Australia's Top 10 Festive Campaigns of the Last Decade

Ten years of Cubery ad testing reveals which Christmas campaigns actually built their respective brands for the long-term, and not just who won the industry’s applause.

Check your calendars. Uh oh, that’s right, the annual avalanche of Christmas advertising is just around the corner. Which means we're about to enter that annual ritual where marketers, journalists, and LinkedIn commentators dissect every festive campaign as though civilisation depends on it.

Christmas advertising attracts an extraordinary amount of attention, delivering a fresh parade of rankings, hot takes, and creative critiques. Yet despite all the scrutiny placed upon it, advertisers rarely stop to ask the obvious question: what did we learn from all the Christmases that came before?

Advertising has always suffered from a short attention span; we obsess over the next campaign, the next platform, and the next new trend. But at the same time we overlook one of the most valuable sources of evidence available to us: what has already worked. Christmas campaigns are particularly vulnerable. They arrive quickly to great fanfare but disappear just as swiftly with the decorations.

So rather than speculate about this year's winners, we've instead rummaged through a decade of Australian Christmas ad testing data. What campaigns have done the best job of delivering long-term growth for the brands behind them, and not just generated seasonal excitement?

While digging through the archives, one finding genuinely surprised us: of the ten most emotionally engaging Australian Christmas ads over the last 10 years, not a single one of them made it into the top ten for brand linkage (i.e. how effectively those experiences built memories that were linked to the brand).

For advertisers, it’s an important reminder that generating emotion is not the same thing as building memory structures. While making people feel something is valuable, ensuring those feelings become associated with your brand is infinitely more important. The Ehrenberg-Bass institute has spent decades demonstrating that future growth comes from being easy to remember and easy to buy. Christmas often makes that job harder because brands are competing not only with one another, but with Christmas itself.

Which makes the campaigns that successfully navigate this predicament all the more impressive. So, before another season of festive advertising kicks off, let's take a look at the campaigns over the last 10 years that got the balance right.

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And the winners are...

Australia Post’s ‘Delivering Christmas’ takes the top spot, with McDonald’s ‘I’m Ruinin’ It’ and Kmart’s ‘Feel the Low-Price Love’ following close behind. Three very different brands, with three very different creative approaches.

The remainder of the top ten is equally diverse, featuring Cadbury, RedBalloon, TK Maxx, Coles, Aldi, and Lego. Interestingly, seven of the ten campaigns come from the past three Christmases. That's encouraging evidence that creative effectiveness is not some lost art form buried in advertising history. If anything, the quality of festive advertising in Australia appears to be improving. Take that, AI!

But the obvious question is why. What separates these campaigns from the countless festive executions that disappear without a trace? Well, our winner is a pretty good place to start.

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When Christmas serves the brand

It sounds odd to criticise Christmas advertising in an article celebrating it, but much Christmas advertising suffers from a fundamental strategic flaw: brands become so distracted by advertising Christmas that they forget to advertise themselves.

We all know the formula. A decorated house, a family around the table, a tearful grandparent, and a nauseating amount of festive warmth. And somewhere in the background, a brand that may or may not have supplied the Christmas ham.

It's undeniably festive and emotional. Whether it's actually effective is another question entirely. But this isn't a Christmas-specific problem. Brands often become subordinate to the very platforms, sponsorships, events, or cultural moments they are trying to leverage. The occasion becomes famous, not the brand.

Australia Post avoided this trap brilliantly with their 2023 Christmas campaign. Introducing Santa Claus into an advertisement would normally risk making him the star. Instead, Australia Post structured the story so that the brand remained indispensable – Christmas, quite literally, could not be delivered without it.

That's exactly what effective advertising that builds brands over the long-term looks like – the entertainment serves the brand rather than the other way around. The results reflect this discipline, with ‘Delivering Christmas’ among the strongest Christmas ads we’ve ever tested for branding, meaning that the memories generated by the story were firmly attached to Australia Post.

When emotional storytelling and unmistakable branding work in tandem, marketers don't have to choose between effectiveness and enjoyment. And that's what propelled Australia Post to the top of the Christmas effectiveness tree.

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There’s more than one way to sleigh

Incredibly, Aldi accounts for three of the five most emotionally engaging Christmas ads we've tested over the past decade. One of the retailer’s campaigns in particular stands out: 2021's ‘You Can't Overcook Christmas,’ which somehow moves from a gentle piano rendition of ‘O Christmas Tree’ into a full-blown Darude ‘Sandstorm’ remix.

Gloriously ridiculous, the ad was chaotic, distinctive, and impossible to ignore. Predictably, some viewers loved it while others found it irritating, which can sometimes be the price of a distinctive creative approach. After all, standing out often requires making choices.

Yet despite its entertainment value, the campaign fell short of our overall top ten rankings. The reason is instructive; attention alone rarely guarantees effectiveness, with the creative experience sometimes overshadowing the brand itself.

To Aldi's credit, the brand has learned from this and subsequently refined and evolved its creative strategy over time. In more recent years the retailer has maintained its irreverent humour while giving the brand a more prominent role. This culminated in 2024's ‘Go a Little Extra This Christmas’ successfully combining the brand’s distinctive style of entertainment with stronger brand linkage, earning a place in our top 10 of the last 10 years as a result.

The lesson for advertisers is that consistency doesn't mean repetition, it means evolving successful creative platforms in ways that strengthen brand memory over time.

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The gift that keeps on giving

There’s a strange pressure each year to unveil something new, but sometimes the smartest creative decision is to stick with what already works.

One of the most persistent myths in the marketing world is the idea that consumers tire of advertising, when in fact it’s marketers themselves who become bored with the campaigns they’re surrounded by every day.

TK Maxx's ‘Shut Up’ demonstrates this perfectly. It's the only campaign to appear twice in our overall top ten, and remarkably, it performed even better in its second year.

For all the discussion about novelty and innovation, the evidence points to a different conclusion – distinctive creative assets become more valuable through repeated exposure. Familiarity is not a weakness, it's often one of the primary mechanisms through which advertising builds memory.

That's why the best advertisers don't simply chase new ideas but rather compound existing advantages. Which brings us back to why we opened the Christmas archives in the first place. The real value of creative measurement is understanding what made the winners work and building on these learnings year after year.

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And that's ultimately why looking backward matters. The value isn't just identifying the campaigns that won. It's understanding why they won and then using those lessons to compound creative effectiveness over time. Christmas may only come once a year, but the learnings shouldn't.

So, here's to the Christmas class of 2026. May they entertain us, surprise us and, most importantly, not play second fiddle to the Christmas lunch spread.

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