Last updated: Grow your heart 3 sizes: 2020’s best holiday ads to lift your spirits

Grow your heart 3 sizes: 2020’s best holiday ads to lift your spirits

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After a year in which our economies, livelihoods, and families have taken a toll, the best 2020 holiday commercials offer hopeful messages of human connection and kindness.

During this time of year, we’re accustomed to cheery commercials appearing on our screens and social media. But this year, advertisers have fine-tuned their messaging and style for a COVID-devastated audience.

It’s striking how many 2020 holiday commercials focus on the same hopeful themes using a storytelling approach.

Advertisers have already stepped up in 2020 with commercials keenly crafted for the times. Dubbed “pandemic era ads,” they’ve  encouraged us to not hoard toilet paper and thanked us for forgoing their services. They’ve even made it cool to embrace the couch potato lifestyle

Though the pandemic has distanced us, vaccines are on the horizon, bringing about a giddiness in the air, and light at the end of this tunnel – even if it still feels too good to be true. 

Best heartwarming 2020 holiday commercials for tough times

1. Amazon

Online giant Amazon pulled on the heartstrings of everyone who had their big, life-changing events canceled due to the pandemic. From school performances, tournaments, and graduations to weddings and baby showers, the celebrations of our lives largely came to a halt in 2020.

Mostly, their ad spoke for a generation of young people who have missed out on so much, but been so strong, brave and resilient in the face of so much adversity.  

And yet, the show still went on. Around the world, people found ways to connect and to celebrate even from afar. And Amazon’s 2020 holiday commercial shows all that we missed, and all that we made up for, in a short 2-minute clip.

Featuring incredible cinematography, the commercial focuses on a young ballerina who won a lead part in a performance, only to have it cancelled when the pandemic took hold.  A friend persuades her to perform a solo lit up by a spotlight bought on Amazon (of course), and arranges for an audience of her friends and neighbors . 

2. Sainsbury’s

UK supermarket chain Sainsbury’s doesn’t address the pandemic specifically in its commercial, but it does pull together all the things each of us are dealing with this holiday season – and have been for all of 2020. It depicts the phone calls home hoping for connection, and to be able to gather. 

The joy is palpable in the family’s voices as they joke and play, and work to make a phone call as meaningful as ever. And of course, all those memories each of us have of the food, the warmth, and the glow of the holidays.

It’s an ad that reminds us that even if we can’t be together this year, those memories are with us, embedded deeply in our bones, and in the voices of those we love. 

3. Disney & Make-a-Wish Foundation

Though this 2020 holiday commercial doesn’t touch on this year’s events, it’s a stark reminder of the importance of family and family traditions. For so many, the holidays in 2020 will be disrupted and traditions altered. And still, it’s the small things we can do that bring us closer, like recognizing and honoring the value in those traditions and cherished objects.

2020 has made us all feel a bit estranged from those we love. Disney and Make-a-Wish Foundation’s 2020 holiday commercial reminds us that the estrangement can be repaired, and together, we can continue to celebrate our traditions, even if they look a little bit different. 

The ad also touches on how relationships and traditions can suffer when children grow older and become more independent.  We see this theme in our next commercial. 

4. McDonald’s 

McDonald’s “Inner Child” holiday commercial speaks volumes not just to those parents with pre-teens and teenagers, but to all of us who this year have struggled this year to enjoy doing the things we’ve always loved. 

We’re fatigued. We’re lonely. We’re working and living in a year in which very little has gone the way we expected. It’s OK for all of us to feel less than excited about so much.

Yet with encouragement and connection, each of us can find our way back to the joy of the small things – the things we can still do and control. The things, that in the end, matter the most. 

2020 holiday commercials: Looking to better times ahead

At the end of a difficult year, what people need most is hope. The 2020 holiday commercials give us a glimpse of this future and how things could even be better after the pandemic is over.

Perhaps people will appreciate the simple things more: Human connections, and the value of family and friendships. 

I’m excited to see that brands have embraced diversity in their holiday messages like never before. If nothing else, that’s one small achievement in 2020 that I cling to.

And of course, perhaps the greatest gift of all: A vaccine that gives us hope for a better, less distanced 2021. 

Where do we go from here?
The most brilliant minds are on it.
Learn more HERE

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