John Lewis Tops UK Top 10 Christmas Ads

With the Christmas ad push now in full swing, new research from social media agency BLOOM Worldwide has evaluated the social media success and online performance of the Christmas ads from ten of the UK’s biggest high street retailers to create a true representation of the nation’s favourite Christmas ads this year.
 

John Lewis’s animated heart warmer ‘The Bear and The Hare’ has been the runaway winner this year, generating over six and half times as many online mentions than Marks & Spencer’s ad which ranked second.  
 

See below for top 10 retailer Christmas ads:

1 John Lewis
2 Marks and Spencer
3 Argos
4 Tesco
5 Boots
6 Morrisons
7 Sainsburys
8 Debenhams
9 ASDA
10 Waitrose

The ads have been ranked according to five key performance indicators including: Exposure – how many people have viewed the ad online? Reach – how many social media mentions did it gather? Affinity – did people like it? Engagement – whether people acted after seeing the ad (like/rate/comment)? And advocacy – how successful was the ad in stimulating shares across the social web?

 
Although John Lewis had the highest number of online mentions at 61,407, only 30% of those had a positive sentiment.  The Argos and Debenhams ads both scored highest for positive sentiment at 44%, despite only having 450 and 857 only mentions respectively. The ASDA ad has the lowest positive sentiment score at 16%.

 
Also Interesting is how the ads scored for ‘share ability’ across twitter and Facebook.  Here Marks and Spencer stood out with 30,716 viewers choosing to share the ad from Marks and Spencer’s Facebook and twitter accounts. The John Lewis ad received less that half this number at 14,700 shares.
 

John Murphy, Senior Strategist, BLOOM Worldwide, commented: “While everyone will have an opinion as to which Christmas ad they like best, by combining social media insights and sentiment analysis we’ve been able to turn that opinion into fact and create a top ten based on real data.

 
“With The Bear and The Hare, John Lewis has clearly understood the principles of creating fantastic content which triggers an emotional response from its viewers, which is why people have gone online in such huge numbers to view, discuss and share this great ad.” 

The data was collected between 6th – 14th November 2013.