Why Brands Shouldn’t Sit Christmas Out on Social

It’s Chriiiiiiist-maaaaas!

Yep, we’re hurtling towards that time of year again where brands are starting to think about Christmas social media campaigns. Only…they’re actually not.

Having worked with brands for the last eight years, we’ve noticed an appetite to put together festive campaigns but ultimate decisions to push things back and start fresh in the New Year. The reason? Brands are afraid that spending money on Christmas campaigns on social will be fruitless given how noisy social is at that time of year, especially from the big brands that plough millions into ABL at this time of year. How can they compete?

It’s understandable. No one wants to invest money into a time of year where brands are screaming from all angles to BUY BUY BUY!

In creative circles, it’s easy to assume that it’s only the big brands that win Christmas. There’s a plethora of think pieces analysing the year’s xmas ads from retailers, with follow-up analysis on sales post-holiday providing a barometer for success. Investment of millions = sales in the tens of millions = success! How CAN smaller brands compete?

Well, they don’t have to compete like that

The mistake is thinking that winning Christmas means making an ad.

For most brands, trying to go toe-to-toe with the biggest festive advertisers is a hiding to nothing. You probably aren’t going to outspend John Lewis. You don’t have Coca-Cola’s decades of Christmas brand equity behind you.

Luckily, social doesn’t require you to. That’s the beauty of it.

On social, the challenge isn’t to make the most expensive piece of Christmas content but to make something people actually want to engage with when it lands in their feed.

And there are an awful lot of people on those feeds with shopping on their minds.

Research from Retail Economics and Unbox forecast that UK consumers would spend £2.4 billion through social platforms during the 2025 festive season. More than half of consumers, 55%, said they planned to buy through social over Christmas, with around a quarter of festive gifting budgets expected to be spent there.

So yes, social IS noisy at Christmas, but in a great way.

People aren’t scrolling, they’re shopping

Nearly a third of UK shoppers, 32%, now use TikTok or Instagram instead of Google when researching what to buy. For Gen Z, that rises to 52%. Almost half of UK adults have already bought directly through a social platform.

That matters at Christmas because social isn’t simply somewhere a campaign gets seen before a customer wanders off to begin their shopping journey somewhere else.

Increasingly, social is part of the shopping journey.

People are looking for present inspiration, watching creators recommend products, sending posts to partners... They’re discovering brands they’ve never heard of and, in some cases, buying without ever leaving the platform.

For younger audiences the behaviour is even more pronounced. Retail Economics found that 92% of Gen Z expected to browse or buy through social during the festive season, while 66% expected to make a purchase there.

Sitting Christmas out because everyone else is talking therefore feels a little counterintuitive.

Yes, there are more brands competing for attention, but there are also millions of consumers actively looking for ideas on what to buy.

Big budget doesn’t automatically mean big attention

There’s another reason brands shouldn’t assume Christmas belongs to whoever has the largest media budget. Social has a fabulous habit of making the relationship between spend and reach slightly less predictable.

Back in 2021, Heinz launched Christmas Dinner Big Soup, cramming turkey, pigs in blankets and the rest of Christmas dinner into a can. It was daft, which was precisely the point.

The initial 500 tins sold out in three hours and demand spilled onto social. Heinz leaned into the reaction with competitions, further product drops and social content, including a TikTok parody timed around the launch of the John Lewis Christmas advert.

The campaign eventually generated 505 million social impressions, despite having what The Drum described as a tiny production budget and zero paid media budget.

More importantly, attention translated beyond social. Heinz reported a 14% week-on-week sales uplift across Big Soup varieties alongside an increase in market share. So that’s half a billion social impressions from Christmas soup in a tin.

Not bad for a brand supposedly competing for attention during the noisiest advertising period of the year.

And social attention can translate into action

Of course, impressions make lovely case-study slides, but brands ultimately need activity to do something.

Argos' 2024 Christmas campaign on TikTok gives us a useful example. Rather than measuring success purely through views, TikTok's Unified Lift Study looked at whether exposure to the campaign actually changed customer behaviour.

It found a 5.5% lift in ad recall and a 4.2% incremental lift in completed purchases. There were also measurable increases in customers adding products to their baskets and progressing to checkout.

So the opportunity isn't simply to get eyeballs at Christmas, but to get the attention of people who are already in a heightened period of discovery and spending.

Maybe “noise” isn’t the problem

Yes, Christmas social is crowded. Feeds fill up with gift guides. Every supermarket suddenly becomes sentimental. Products acquire little trees and bows. Santa gets worked to death.

But crowded doesn’t mean ineffective. If anything, the commercial behaviour happening on social during the festive period makes disappearing until January a strange response.

The bigger problem is adding more noise to the noise.

A generic Christmas giveaway probably isn’t going to cut through just because you’ve added some snowflakes to the artwork. Neither is taking a standard product ad and sticking a Santa hat on it.

Brands need a reason to join the conversation. For some, that might mean finding a behaviour around Christmas they can play with. For others, it could mean creating a piece of entertainment people genuinely want to pass around.

The common thread is that the work needs to be made for the way social travels.

You don’t need to win the Christmas ad war

Perhaps the most useful shift for brands is to stop viewing their Christmas social campaign as a smaller version of an ATL campaign.

You aren’t competing for the title of Britain’s favourite Christmas advert. You’re competing for a moment of someone’s attention in their feed. And unlike a TV ad break, social gives good ideas somewhere to go.

We see them get shared into WhatsApp groups, creators pick them up. comments become content. A small idea can suddenly find itself travelling considerably further than the media budget behind it should logically allow.

None of that means brands should throw money at Christmas simply because it’s Christmas. It means ruling the period out because it’s “too noisy” risks misunderstanding why the noise is there in the first place.

People are browsing, looking for things to buy and spending billions through social platforms while they do it.

All that to say, you don’t need millions of pounds and a two-minute cinematic masterpiece to be part of that. You just need an idea worth paying attention to and passing on.

And, of course, we can help you with that 😉