Tesco’s Multiple Christmas Ads Show Hilariously Real Seasonal Moments, Not Traditional Ones
When it comes to the festive season, it’s most commonly framed as a series of picture-perfect, wholesome moments. But if you talk to most people, their festive period is full of funny, chaotic, unscripted moments, without which, it simply wouldn't be Christmas.
That’s the theme of Tesco’s Christmas campaign titled ‘That’s What Makes It Christmas’ which launches this morning, November 12th 2025, on Tesco social media channels and via email to Clubcard members, and airs on TV later today.
Taking a unique approach, Tesco’s ‘That’s What Makes It Christmas’ campaign is structured as a series of standalone films (in 10, 20 and 30-second formats). Created in partnership with BBH London, each film introduces a different family and a different narrative, ensuring the campaign helps the whole country feel seen this holiday season. The films were directed by Jeff Low and produced by Biscuit Filmworks, with narration from comedian John Bishop.
Moving away from a censored view of Christmas, the films show that people actually find their festivity in all manner of perfectly imperfect moments. The series of vignettes show a range of all too familiar scenarios – colleagues musing over what to buy that person from the office they barely know for Secret Santa, a fridge stuffed full of delicious treats that you are not allowed to touch until Christmas day, or making sure you get that essential bag of Christmas nuts. Other narratives include family boardgames that get seriously competitive, awkward chats with the neighbours you don’t really know and heading back home up north only to be teased about your southern twang.
The campaign highlights how Tesco is intrinsically part of Christmas in the UK – whether it’s for the abundant main meal, snacky bits for when guests nip over, or party food for the office get-together – so who better to celebrate every facet of it?
“It all started with insights that we talked about and found genuinely funny,” executive creative director at BBH Felipe Serradourada Guimaraes tells LBB. One film, which centres around a father over-sharing via the medium of Christmas cards, is plucked directly from his own experience. “My dad writes cards to everyone he's ever known in four different languages about what haircut I've got,” he laughs. “It's so ludicrous that people do that.”
As slices of life, each of these festive-but-flawed life moments is presented with charm and humour, but they also land strategically for the customers of UK’s largest supermarket brand.
Strategically, the multi-faceted approach to the campaign was a gift, says deputy chief strategy officer Saskia Jones. “Tesco have got key audiences that we want to go after, families obviously always being the heartland, but I think what was really exciting about this is you've got insights that are universally true to everyone. But because of the scale and the shape of this campaign, you can get a lot more targeted.” From family scenes to a workplace kitchen, there’s something that any audience in the country can relate to. “Strategically, it felt easier to do that because otherwise you're hanging your hat on one insight. Sometimes the most stressful conversation is deciding we really need to put that one insight into research and all feel really confident. I actually think the fact that you can stretch it over so many gave us even more confidence that we're going to hit all of our bull's eye audiences [across] the whole nation. The whole nation can point at one of them or multiple and go 'That's a bit of me.'”
To make sure the comic tone hit just right, each slice of life needed to be perfectly timed. “I think to do the idea justice needed time,” says Felipe. “There was a danger of the insights becoming a bit too superficial. And for you to be able to get it, you'd have to push it to a place where it felt maybe a bit stereotypical or over-stylised. We wanted the nuance of the insights maybe sometimes being a bit more niche.”
The ECD takes the example of the son who’s lost his accent down south. “Without the context of [the parents’ voices] being teased, explaining the accent, that wouldn't have been delivered,” says Felipe. “A kid coming in and saying, ‘I got the fast train’, you'd be like, all right, well done. They deserved time for the insights to be able to stay real.”
While the campaign is made of lots of little scenes, they couldn’t be too small. “Yeah, it feels like a different shape, but the nature of the idea required a little story for you to kind of come in without losing the tone. So that's what we did.”
Biscuit Filmworks director Jeff Low was key in that process too. “Jeff Low did an amazing job in terms of casting,” says Felipe. “Work like this is really hard because you can either overplay it and it becomes just like a bunch of weirdos because it has to be funny, or you play it so dry that it becomes a tone that's not appealing to the nation. I think he managed to get a balance where the insights are still true and still played straight but there's a bit of levity. He pushed some of the characters and performances into places to make it more unanimous in terms of the style of comedy, so fair play to him. We started with something but I think we got something really special because he really pulled it off.”
As a Canadian, Jeff’s sense of humour is relatively close to a British one, it turns out. He understood the script. He is also a close collaborator to BBH, having worked with the Dublin agency on some recent work for Tesco Ireland earlier in the year. The creative team, Ash Hamilton and Sara Sutherland, had already worked with the director while at a previous agency and the creative director Gary McCreadie is a good friend of Jeff’s. “Tesco Christmas is hard to deliver and it's a big old brief,” admits Felipe. “And I think we all need to be holding hands, doing it together. So even when you're picking talent, you kind of make decisions of people that will hold hands and do it with you – to the point that Jeff was in the agency for a couple of weeks writing with the teams and really invested in it, which I haven't seen happen ever before. And I think it shows in the work.”
The campaign is scored by the track ‘Holly Jolly Christmas’, which has been reworked to be less imposing than most festive tunes would be between Black Sheep Music and Resister. That was a long process of trial and error. “I don't think you ever know until you start putting stuff on the film,” says Felipe. “We looked at three takes on it. We looked at a big Christmassy track, like a 'Love Actually' type of score – it made the films feel really fake. It was really odd, playing it into this kind of skit. Then we put stuff on that was so famous and recognisable that it was super distracting. We genuinely tried hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of tracks, and when we got to ‘Holly Jolly’, we even had to re-score it to be able to give it a bit more space. We all knew what the tone needed to be, we just needed to move the right levers to get it there. It was interesting as you put stuff in and it totally ruined everything.”
There is much more to the campaign beyond the score. In fact, ‘That’s What Makes It Christmas’ has even become part of Tesco’s product offering. For the first time, customers will be able to tap into the creative elements of the campaign through products in-store in the form of hand-drawn Christmas cards by the estate of Robin Shaw (the modern day illustrator of ‘The Snowman’ which was originally created by Raymond Briggs in 1982), depicting familiar chaotic Christmas scenes for a tongue-in-cheek way to send season’s greetings to loved ones, and F&F Christmas jumpers designed to answer inevitable awkward family questions (e.g., “Yes, I’m still single”). These will be available to buy in selected Tesco stores later this month.
That’s some serious commitment to the idea from the client. “In all honesty, sometimes you see an idea and you just know it's going to work,” says Murray Bisschop, marketing director at Tesco UK. “So it was a pretty easy sell with our product teams. We showed them the broader idea in the execution of the cards and the jumpers.”
“I give credit to Felipe and the team,” he continues. “When we first started building the momentum and the idea, they came to us with the proposal on both the jumpers and the cards. When you've got such a strong idea, you look at this concept you go, well, it makes sense. And that becomes a much easier job for us to get our business galvanised behind it. The moment we showed our Christmas card buyers and jumper buyers the concept and the idea, they were all in. So I think the idea brings its own merit.”
The ‘Snowman’-esque style, juxtaposed with the sardonic takes on Christmas scenes, perfectly encapsulates what this campaign is trying to do. “That's why you have that feel and I think it feels legit,” says Felipe. “That was a huge part of the campaign. It isn't just about subverting things for the sake of it, it's presenting traditional Christmas through a slightly more real point of view.” He describes the months-long process of ideation as finding the scenes that provoke the reaction “Oh, that is the Christmas film.” Followed by “How do you give it a twist?”
The campaign aims to ignite a national conversation around everyone’s perfectly imperfect festive experiences. Across the plan, and with media led by EssenceMediacom, partnerships have been crafted to ignite and facilitate a cultural conversation around everyone's 'That's What Makes it Christmas' moments. This includes a partnership with Channel 4’s Gogglebox, where the nation's favourite television commentators will discuss the ads, and talk about their own unique 'That's What Makes it Christmas' moments.
The campaign maximises reach and impact across AV, audio, press, OOH, digital and social, placing Tesco at the heart of ‘That's What Makes it Christmas’ moments, including contextual messaging in targeted environments. This extends to buses wrapped in paper that has run out (a Christmas classic), a Metro cover wrap Bingo card for ticking off chaotic Christmas moments and petrol pumps delivering tailored messages to those on their journey home for Christmas.
Murray’s excited to see the nation respond to the supermarket’s remedy to the monolithic big Christmas film, but encouraged by the testing it’s gone through. “Personally, for me, that point in the campaign is exciting, but of course there are nerves,” he says. “Then we put it in front of customers, and when you see how they start to build on it, genuinely, you feel elation. Because what we were talking about and the way our teams were reacting to it t, we saw mirrored in customers. Then you realise you're onto something. It creates this momentum that a team really sees as an opportunity creatively to do these as individual spots. To Sas's point, we realise that the more we do that, the more we've got a chance that everybody sees something that's really on the button for them. And then we work with the media team and we realise we can actually make that happen and really give a good OTS [opportunity to see] through the campaign. The three things come together and it just falls into place.”
