Advertisers also paid premium prices to run premium creative. Smirnoff spent the season with the delightful “Snowed In with Troye Sivan.” It was part of a phalanx of advertisers who get that video builds brands in ways that banners and search simply cannot.
Over the holidays, advertisers actually worried about whether their creative was good enough. Pre-testing spikes in Q3 as marketers measure emotional response and brand linkage in the run up to the festive period. Anyone spending more than a million bucks on an ad should be fired for not pre-testing it, holiday season or not.
The proof of holiday advertising’s effectiveness is in the pudding. System1 has tested thousands of Christmas ads with millions of consumers over the last five years, and two things are always apparent. First, these ads score significantly higher on their “Star Rating,” which predicts brand building and effectiveness. Second, they are pulled from the market far earlier than the less effective fodder made during the rest of the year.
Source: System1
I’m not suggesting we feature Santa Claus in April or play Mariah Carey in July. I’m recommending that the principles of holiday advertising become the default, not the exception. Emotion works in February. Mass reach builds brands in the fall. Share of voice is just as correlated with growth in Q2 as it is in Q4. Pre-testing works year round.
The fundamentals don’t take Christmas vacations. Only marketers do.
We abandon effectiveness in January for the same reason we break promises about gym membership and fiber: it’s easy to go back to our old habits. Performance marketing feels productive. Micro-targeting seems sophisticated. Cutting brand budget appears financially prudent. And nobody ever got fired for doing what everyone else was doing.
But I think it should be Christmas every day—not the tinsel and carols and awkward office parties, but the effective advertising.
