Half of this year’s top 10 best performing Christmas ads are repeats, study finds

Cadbury’s ‘Secret Santa’ has been crowned 2025’s most effective Christmas ad, according to new Kantar research, demonstrating the power of repeat creative.

Kantar’s consumer testing found five of the top 10 performing TV spots this year reuse previous ads. Cadbury, for example, first introduced its Secret Santa campaign in 2018. Overall, Cadbury and Coca-Cola’s ‘Holidays Are Coming’ in the upper 100th percentile of Kantar’s advertising database for powerful branding.

Other strong performers include Aldi, which celebrated the 10th anniversary of ‘Kevin the Carrot’ and M&S Food’s Dawn French festive fairy, which returned for a fifth year. Other brands in Kantar’s top 10 include Tui, Asda, Argos, KFC, Sainsbury’s and Asda.

Kantar head of creative excellence, Lynne Deason, dubs the decision to reuse campaigns “smart marketing”.

“Brands reusing and evolving familiar assets are cutting through more effectively than those starting from scratch,” she notes.

“Our brains forget things easily and in today’s busy world, brands have to keep drumming into people’s minds what makes them different in a way that’s memorable and meaningful to cut through.”‘Good creative wears in’: How ‘multifaceted’ consistency is driving festive ad ratings

With this in mind, Deason argues effective advertising takes “more than simple repetition” and brands need a clear, core idea rooted in strategy that can be “refreshed and adapted to trends and consumer realities”.

“We know that brands which maintain a cohesive image and messaging, which sets them apart from their competitors, ultimately grow better in the long run,” says Deason.

Asda’s ‘Grinchmas’ campaign was the only brand in the Kantar top 10 with an entirely new idea.

Notably, John Lewis, Lidl, Morrisons, Waitrose and Tesco’s TV ads didn’t make Kantar’s top 10 in 2025, yet Ipsos data last week found John Lewis’ ‘Where Love Lives’ is the spontaneous favourite ad for the third week running.

The benefit of repeated ads was highlighted by System1’s Christmas rankings, which saw Amazon’s repeated ‘Joy Ride’ ad take the lead. System1 chief customer officer, Jon Evans, argued “good creative wears in, it doesn’t wear out” and consistent ads are topping this year’s rankings.

Fragmented media

According to Kantar, TV still “dominates” Christmas advertising, but the role of other channels has played a bigger role in driving campaign awareness this year as audiences fragment. Deason explains non-traditional media formats are doing more of the heavy lifting in terms of “magnifying and extending the impact of campaigns”.

The research finds one in four consumers are looking forward to watching ads on YouTube and 18% on TikTok, with John Lewis the most talked about advert on TikTok. Press advertising cut through for grocers has doubled in the last three years, with Kantar’s data showing the contribution of campaign synergy to overall success has doubled in recent years.

This echoes Samira Brophy at Ipsos, who last month told Marketing Week brands are “thinking more about themselves as entertainment properties” when it comes to Christmas, which she feels is the biggest “evolution” from last year.

According to Kantar’s research, part two of the Aldi trilogy – detailing Kevin’s chaotic stag do – was seen as the funniest advert, with Amazon coming out on top for musical enjoyment, followed by Coke.

Cadbury also scores the highest for positive male portrayal, with Argos also scoring highly on this measure. Kantar claims this is the “strongest Christmas ad yet” from Argos, which scores highly on humour, storytelling and brand centricity.

Amazon was also deemed a “powerhouse for showing women positively on screen”, however Kantar found the proportion of all UK adverts depicting women in non-traditional roles halved in 2025 versus last year.