2016 Was a Rotten Year — Which Made It the Right Moment for Christmas Ads to Compete on Warmth and Comfort

The grandest gesture is to shoot a short film and tell a good story; other brands put out a "Christmas edition" product to give you a reason to buy; and if all else fails, put up a Christmas tree — anyone can manage that, right?

Just as every brand has to borrow a bit of Spring Festival around Chinese New Year (you'll always see red envelopes, the family reunion dinner, or a sea of red), almost every company and brand has to do something for Christmas.

In Europe and the US, big retailers and brands will spend heavily to tell a good story. These ads aren't really built to sell — they're brand ads, image ads. They use the season to give you a warm feeling, so that you think better of the brand (and buy a little more to give away).

In Britain, the Christmas ad is often a brand's single biggest marketing budget of the year, holding the place the Super Bowl holds in the US and Spring Festival advertising holds in China.

"Christmas matters enormously to British retail brands," said Josh Krichefski, CEO of MediaCom, the media agency owned by WPP.

"A brand's Christmas ad usually runs on several platforms at once. If the Christmas ad works, the whole year's [marketing] works. And the other way around," said the CEO of Adam&EveDDB, the agency for the British department store John Lewis.

This year, consumers have even started seeking Christmas ads out. David Black, Google UK's director of brand operations, said searches for Christmas ads on YouTube were up 40% from last year. "People start searching before the ads have even reached television," he said.

Across the Pacific, America's Christmas ads are on the whole less impressive than Britain's, and make less noise. We've written before about why British Christmas ads are better than American ones (reasons include the weight the US puts on Super Bowl marketing, and Britain's tradition of making Christmas ads).

The research firm Ace Metrix found that the US ran fewer holiday ads this year than last. Before Thanksgiving only 47 had aired on television, against 111 in the same period last year. This may have something to do with the election.

Among the few American Christmas ads, Macy's was decent — warm, with a sense of history, and it managed to fold Thanksgiving and Christmas together (while showing off its own annual Thanksgiving Day parade on the side).

This Christmas ad comes from a Michigan supermarket chain: "Kids Can See Santa."

The US really doesn't take Christmas ads as seriously as the Super Bowl. But because Christmas follows Thanksgiving, November and December make up America's biggest shopping season of the year. The National Retail Federation puts this year's sales at $626.1 billion. Take toys: November and December account for 32% of the year's sales. So plenty of brands still market at Christmas, just with a heavier tilt toward shopping — the department store Kohl's staying open for four days straight this year, say, or the store window displays on Fifth Avenue.

In countries with no Christmas tradition, such as China, companies and brands may have neither the appetite nor the budget to tell a story. But they can still put out a special "Christmas edition" product to give you a reason to buy, or at least stand a Christmas tree in a mall — some holiday atmosphere, and a reminder that they exist.

The turmoil in world affairs left everyone feeling pretty bleak about 2016. Even Pantone picked Greenery, a color of hope and new growth, as next year's color of the year.

If this year's Christmas ads share a theme, it is that the brands telling stories are all going for comfort. Even John Lewis, a company fond of playing a few sad cards, couldn't bring itself to make you sad this year.

Mixed-race families have also become a more and more mainstream element in these ads. Beyond reunion in the ordinary sense, they carry an extra layer of meaning — "inclusion." That may be the tune people want to hear after Brexit, the US election and other large political events made them aware of how divided society is.

Ethnic-minority and mixed-race families may be showing up more and more

The department store John Lewis has long been treated as the weathervane of British Christmas advertising. Its Christmas ads have been winning it attention since 2007, and each year's film is taken as the start of Britain's Christmas marketing season. Watch its ads from earlier years and you'll spot the formula: a sad story with a warm ending.

This year it decided to drop the sadness. A John Lewis spokesperson said the company worried that last year's ad had been too mournful, and that this had been a "difficult" year for Britain (Brexit), so it wrote something more cheerful instead: a father puts up a trampoline for his daughter, and it turns out that besides the little girl, all sorts of animals love the gift.

It gets to the point, more or less: at John Lewis you can buy a gift everyone likes. Worth noting: this is the first time John Lewis has made an ethnic-minority family its protagonist.

The lifelike animals are all CG; the effects team spent four months on them. The production budget this year was £1 million. That's £6 million less than the year before, but still a big spend.

It also worked with Bright Bricks to rebuild scenes from its past five Christmas ads in Lego, on display in its stores.

What do you make of the John Lewis ad? Some British outlets, The Drum among them, did not rate it as the year's best Christmas ad (Sainsbury's Christmas ad, for one, passed John Lewis in views at one point).

By YouTube views, though, John Lewis is still the No. 1 Christmas ad — probably riding the momentum of its strong work in earlier years.

Sainsbury's story this year isn't unusual: a working-class family finds a way to spend Christmas together. Its strength is the form — claymation stop-motion, with a theme song sung by the comedian James Corden. The ad features a mixed-race family.

Those are the two most-watched ads on YouTube this year. As of press time, John Lewis had passed 22 million views and Sainsbury's 14 million.

As long as the story is good, a brand nobody had heard of can still catch consumers' attention. Allegro, a Polish e-commerce company, was the dark horse of this year's Christmas marketing. Its Christmas ad passed 12 million YouTube views within two weeks of release.

Allegro's ad has something in common with last year's John Lewis film: an old man living alone.

It opens with the man receiving a copy of English for Beginners. You watch him practice, warm and a little funny: he labels every object in his home with sticky notes, gets misunderstood when he practices English loudly on the bus, gets laughed at by the neighbor's kid while he dozes off, rehearses his lines with a rubber duck in the bathtub. The question left hanging: why is he learning English?

Then a suitcase arrives, he packs for a trip, and he lands in England. He is visiting his son's family there (another mixed-race family). All that preparation was for one line to his small granddaughter, who may not be related to him by blood: "Hi, I'm your grandpa."

The closing caption: "And you? What are you chasing?"

The ad was made by the Polish agency Bardzo. Its spokesperson said the situation in it is common in Poland: "Nearly a million Poles emigrate every year, settling and starting families in Britain and other countries. That thins their ties to family back home, and Christmas is a time when people long to be together." What surprised them was how many people in other countries the ad moved.

If the numbers look bad, hire a film director and movie stars and shoot something that looks good

More and more brands are hiring film directors to shoot Christmas ads with the feel of a feature.

Marks & Spencer brought in Tom Hooper, who directed The King's Speech, and Janet McTeer, an actress who has won the Olivier Award, British theater's highest honor. The story is inventive too: it is about Mrs. Christmas, Santa's other half, and this sharp, cool Mrs. Claus nods at the larger theme of "girl power."

H&M's short film was directed by Wes Anderson, who made The Grand Budapest Hotel, and stars the Best Actor winner Adrien Brody. The color and the framing are lovely, but the story feels unfinished.

Burberry's Christmas film is as lavish as the brand itself: directed by Asif Kapadia, an Oscar winner for best documentary; shot by Dion Beebe, who won an Oscar for Memoirs of a Geisha; written by Matt Charman, Oscar-nominated for Bridge of Spies. The cast is full of British film stars you can name. The film tells the story of the founder and has little to do with Christmas, but the sense of history and cool that Burberry gives off is hard to ignore.

Set against these good-looking films, though, the three brands' numbers do not look good at all.

Marks & Spencer has just come to grief in China, announcing it will close 10 stores. Beyond China it is closing stores in France and the Netherlands as well. In the half year to October, its revenue barely grew and pre-tax profit plunged 17%.

The whole department-store business is in trouble; John Lewis's growth has slowed too. Same-store sales rose in the first half, but operating profit fell 31.2% on higher spending.

H&M's profit keeps falling. In the third quarter, online and offline expansion lifted revenue 7%, but net profit was 4.82 billion Swedish kronor, down 9.2% from a year earlier — the fifth straight quarter of falling profit. Gross margin slipped from 55.9% a year earlier to 54%.

As for Burberry, the weaker pound helped its sales, but its products and operations have not improved much. Revenue fell 4% and profit 19% in the first half.

There will be Christmas presents, but this time they can be a little different

In the US market, Godiva solved the problem of presents for three people with a single box. It is a box inside a box: open it and half of what's inside is chocolate marked "to keep," the other half an unopened box marked "to give."

There are four layers in all, each holding a new chocolate box. The sly part: it can satisfy the wish to eat a piece yourself without eating too much, or — if you bought it for someone else — to sneak a taste anyway.

Just as inventive is the "interactive," "animated" ugly Christmas sweater Burger King made in France. The pouch in the middle holds a phone, which plays a fireplace animation in the ad — a silly way to make the point that the Whopper is flame-grilled. It sells for 30 euros, and you can buy it as a gift on streetwear sites.

Coca-Cola changed its packaging too, putting the polar bear back on it.

The Advent calendar, a decorative calendar people use to count down to Christmas, began in 19th-century Germany. Around 2009, beauty brands and department stores started selling their own during the Christmas season. Maybelline and the department store Selfridges were among the first; because they kept selling out, more and more brands joined in.

It is not only a countdown. Each day these calendars let you open one small box holding a mini or trial size of a product. Put plainly, it is a set of sample sizes packaged as "one reveal a day" — but it does bring a little suspense and fun to an otherwise ordinary gift box.

Alongside a crowd of department stores and beauty brands (Marks & Spencer, The Body Shop, Kiehl's, Jo Malone, Decléor and others), Lego joined the Advent calendar line this year too — from December 1 you can build a small toy a day.

In China, the Christmas special edition rules

Christmas in China is not the national occasion it is in Europe and the US. There are "Christmas special drinks" and "Christmas special editions," but you rarely see an ad that tells a Christmas story. Brand campaigns here lean much harder on selling.

McDonald's put out McCafé paper cups in a Christmas style — snowmen and gingerbread men — with a sleeve you can turn, and it wants you to write on the cup to say something to someone. Earlier this year, though, McDonald's in Taiwan had already used a similar "write on the cup" idea.

KFC Delivery put out 3,700 limited "Christmas and New Year Roast Whole Chicken" gift boxes in Shanghai — a whole chicken, plus an Old Beijing Chicken Roll, popcorn chicken, red bean pie and more — playing "limited quantity, limited time" to whet the appetite. Its parent brand also launched several seasonal items, including a new Nashville hot chicken and a lychee pie.

In China, the people who celebrate Christmas are mostly young people in first- and second-tier cities, so the marketing is built tightly around them.

Offline, most Christmas marketing gathers in malls and shopping centers. Budweiser has always been keen on holidays and runs a lot of offline events; beyond its Halloween party and "blood beer" drink, this time it built a Christmas market at Xintiandi in Shanghai, with the space designed by Shuhei Aoyama.

In this season, the Christmas tree is the most common form of "outdoor advertising." Can't tell a story? No budget to hire a director and actors? Putting up a Christmas tree is something anyone can do, right?

Usually a Christmas tree is just riding a trend, but an interesting tree can become the trend. From 2013 to 2015, Xintiandi Shanghai showed the "Kissing Tree," which lit up when people kissed, a work by the British lighting designer Paul Cocksedge. Next to an ordinary Christmas tree, it got people talking. This year they worked with the French art group 1024 Architecture on the Cube Tree.

QDaily rounds up the year's Christmas advertising every year, and we have found that of all the holidays, Christmas may be the most on-message and most politically correct marketing season of the lot. Most of these ads are warm-hearted; they press inclusion, diversity, love and harmony; parody and absurdity are rare. If you feel that Christmas marketing looks much the same year after year, that is a fair reaction. After so many years of it, a brand has a hard time making a Christmas campaign with a personality of its own. Look closely, though, and you can still find small marks of the times, usually tied to the political or economic climate.

Merry Christmas!

Cover image from video stills, brand websites, Pexels and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver