What Christmas Advertising Tells Us About Building Brands

Christmas is one of the few moments in the marketing and advertising calendar when almost every brand is trying to make people feel something: warmth, nostalgia, generosity, togetherness, anticipation and joy. It is also one of the hardest times of year to be distinctive. Every December, brands compete in much the same emotional territory, often with the same visual language, familiar music and basic promise that Christmas is better when we spend it with the people we love.

So what separates the Christmas advertising people remember from the advertising they simply remember seeing? Looking back at the 2025 Australian Christmas season, there is a useful answer. The work that cut through was not necessarily the work with the biggest production, the most elaborate story or the greatest emotional ambition. It was the work where the emotion and the brand were difficult to separate. That sounds obvious, but in practice it is surprisingly difficult to achieve.

Emotion is not A strategy

Christmas gives marketers an enormous creative advantage because the emotional territory is already there. People are predisposed to think about family, friends, generosity, food, celebration and memories, which means the audience does a lot of the emotional heavy lifting for you. The problem is that everyone has access to the same emotions. Emotion can therefore be a powerful starting point, but it is a poor point of differentiation on its own. A beautifully made story about togetherness can make people feel something without necessarily making them remember who paid for it.

This is one of the recurring challenges of festive advertising. The better the story, the greater the temptation to let the story become the hero. But advertising still has a job to do for the brand. Analysis of the 2025 Australian Christmas advertising season highlighted work from brands including Kmart and McDonald's, alongside the continued strength of established brands such as Coca-Cola and IGA. A common thread was branded memorability: advertising was more difficult to confuse with anyone else's when it was anchored in distinctive brand assets, platforms or associations.

The lesson is not that every Christmas ad needs a logo in the first three seconds. It is that the brand needs to have a meaningful role in the story.

The brand cannot disappear inside the idea

There is a difference between an advertisement being entertaining and an advertisement building a brand. The best work does both. McDonald's can put itself at the centre of a playful Christmas narrative because the brand already has a distinctive world, language and set of assets to draw on. Kmart can make a relatively straightforward retail proposition feel engaging because its creative platform is recognisable. ALDI can lean into its irreverent tone because the audience already knows what an ALDI joke sounds like.

These brands are not starting from scratch every Christmas, and that matters. Distinctiveness is rarely created by one brilliant campaign. It is built through repetition, recognition and a willingness to keep investing in the things that make a brand itself. The temptation in advertising is often to believe that every campaign needs to be completely new. But newness is not necessarily the same thing as creativity, and novelty is not necessarily the same thing as memorability. Sometimes the smartest creative decision is knowing what not to change.

Familiarity can be a creative advantage

Christmas is a particularly good demonstration of this because people actively welcome familiar things. They expect certain songs, recognise certain characters and look forward to recurring campaigns. They have memories associated with particular brands and rituals. That gives marketers an unusual opportunity: to create something new within a world people already recognise.

Coca-Cola's Christmas advertising is an obvious example of the principle. The brand does not need to explain who it is every December. Its distinctive colours, visual codes, music and festive associations do some of the work before the story has even begun. Research into Christmas advertising in Australia has similarly highlighted the role of established distinctive assets in helping brands remain memorable during a crowded festive period.

The creative challenge, then, is not always to invent a new memory. It is to strengthen an existing one. That is a useful distinction well beyond Christmas.

The smartest brands understand their role in the occasion

There is another pattern worth noticing. The strongest festive work tends to understand why the brand has a legitimate place in Christmas in the first place. For Kmart, it is about making Christmas accessible. For a supermarket, it is about food, preparation and bringing people together. For ALDI, affordability can become part of the festive proposition rather than something the brand has to hide behind the emotion. Its 2025 campaign encouraged Australians to indulge while maintaining its familiar value proposition. Coles took a similarly natural route with its "Every Kind of Christmas" campaign, putting food and the realities of Australian Christmas celebrations at the centre of the idea.

These brands do not have to manufacture a reason to be part of the season. Their role is already there. That is an important strategic question for any brand entering a cultural moment: what is our legitimate role here? Not every brand needs to talk about togetherness, produce a sentimental film or make itself part of the cultural conversation simply because everyone else is doing it. The stronger question is what the brand can contribute that feels natural, useful or genuinely entertaining.

Distinctiveness matters most when everyone is being emotional

This is where Christmas advertising becomes a useful lesson in brand building more broadly. When everyone is trying to create an emotional response, emotional advertising becomes less distinctive. When everyone is telling stories about family, the story alone is unlikely to tell people whose story it is.

The brands that break through are often the ones that have something recognisably their own within the emotional world. It might be a particular tone, a character, a visual language, a sound, a recurring idea, a point of view or simply a way of talking about the season that could not be transferred easily to a competitor. This is why distinctive brand assets matter. They allow brands to participate in culture without disappearing into it. The objective is not to make advertising less emotional. It is to make the emotion more ownable.

Christmas is a useful test of creative discipline

There is also something useful here for marketers planning the year ahead. The festive season can encourage excess: more production, more channels, more content, more messages and more reasons for brands to say something. But the brands that build memory are not necessarily the ones that say the most. They are the ones that make the clearest choices about what they want people to remember.

That requires discipline. It means knowing which parts of a brand are worth repeating and which parts are worth changing. It means resisting the urge to chase novelty for its own sake and understanding that a campaign can evolve without abandoning the associations that have made the brand recognisable in the first place. It also means judging creative work on more than whether people like it. Likeability matters. So do attention and emotion. But ultimately, the question is whether those things work for the brand.

The best Christmas advertising makes the feeling belong to the brand

Perhaps that is the most useful lesson from the festive season. Christmas advertising does not need to become less emotional, less entertaining or less ambitious. It simply needs to remember who the emotion is for.

The brands that stay with people are the ones where the feeling and the brand become connected in memory. You do not just remember the story; you remember who told it. You do not just remember the joke; you remember who made it. You do not just remember how the advertising made you feel; you remember the brand that made you feel that way.

That is the real creative challenge, and it is not limited to Christmas. In a marketing landscape where audiences are fragmented, content is abundant and every brand has more opportunities than ever to say something, being memorable is becoming harder. The answer is not necessarily to say more. It is to make more of what you say unmistakably yours.

Because the strongest brands do not simply create feelings. They build associations. And over time, those associations become memory.