?? Do Christmas Ads Pay Off?

It's THAT time of year again. And signs of the time are heart-warming, big budget TV ads. Especially retailers tend to compete for the "best" xmas spot every holiday season. Reason enough for #WednesdayWhizz to dedicate the last episode of the year to a little double click on the topic...

The Views have it

Why on earth would people equipped with free will watch TV ads on YouTube? (And I am talking skippable in the best sense of the word.) But they do. And big time! We have looked in detail at the YT channel of one of Germany's major grocery retailers (EDEKA), which has aired a popular Christmas ad on linear TV every single year since 2015. And the views are popstar level: Their average Christmas spot 2015-2021 had more than 15M views!

Here is their most viewed Christmas ad published in 2015 that accumulated 69.094.070 views by now - statistically every adult Germany has seen it once:

And interestingly, using those Views as KPI, Christmas spots are 12x more popular than non-Christmas spots by the same Retailer:

For reference, the most viewed non-Christmas spot by Edeka is the following from 2021. It features lots of things Germans supposedly love (BBQ, Soccer, ageing blonde male TV hosts ??) but still accumulated only a fraction of the views vs. its Christmas counterparts:

What are the ingredients of a good Christmas spot?

So why is that difference? It might come down to season and having time to watch. And/or there is something about Christmas spots that unites the generations. Given that I am a quant and - above that - an effectiveness quant, I would keep this section short and leave the WHY topic to the pros at #System1, so please see here:

BUT: Do these ads actually leave money under the tree?

More interesting for us at Analyx? was the question if these mini movies aired at high season actually pay off - so we finally looked at the semi-heart-warming question of: What is the relative ROI of Christmas ads?

In order to do so we unlocked the Analyx Media Effectiveness Database again. As our?SpendWorx? solution?for global agile marketing budget optimization is in regular use at many well-known brands in >10 countries across 5 time zones, we have built an effectiveness database as a little side product of that work which contains media ROIs derived by a consistent methodology. It does so down to campaign level, so we can derive incremental sales and campaign level ROIs.

If we now filter this for Retail only and look at the last ca. 3 years of data (173 weeks in total), we cover 3 Christmas periods (=December for simplicity). It turns out that:

Christmas TV ads of Retailers are on average 24% more effective than the average Retail TV campaign

So - at least for Retailers - Christmas TV ads seem to pay off on average:

I was actually pretty surprised by these results given the competition for attention during that time of the year and given that December GRPs tend to be more expensive seasonally. However, it seems indeed that all those reindeers and the well-crafted messages are not just yielding YouTube views and the occasional award. Christmas is full of surprises...

With that being said, I wish all of you - from Berlin town - a