Boots, Morrisons and Aldi embrace oddball Christmas advertising
Christmas advertising has gotten a little weirder this year, as Boot’s, Morrisons and Aldi make their oddball moves.
Christmas 2026 is starting to get a little unhinged. Morrisons has invited three animatronic bears, Boots has insisted on bringing a cast of women behaving alarmingly around electrical beauty products, and Aldi has once again bought along its animated root vegetable.
Morrisons: Goldilocks comes home for Christmas
Let’s start with our favourite of the crop. Leo UK has turned a familiar fairy tale inside out as Baby Bear brings his new girlfriend home for Christmas, with Nick Ball bringing the bear family to life through some impressive old-school craft (a theme this year, we note ADD LINK WHEN AVAILABLE).
The ad plays on a familiar anxiety around bringing a new partner home at Christmas: which is all the stranger if your parents happen to be bears.
‘Christmas Made Just Right’ is a 90-second film that updates Goldilocks and the Three Bears for the social media generation. It’s just the right side of dark, and the animation really stands out. The plot involves Mummy and Daddy Bear being thrown into a panic when their grown-up son announces that he is coming home with his girlfriend.
Daddy Bear heads for Morrisons Market Street, picking up an enormous salmon and getting cooking instructions from a fishmonger, while Mummy Bear attempts to make the family home presentable. Then comes the payoff. Baby Bear arrives with his girlfriend, Goldilocks.
Director Nick Ball has wisely resisted making the bears glossy CG creations, and the mixture of the bizarre and the ordinary is masterfully pulled off. The "just right" line is delivered with comic understatement, and the food plays into the action without being too tenuous.
Credits
Client: Morrisons
Agency: Leo UK
Chief creative officer: Andrew Long
Creative director: Kim Gill
Director: Nick Ball
Boots unwraps Christmas and lets the weirdness out
Forget tear-jerking Christmas sentiment; Phoebe Arnstein's eccentric spot leans into our seasonal gift obsession.
‘For Gifts They'll Really Love’, created through WPP, with creative from VML, is the first Christmas iteration of Boots' new ‘Give it Some Boots’ positioning, launched in September.
The ad is in keeping with this new direction, again putting people’s genuine affection for its diverse products at the centre - only this time the zaniness of the appreciation is turned up to 11. It is Christmas, after all.
The ad opens conventionally enough: people across Britain are delightedly unwrapping presents from Boots: a hair styler, electric toothbrush, make-up, fragrance and the futuristic Shark CryoGlow LED face mask. Then things get weird as the gift recipients have comically exaggerated reactions to their presents.
It’s a left turn from last year's Christmas campaign, ‘Gift Happily Ever After’, which revolved around Puss in Boots and a more conventional fairytale world. This year's shift is stranger and sharper.
Credits
Client: Boots UK
Integrated agency: WPP
Creative: VML
Chief client officer: Pip Hulbert
UK chief creative officer: Ryan McManus
Deputy chief creative officer EMEA: Simon Lloyd
Creative directors: Gary Arnold and Christian El Asmar
Production company: Biscuit Filmworks
Director: Phoebe Arnstein
Kevin the Carrot goes looking for his dog
In what’s become a Christmas mainstay, Aldi's indestructible festive mascot has returned for his last hurrah, apparently, this time setting out to find the family's missing cauliflower dog.
Eleven Christmases in, Kevin the Carrot has acquired a wife, children and now, apparently, responsibility for a dog made out of cauliflower. (We’re not crying, you are.)
‘Kevin the Carrot and the Christmas Wish’ finds his daughter Chantenay distraught because Cauli Dog has disappeared. Father and daughter plaster the neighbourhood with LOST posters before discovering tiny pawprints leading into the snowy wilderness.
A fairly useless scarecrow sends them in the wrong direction before something resembling a grizzly bear turns out to be a much less threatening squirrel. Eventually the tracks take them right back home, where the family hears snoring coming from a Christmas cracker. Inside is Cauli Dog, happily asleep.
It's comfortingly familiar stuff, which is really the point.
Kevin the Carrot first appeared in 2016, and Aldi and McCann Manchester have built a recurring character and expanded his universe year by year. Kevin's debut received a respectable three stars in System1's testing, before later executions repeatedly crossed into its exceptional five-star territory. (On the company's scale, 5.9 is the maximum possible score).
Aldi is ending its 21-year relationship with McCann Manchester after a creative review, which could mean this is the agency's final Kevin Christmas. We know, we know.
Credits
Client: Aldi UK
Agency: McCann Manchester
Chief creative officer, McCann Manchester: Dave Price
Recent Kevin animation work: Psyop in association with Riff Raff Films
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