SensorTowerHoliday Campaigns: What We Can Learn From Coca-Cola, L'Oreal, & Hershey's
Summary
Across Coca-Cola, L’Oreal, and Hershey, the 2025 holiday campaigns reveal that budget timing and channel mix matter as much as total spend. Coca-Cola was the aggressive spender: holiday ad spend rose 110% and impressions 91%. Its priority was video, with increases of 494% on Linear TV, 281% Snapchat, 127% TikTok, and 111% YouTube. The top 30-second Christmas spot, featuring polar bears and wreaths, represented 8.9% of holiday spend and peaked at 42M daily impressions on Dec. 28—three days after Christmas—while December spend reached 2.2x November, signaling a deliberate push into prime shopping windows. For ad ops, this argues for early creative production, video-first inventory, and post-holiday flighting to capture late demand.
L’Oreal took a moderate, strategic path: spend rose 18%, but creative concentration was higher. A 15-second Lancome fragrance ad starring Julia Roberts, launched with Macy’s, consumed over 12% of holiday budget and peaked at 13M daily impressions on Nov. 12, nine days after debut. L’Oreal boosted TikTok +72%, YouTube +54%, and LinkedIn +83% for a workplace-culture/social-justice campaign. It kept December spend relatively steady, reallocating from Linear TV to social: a cable fragrance push before Black Friday, then Facebook and Pinterest nearer last-minute gift buying. This suggests ad ops should balance brand-led TV with social retargeting, and map platform shifts to retail moments.
Hershey was slow and steady. Sequential spend fell 32% from Sept.-Oct. into Nov.-Dec., yet YoY holiday spend stayed relatively stable; spend fell about 9% YoY while impressions only dropped 2%, indicating improved efficiency. Within the season, December spend was 25% above November, led by Snapchat +90% and YouTube +74%. Notably, its top two new holiday ads targeted football fans and game-day snacks, not Christmas, and the third-largest creative was a 6-second Instagram video taking ~4% of budget. Takeaway: seasonal campaigns need not be holiday-themed if audience intent is strong; short-form social and efficient YouTube/Snapchat buys can outperform broader festive messaging.
Analyst Note
With 2026 holiday planning already underway, the contrasting spend patterns here point to a broader reallocation of budgets toward platforms that support high-production video and measurable incremental reach. What stands out is not the percentage increases themselves, but the concentration of spend behind a single hero creative: Coca-Cola’s 30-second spot and L’Oreal’s 15-second fragrance ad each absorbed outsized shares of holiday budgets. That concentration puts pressure on ad ops teams to validate frequency capping, cross-platform attribution, and creative versioning at scale, especially as budget moves between linear TV, OTT, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube.
The Hershey’s case adds a useful counterpoint: lower spend with only a slight impression decline suggests efficiency gains can offset budget tightening, and that holiday seasonality does not automatically translate into category-wide spend increases. L’Oreal’s LinkedIn boost also signals that not all holiday investment is purely consumer-gifting oriented; workplace and social justice messaging can coexist with seasonal retail pushes. The key implication for UA and monetization teams is that holiday performance increasingly hinges on channel-level flexibility and creative-level tracking, not just total budget.
Worth watching whether this video-first, hero-creative pattern holds as CTV and social continue to converge.
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