Aldi’s 2022 Christmas ad has been revealed as the most effective advertising soundtrack of the festive campaign season.
Sonic branding testing company Soundout, has tested the soundtracks of 24 Christmas ad campaigns and analysed how well they matched the ‘parent brand personality’, as defined by thousands of consumers.
For each ad, the firm also measured their emotional impact across 200 ’emotional brand attributes’.
Aldi has taken first place in the ‘Brand/SoundTrack Brand Match’ league table with an advert soundtrack that holds a 90% match to the Aldi brand.
“The soundtrack follows a clear Rebel/Hero archetype and delivers emotions such as ‘fun’, ‘alive’ and ‘amazing’ – but also comes across as ‘confused’,” SoundOut said.
In second and third place are Lidl and TK Maxx with 84% and 83% brand sound matches.
John Lewis’ Christmas ad, widely acclaimed as the best festive spot of the year, only gained thirteenth position in SoundOut’s table, with a brand match of 68%. Asda’s Buddy the Elf ad also landed in eleventh place with a 71% brand match.
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“While some brands may decide to go for a full on sales activation approach, smart brands use the emotional power of Christmas, and one of the largest annual campaign budgets, to drive long term emotional empathy with the brand itself,” SoundOut CEO David Courtier-Dutton said.
“This ‘look at me, I really care’ or ‘you can always trust me to throw a great party’ may or may not be a better way of shifting mince pies next week, but it is one rooted in long term brand building, which as every marketeer knows, is the secret to long term sales uplift.
“For brands taking this approach it is essential to be authentic. This authenticity needs to come from the heart (or appear to) and one of the most powerful ways to tie the emotion of the campaign with the brand itself is through music.
“Music that simultaneously captures the empathetic emotions of the storyline and the core brand personality is the best way of creating genuine long term rapport with consumers. This is because music is the hod-carrier of emotional bricks, acting deep on the consum-er subconscious while the story unfolds.”
