and sudden, quiet displays of love. It’s sentimental, chaotic, hilarious, and exhausting – often all unravelling before the King’s speech.
To pit these campaigns against one another in a pointless popularity contest misses the entire point of the season. Christmas has never been a single emotion; it’s a collision of contradictions. It’s genuine warmth and sharp nostalgia mixed with festive panic, kitchen friction, and sudden, very uncharacteristic British displays of love. It’s sentimental, chaotic, hilarious, and time exhausting – often all unravelling before the King’s speech.
And that is precisely why every single advert this year deserves its flowers: because collectively, they nailed it.
Rather than churning out identical, sentimentality, the wonderful minds of the creative world dived headfirst into the idiosyncratic complexities of what the Christmas Season actually feels like. Understanding that one household’s Christmas is a tearful, bittersweet trip down memory lane, while another’s is a sweat-soaked kitchen challenge. Capturing the quiet guilt of a grandmother who doesn’t know what to buy, the absolute chaos of meeting the new in-laws over a wonky dining table, and the pure, unadulterated absurdity of an armchair on tractor wheels plunging into a snowdrift.
These adverts don’t just sell groceries, woolly jumpers, or running shoes, they hold up a mirror to the rich, contradictory, delightfully unhinged fabric of human life at Christmas.
So who won the Christmas Advertising top spot!
VI says… let the marketeers keep their scorecards and bicker over who “won” the Christmas. The real victory belongs to the brilliant creatives in the agency rooms across the globe who took every tangled contradiction of the festive season and turned it into art. In 2026, we feel there isn’t one winner – because together, they captured all of us.
But if you really want some Christmas Advertising rankings. Read Brian Dillon’s article: I watched 7 supermarket Christmas ads – clear winner isn’t M&S or Morrisons
