Sophie Neary is a managing director at Google, covering retail and consumer goods. She is a highly experienced thought leader in retail and digital transformation, having previously worked at large brands including Meta, Boots, and Tesco.
Trees are up, presents are being wrapped. And the best drama of the season? No, not the “is Christmas pudding good or not” debate, it's the YouTube Christmas Ads Leaderboard.
For my retail team at Google, this is our equivalent of the Super Bowl, where we see who truly connected with the audience.
After all, Christmas ads are a cultural moment us Brits actively seek out. In fact, "Christmas advert" searches, per Google Trends, are up to 100 times higher at the leaderboard’s 1st Oct (Q4) launch than searches for festive music royalty like Mariah Carey,1 and that, I’m sure you’ll agree, is really saying something.
And the numbers speak for themselves: the top five advertisers on the leaderboard have currently achieved a combined total of 919 million views, a dramatic +747% jump from the 122 million views generated by last year's top five at this same point.2 The competition hasn’t just snowballed – these brands are, ahem, sleighing this season.
Viewership and engagement numbers for the top channels delivered outstanding results, reflecting how brands are using YouTube across formats, screens, and moments to maximise festive reach and impact.
Strategies for festive success
It doesn't matter whether you're advertising on social media, radio, out of home, at the cinema, or on telly. Creative is still the number one most important factor in how effective an advert is, and storytelling still wins.
The data shows just how differently each format pulls its weight. Shorts accounted for 16% of total views but drove 92% of all “likes”, generating 11 times more “likes” than long-form content.3 Conversely, long-form videos sparked deeper conversation, delivering 14 times more comments than Shorts.4 Together, they reveal a powerful pattern: each format plays its own distinct role, and the strongest campaigns used both to full effect.
It doesn't matter whether you're advertising on social media, radio, out of home, at the cinema, or on telly. Creative is still the number one most important factor in how effective an advert is, and storytelling still wins.
Here’s a deep dive into one of my favourites this season, the seminal British high street brand Marks & Spencer:
M&S anchored their strategy on moving away from a single hero ad to a phased approach with multiple "mini content drops". According to M&S head of digital marketing strategy Lisa Yeates, the company executed a “flighting strategy” that envisioned the customer journey across key moments in Q4. Beginning with Autumn style, transitioning to Halloween and crossing into the festive period was key for this strategy, she said. “Our campaign approach allows us to serve relevant messages across multiple customer journeys throughout the period.”
To achieve this, Yeates said leveraging Search insights was a vital step, in that it provided a full view of the market from October onward. From there, M&S created a “chapters” approach for each possible customer journey through to Christmas. So if people were searching for hosting-related YouTube content, M&S could respond with creative focused on partywear, tablescaping, decorations, and other related categories.
Don’t think, however, that M&S completely abandoned the “hero” concept in their 2025 campaign. By leveraging AI, M&S took a handful of main customer ad journeys and, by varying the size, length, and creative assets, turned them into hundreds of versions.
The results are stunning: over half of their initial views came from short-form videos, demonstrating the power of a short and long form strategy. Another reminder of why “and” is the most important word in the popular marketing phrase "the long and short of it”!
Deck the halls with boughs of takeaways
1. Build for multi-format viewing behaviour
People move fluidly between short- and long-form content on YouTube, and the most successful brands built campaigns to match that behaviour. Using a combination of formats like YouTube Shorts, long-form video, and Video Reach campaigns can help brands maximise both discovery and recall. (Or, as I like to say: start short, and go long.)
2. Think in phases, not just hero moments
This year’s most-watched ads moved beyond the single Christmas drop. Instead they phased “content moments” such as back-to-school and Halloween, to keep campaigns alive throughout Q4. Tools such as YouTube’s reach planning, A/B experimentation, and frequency management can help brands design smarter, sequenced rollouts.
3. Invest in emotion (and let your audiences help shape it)
Creative that sparks joy or taps into culture continues to outperform. This year also showed the value of creator-led content and community participation, especially through Shorts. Using tools like Creator partnerships, AI-powered insights, and optimised creative guidance can help brands refine what resonates.
With 47.9M U.K. adults watching YouTube every month,5 this leaderboard isn’t just a ranking — it’s the cultural pulse of Christmas. The 2025 YouTube Christmas Ads Leaderboard shows that festive success isn’t about a single formula. It underlines how festive storytelling continues to evolve, even as the magic of a great Christmas ad remains unchanged. And the most enchanting part? How your brand shows up alongside the connection you create with YouTube’s high-intent viewers.
Congrats to all the brands who had Claus for celebration this year. I’m excited to see what you all do next. Now is the time to kick off your 2026 strategy, so let’s enjoy the turkey, and — probably not at the same time — let’s do this.
Methodology: The top five U.K. YouTube channels are based on an aggregate of YouTube ad views over Q4. This data combines the public count of views for videos used in paid marketing, which includes organic views on some ads listed publicly on a business YouTube channel. Videos are only counted if they started on or after the 1st of Oct 2025.
