Aldi’s Kevin the Carrot overtakes Sainsbury’s as the most recognised Xmas ad, study finds

Part two of Aldi’s festive trilogy, detailing Kevin the Carrot’s chaotic stag do, has overtaken Sainsbury’s ‘The Unexpected Guest’ as the most recognised Christmas ad this week, according to exclusive Ipsos Race to Christmas data.

Some 55% of people say they have seen the Aldi advert and recognise it after seeing de-branded stills, compared to 47% last week. This means Aldi overtook Sainsbury’s BFG ad, which came in at 52% this week, compared to 50% last week.

Waitrose’s star-studded ‘The Perfect Gift’ is in third place at 48%, a 6% increase from last week, with Asda’s ‘A Very Merry Grinchmas’ remaining level to the week prior at 45%. In this category, EE also saw a drop off, coming in at 21% last week compared to 9% this week.

So far, the average level of recognition for this year’s Christmas ads tracked is 29% in both week 2 and week 3, with Ipsos claiming that ads that break category conventions are 21% more likely to be strongly encoded in people’s memories.

Samira Brophy, senior creative excellence director at Ipsos, says the Ipsos book Misfits “proved how high levels of creativity, empathy and fit combined are most strongly correlated to effectiveness outcomes”.

“Ads that have one without the other have a tendency to regress to the mean. The Ipsos Race to Christmas data shows the ads pulling ahead of the others are those delivering a high-quality audience experience, while tapping into relevant consumer context, all done in a well branded way,” claims Brophy.

Similarly, 43% of respondents instantly recognised Aldi’s second advert and connected it to the Aldi brand after seeing debranded stills – an 11% increase compared to last week, where it also topped the charts with 32% recognition in this category.

M&S and Sainsbury’s came joint second last week with 31%, and both score 29% and 36% respectively this week, cushioning Waitrose coming in third with a 30% score – an increase of 9% from last week.

According to Ipsos, these results show that creative repetition, humour and episodic storytelling is paying off, with the company’s creative testing highlighting that brand characters are twice as effective vs celebrities at capturing attention – this despite the success Waitrose is seeing with its star-studded ad.

Empathy vs recognition

Burberry comes in at 0% for recognition from de-branded stills, the same as last week. Yet it scores the highest for ad empathy. Some 62% of recognisers strongly agree that the advert is for ‘people like me’, meaning it tops the table for ad empathy. This is a 3% increase from last week, where it also topped the table.

Disney follows at 53%, O2 at 51%, and Barbour at 50%. All overtake Lego, which came in second at 50% last week and scores 48% this week.

Burberry also comes first in terms of recognisers agreeing that the advert ‘made me feel good about the brand’. 66% of respondents agreed with the statement in reference to the Burberry ad – a 3% increase from last week, where the brand also came first. These results suggest the ad is landing with its core audience.

Lego came second last week with a score of 55%, yet this week was overtaken by O2, Coca-Cola, Barbour and Disney. Asda comes in last at 29%, with the brand also coming last the week prior with a score of 28%.

Elsewhere, John Lewis’ ‘Where Love Lies’ is the spontaneous favourite ad for the third week running, with 20% of respondents recalling them in this context. Waitrose is closely behind at 14%, followed by 8% favouring M&S. Last week, M&S and Waitrose came joint second as 10% of respondents selected each one as their top choice.

On the findings, Brophy says “the growing success of Waitrose and spontaneous recall of John Lewis also shows how effectiveness is not a paint by numbers game” despite brand characters “outperforming” celebrities on average.

“Context matters and if your development and measurement only focus and optimise for one thing, you might miss some important opportunities,” she adds.