Christmas 2017: The Top 10

It's that time of the year when retailers battle it out for the best Christmas advert of the season. We partnered with audience platform Lucid to test the emotional response of over 3,300 people in the UK, watching 55 videos during a week, mid November 2017.

Emotion recognition technology was used to collect emotional responses. These ad rankings are based on individual adverts’ EmotionAll® scores – a 1 to 10 performance score which compares videos’ emotional performance across our entire database of over 10,000 previously-tested videos. This EmotionAll® score can be segmented by age, gender or other metrics such as income.

RANK	BRAND	CAMPAIGN	(%)	Score
1	Coca-Cola	Gogglebox...Holidays Are Coming	96	10
2	Vodafone	A Christmas Love Story	95	10
3	McDonalds	Carrot stick Christmas	93	9
4	M&S	Paddington and the Christmas visitor	85	9
5=6	Currys PC World	Merry Techmas	84	8
5=6	H.Samuel	Beautiful girls	84	8
7=8	Waitrose	Christmas together	81	8
7=8	Heathrow	Bear Christmas	81	8
9=10	Pandora	Do get what you wish for	80	8
9=10	Tesco	Turkey, every which way	80	8

KEY INSIGHTS

Alongside Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, Tesco was another top 10 ad to feature typical household situations. Authenticity, providing a more honest representation of 'real-life' Christmas, was a leading theme this year.

Romance was another, being featured in four out of the top ten, H. Samuel, Heathrow and Pandora joined Vodafone in trying to capture people’s hearts. Further down the list of the 55 videos, lower-performing ads had a more rational approach with more attention given to products than narrative. Unwrap other findings by downloading our study.