The best Christmas ads of 2024

If you work in an area related to marketing, there’s a good chance your Christmas is equal parts stress and excitement, especially if you have yet to launch this year's Christmas campaign. But there is one thing that truly makes this the most wonderful time of the year for marketers—the Christmas ads.

At least, we imagine that is the case if you, like us, enjoy geeking out over fun advertisements and clever ad campaigns. There’s just something about Christmas ads that brings out the best in a brand.

So, to get you in the spirit (and provide you with a little inspiration for next year) we’re taking a look at some of the best Christmas ads from 2024. From Aldi’s unbe-leaf-able Kevin the Carrot and Boots’ Christmas feminism to IKEA’s lonely dachshund.

Sainsbury’s Christmas ad is a near perfect adaption of everyone’s favorite Big Friendly Giant

In what is probably the biggest “influencer collaboration” of the year (pun intended), Sainsbury decided to pull at our childhood nostalgia in an extremely sweet animated imagining of Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant (or BFG for short).

To those who are unfamiliar with the story, BFG has canonically laid off eating humans and is looking at a Christmas dinner consisting of prawn coat tails, beef wellyboot, and wigs in blankets. But in a spur of genius, BFG asks Sainsbury’s for help to make this Christmas a bit more phizz-wizzing.

With real life Sainsbury’s colleague ‘ Sophie’ in his briefcase BFG travels all across the country to forage for the Christmas meal of his dreams (which doesn’t include any humans).

The commercial isn’t a CGI-production either,as Sainsbury’s advertising agency New Commercial Arts managed to pull off the heartwarming short using puppets and scale sets.

The 2024 Aldi Christmas ad features the return of Kevin the Carrot

Aldi is not a brand to shy away from a joke, and that goes almost double for their UK division, who’ve developed quite the tradition with their Kevin the Carrot who first aired on screens in 2016. 

Kevin has since become a permanent part of Christmas, and at this point we could ask ourselves, is it even Christmas without Kevin?

Together with their agency partners McCann Manchester, Aldi UK brings as a Christmas poem of epic proportions featuring mission impossible style lasers and both boob and butt jokes as Kevin and Katie (the carrots) venture out to steal the festive spirit of Christmas back from the humbug thieves who have stolen it in the 2024 Aldi Christmas advert.

The Boots Christmas ad with just a dash of feminism

One thing that’s almost as certain as brands making adorable Christmas ads, is that at least one of those ads will receive a social media backlash. And this year one of the ads to receive backlash is Boots’ Make Magic starring Adjoa Andoh. This is, possibly, also the best Christmas ad we have seen so far.

The ad, which was created for Boots UK in a collaboration between Hogarth, VML and The Pharm, has seen responses from social media users who call to #boycottboots because of the feministic tone, the fact that Mrs Claus is portrayed as a black person, Santa is asleep, some of Santa’s (Mrs. Claus’) helpers appear to be in drag, and a kid is referred to with their preferred pronoun.

The Christmas ad shows Mrs Claus coming home to see a sleeping Santa, after which and to the tones of “She’s That Girl” she takes matters into her own hands. Throughout the coordinated production Mrs. Claus makes sure everything goes off according to plan, and after Santa finally wakes up (just in time to deliver the presents) she looks down the barrel of the camera and asks the question: “You thought it was all him?”

Lidl hired an Oscar winning director to give us a magical Christmas ad

With help from Oscar winning director Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech, Les Miserables, The Danish Girl) and the German creative agency BBDO, Lidl has aired one of the best Christmas ads of this year. One that’s sure to tug at your heartstrings to a point where it won’t just bring tears to your eyes it’ll have you full-on ugly crying. Unless your heart is made of stone.

While the TV version of Lidl’s Christmas advert features a slightly tacky poem attempting to frame everything Lidl has to offer, the full version of this Christmas ad (below) features only 5 lines of dialogue and has been adapted to multiple languages.

The Christmas ad itself reads like a short film with a level of magic that almost rivals the likes of Harry Potter as a family seated around a table uses the magic of a pair of bells to wish for more and more things until the film’s main character, a little girl, wishes the things away, one by one, but as they disappear, they appear in the homes and arms of other families and children around the city.

As a final twist to Lidl's Christmas ad, many British viewers were left baffled by the film’s main character, as the young girl bears a striking resemblance to a member of the British Royal Family—nine-year-old Princess Charlotte, the daughter of the Prince and Princess of Wales.

The Polish IKEA Christmas ad

Swedish multinational company IKEA is never one to disappoint when it comes to Christmas ads, and as usual they manage to deliver, albeit from a slightly different angle than expected.

This year’s heartwarming advertisement was created for IKEA Poland, in collaboration with Warsaw-based agency VML and tells the story of a Dachshound with a simple wish—to look out through the window. 

The simple narrative centers around the family dog’s favorite spot in the house, a worn-out armchair by the window, which has to give way for the Christmas tree, leaving no place to sit.

As a part of the campaign IKEA has urged social media users to share images of their pets enjoying IKEA furniture.