A more relaxed holiday season
The grand exemplar of this festive repetition is, of course, Coca-Cola’s “Holidays Are Coming” masterpiece. The ad first aired in 1995 and instantly established its famous red convoy as a herald of the festive season.
The campaign now runs in over 100 countries with data confirming that the ad hasn’t just maintained its appeal, it is actually getting more effective with each passing year. Consumers welcome its familiarity and regard it as a signal of the start of the season.
It’s almost pointless that Coca-Cola still creates new Christmas ads, yet they make one every year, and it invariably performs worse than the holiday classic.
To be clear, if you have a mediocre ad, it’s probably going to stay that way. But when a company like Amazon creates a proven winner — as it did with “Joy Ride” — then the logic for running it over multiple years is clear.
Claudine Cheever, vice president of brand and marketing at Amazon, is a scholar of advertising effectiveness. She knows her ESOV from her DBAs and has followed the emerging data on creative consistency from the outset.
It was her call to run the ad again this year, and her logic is clear and impressive. She knows the campaign delivered a literally perfect score for emotional impact and brand building in 2024, and she’s confident it will do so again. She has also craftily saved the 20% of her budget that would normally go toward the creative production of a new ad and moved all of it to the working capital of media spend.
Finally, her team, who still have the significant challenge of producing a host of product-focused performance ads for the season, have one less thing to do because their big brand campaign is already in the can.
Bet on a winner
Amazon’s “Joy Ride” ad isn’t just a heartwarming reprise — it’s a commercial masterstroke. And it signals a sea change in how marketers and advertising agencies should think about the metabolism of creative work.
Make fewer ads. Make better ads. Spend more on initial creative. And more on testing to get them right. Then run them for longer, ignoring the frenetic energy of those telling you to create more content all the time.
Like the three old ladies sitting at the top of a snowy hill, slow down and enjoy the ride.
