Many brands choose to make a special ad to run through the holidays. Not only is this a great way to celebrate a brand’s history, create something unique, but it’s also a highly commercial decision as the holiday shopping season can make up a massive percentage of retail sales for many businesses both large and small.
These commercials were all planned and shot months ago, with many of the advertisements below representing brands that committed major, in the seven figures, budgets to create highly detailed productions. The more detail, computer generated imagery, special effects, physical props and locations that go into a commercial, the more the costs rise quickly. Many brands commit a larger budget to their holiday ads than any other ad, barring a superbowl production.
Many of these ads have been edited to multiple versions for use on different platforms with TV broadcast ads generally being cut shorter due to time limitations while social media, web platforms, and digital ad channels allow for ads of greater length.
Here are some of our favorite holiday ads of 2020!
LEGO
Kicking off the list is a creative ad from Lego set to the standard “What a wonderful world” with jumps into the different characters and worlds that lego has created over the years. Featuring everything from star wars to medieval knights, it’s a fun spot that relates to about everyone in some way or another. This spot is a strong branding entry for lego and sets a similar tone to many of the advertisements below.
Being automotive marketing specialists , we look forward to seeing the various holiday automotive ads and this year is no exception.
Mercedes-Benz
Audi
Playing off the famous Chevy Chase Christmas Vacation scene, Audi’s fun commercial has been running since late October on broadcast stations nationally.
John Lewis Christmas ads have become something of a tradition with last year’s ad featuring music legend Elton John. This year, stop motion animation
Coca-Cola is another brand with a strong tradition of creating incredible looking Christmas ads. Here’s the long form of a serious yet at times light hearted look at many different scenes and lives that are just that little bit better with a newly opened Coke. Coca-Cola are experts at crafting feel good ads across nearly all their media channels, and while it can be very nuanced how this is achieved the message itself is very simple.
TESCO
This has has become one of the most popular Christmas ads of 2020 with many advertising publications listing it as a top Christmas ad of 2020. Playing off of Santa’s naughty list, this commercial
The previous entries on this list have all been live-action, but here is something a little different, in the form of an animated 2 minute + ad from apparel manufacturer Barbour.
Walt Disney’s CGI animation work is always top notch, with no doubt an immense budget supporting it. While it may not have Baby Yoda in it, it’s a great take on the Disney brand.
TK Maxx
Here’s another fun UK based ad for TK Maxx, featuring a goat in a winter wonderland that was gifted some designer clothing!
Here’s one final regional advertisement from grocery store chain Aldis. This is actually one of our absolute favorite from this list, the whimsical style, use of strong musical soundtracks throughout, mix of live-action and great looking CGI make this one a neat ad.
This global campaign from Amazon takes a heavy inspiration from the ongoing pandemic and presents a hopeful, optimistic going forward. With very neat visuals set to the iconic Queen song, it’s a top tier production from Amazon!
We’d be remiss if we didn’t include a few of our own Christmas ads from this year.
Most of these will run on a combination of media outlets through New Years’.
Holiday sales can represent a huge overall percentage of holiday sales, and particularly in 2020, with consumers preferring to buy online instead of visiting stores, clever marketing campaigns, email sales communications and video content is a major decider in which brands are most effective at capturing sales. Many small businesses are also having to pivot hard into online sales, many quickly building Shopify pages and working with third-party apps to offers shoppers the ability to purchase online.
Video content is a powerful tool for getting your audience to engage with your brand and advertising. Various studies have painted video-based digital ads and emails as having an open and CTR rate of 50-100% higher than traditional static images and text. This means that every dollar you spend getting your media in front of your audience is more effectively used by leaning on video content.
For local and regional broadcast tv and cable tv advertisers, that game has changed and you need to work harder to stay in front of your competition. High-quality video content will move the needle on sales and give your brand the boost it needs to stand out from the competition. Producing one video, just as the brands above have done, allows you to edit it for multiple uses. The longest form will tend to stay on your Facebook page, youtube channel and website, while shorter versions can be used on broadcast, cable and digital ad placements.
While most of the ads above are branding spots without any specific offers or sales promotions, many other holiday ads will feature pricing on certain products or general sale promotions throughout the holidays.
Let us know if you’d like us to help plan and create a holiday video campaign for you!
Volan Media are Tennessee marketing experts, having made hundreds of pieces of content for a variety of marketing channels, coordinating strategy and media placement, improving web traffic, and are veterans at working with various brands marketing requirements and adapting to marketing budgets of any size and scope.
Give us a shout if you want to take your automotive marketing to the next level!
