This year’s holiday advertising season has delivered creativity in droves. System1, The Creative Effectiveness Platform, shares the ads that made an impact in November. The Test Your Ad platform measures consumers’ emotional responses to ads to predict their commercial potential. Creative is assigned a score of 1.0 to 5.9 Stars based on long-term brand-building potential.

Ads that make people feel intense, positive emotions like happiness and surprise score high on the scale. Usually, just 1% of ads secure a 5-Star score. Here are the holiday campaigns that scored highly last month. 

Unlikely Holiday Romance – Waitrose | Wonderhood Studios

“The Perfect Gift” 5.9 Star Rating Test Your Ad Report 

This Christmas, Waitrose served up “The Perfect Gift,” a big, unapologetically romantic epic fronted by Hollywood royalty (and Love Actually alum) Keira Knightley, opposite the brilliantly unlikely Joe Wilkinson. It’s over three minutes long, but you barely feel it. The film pulls you straight into the push-and-pull of their offbeat love story, drifting through a world that feels comfortably familiar, all soft lights, cosy kitchens and snowy streets, yet shot with enough wit and surprise to keep it from ever slipping into pastiche.

What makes it really work, though, isn’t just the casting or the craft. It’s the way the ad leans into place, culture and character arcs, the very things Orlando Wood champions in Lemon and Look out as key to long-term effectiveness. We’re not watching a brand message, we’re watching two people we care about, in a world we recognise, with Waitrose baked into the emotional fabric of the story. The result is an ad that doesn’t just win attention in the moment; it lodges itself in memory, exactly where future sales are made.

Christmas Cut-Through – Apple | TBWA\Media Arts Lab

“A Critter Carol” 5.4 Star Rating (UK) | 5.3 Star Rating (US) Test Your Ad Report

We’re spotlighting Apple for not one, not two, but three reasons this Christmas. It is the highest ever performing Apple holiday ad, the highest ever performing Apple ad on System1’s Competitive Edge database, and it achieves all of this while breaking free of a category that has been stuck in functional, feature-led adverts for years. There are no glossy product close ups, no mega pixel flexing, no hard sell headline. Instead, Apple leans into festive long-form storytelling, rich character moments and a cast of animals that, as anyone familiar with Orlando Wood’s work will know, act as emotional rocket fuel. The iPhone becomes a clear case of show, don’t tell, naturally woven into the world rather than waved at the viewer.

In a category where emotional engagement usually collapses under the weight of specs and sameness, this film blows past the norm, outperforming the smartphone average by more than 3 Stars in both the UK and US. Some argue it does not feel like Apple because it drifts from the old minimalist aesthetic, but Apple advertising has not really looked or felt like classic Apple in a long time. What this spot proves is that bold, character-driven storytelling always wins. It cuts through, it feels distinctive, it defies dull, and it stands as a creative risk that has clearly paid off.

Consistency Christmas – Amazon

“Joy Ride” 5.9 Star Rating (UK) | 5.7 Star Rating (US) Test Your Ad Report

What a pleasure to see this masterpiece back on air for a second year, and even better to see it working harder. Versus 2023 we are seeing either a positive shift in emotion and Star Rating, or a meaningful lift in Fluency, the percentage of viewers who correctly recognise the brand.

As we showed in our Compound Creativity research, great work does not wear out, it compounds. Familiarity and cognitive ease make it more appealing over time, not less. Amazon has leaned into that truth brilliantly here. By bringing this ad back, they have topped the charts and outscored the retail category by more than 3 Stars this year, proving that Christmas does not always need something shiny and new. Sometimes the smartest move is to re-air the work that already lives in people’s heads and hearts.