Remember all of those awesome Christmas commercials? You know, before TiVo and Netflix when you still watched commercials? M&Ms, Apple, Coca-Cola — they pulled out all the stops for the big holiday spend. You laughed, you cried, you opened your wallet…
It never occurred to me that other countries were also susceptible to this Yuletide consumerism until I was living abroad. In the UK, they call it “Battle of Christmas Ads” (so far, it seems John Lewis has won with their “bear and the hare” viral commercial). Millions of dollars are spent by brands in order to get a cut of the billions of dollars spent by shoppers during the holiday season.
Here’s where some of that goes: