Does Holiday Gift Advertising Work?

Everybody does it, but I wonder ... 🤔

Today’s topic is more of an open question: Does this type of advertising actually work?

I mean, has anyone ever been persuaded by the “December to Remember” advertising campaign to buy their spouse or family a Lexus? (If so, how does one marry or get adopted by such a person?)

I wondered, so I went looking. A recent Forbes article claims that Lexus has “at least figuratively owned the Christmastime automotive market” since it began this campaign in 1999. What does an “owned” market look like? The article explains:

Not only did Lexus create an iconic marketing platform with December To Remember, it forced luxury-category rivals to mimic the idea and also saw nearly every other auto brand in the U.S. market follow suit with their own seasonally themed promotions.

To boot, Lexus’s campaign kicked off a reconsideration of the winter holidays as an important season in the annual market, a change that the entire industry has embraced over the last several years.

That’s essentially it. Later in the article, there’s mention of a 2022 ad execution that was “popular,” but no numbers or statistics appear anywhere in the piece.

To me, this sounds like the kind of classic lemming thinking I have witnessed throughout my career. For example, one could ask: Why did everyone in the DRTV industry switch to $10 BOGO offers about a decade ago? Answer: Because everyone else was doing it. It became a ‘thing'.’ Or in Forbes language, the industry ‘followed suit’ and ‘embraced the change.’ But were $10 BOGOs actually better for the bottom line than other offer configurations? 🤷

All I can really tell you is they were “popular” — until someone hated the profit margins so much, they went with higher prices again. Then the same marketer who started the $10 BOGO craze went insane and tried $50 (coincidentally, for a holiday item). It was a huge hit, and then it was over. The $10 BOGO lost its allure. The lemmings stopped plunging over the low-profit cliff and …. started foraging for high-priced holiday products, of course.

Archive footage of the DRTV industry during the $10 BOGO era

Speaking of my industry, we use holiday sales arguments all the time. Around this time of year, we festoon our ads with Christmas decorations and try to convince people that any product we’re hawking “makes a great gift!” Here’s a classic example from last year:

I mean, who doesn’t want a roll of tape in their stocking?

Not to sound like a Grinch, but I have to wonder: Do these holiday themes actually deliver more sales? Has anyone ever measured the effectiveness of this approach, say, in an A/B split?

If you have any information, please leave a comment, shoot me an email, drop me a line, or use whatever other communications metaphor you prefer — just let me know. I’m curious!

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Recent Tests

BerTime

Pitch: “Is berberine nature’s Ozempic?”
Offer: $39.99 for a 30-day supply with free shipping
Marketer: BulbHead

This marketing strategy brought me back to the early 2000s and the blockbuster success of Strivectin-SD thanks to a simple, three-word phrase: “Better than Botox?”

Digital and print ads for Strivectin-SD (circa 2003)

Attempting to tap into the weight-loss craze surrounding semaglutide (i.e. the active ingredient in Ozempic, Wagovy, etc.) using a similar question is vintage DR. I can see a few ways this could go wrong, but I admire the cleverness of the approach.

For those like me who were unfamiliar with berberine, it’s the “active component of an ancient Chinese herb that…has been used to treat diabetes for thousands of years,” according to a 2008 study in the journal Metabolism. The researchers conducted an experiment on adults with type 2 diabetes and found that berberine was “a potent oral hypoglycemic (blood sugar lowering) agent with modest effect on lipid metabolism (the breakdown of fat).”

DID YOU KNOW that I’ve been collecting and analyzing ‘As Seen on TV’ commercials since 2007? Support my work by becoming a paying subscriber, and I’ll give you access to my complete, searchable archive. I call it “The Library of DRTV,” and I update it every week. It’s the ultimate DR research tool!

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News(letters) You Can Use 📰

Thomas McKinlay’s Ariyh (Academic research in your hands) has some more good news for DR marketers:

Use just-below prices to make your product seem cheaper (e.g. $24.99 instead of $25). Doing this won’t hurt how people perceive the quality of your product, and they will be more likely to buy.

Or, in infographic form:

You can read the full report here.

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