How early is too early for holiday ads?

The idiom “Christmas comes early” describes joyful situations that arrive sooner than expected, but in 2025, advertisers are learning that premature holiday celebrations don’t always bring universal happiness. You may have noticed that holiday-themed ads are arriving on your screens earlier than usual, and the ongoing inflation of the Christmas season has left some consumers exasperated.

Traditionally, the U.S. holiday season ramps up after Thanksgiving, when radio stations switch over to festive music and consumers line up to get Black Friday deals on gifts. In recent years, however, Yuletide cheer has encroached into parts of the calendar that were previously reserved for autumnal celebrations. Some of those aforementioned radio stations are now switching to Christmas songs as early as October 7.

Another clear example of “Christmas creep” can be found in the U.K. For British consumers, the department store John Lewis is closely associated with holiday shopping. The chain’s seasonal ads tend to premiere with much fanfare and can even be used to illustrate prevalent media trends.

In 2025, John Lewis dropped its annual Christmas ad on November 4. It’s only the second time — following 2021 — that the retailer has dropped its seasonal spot so early.

There’s a simple explanation behind all this Christmas creep: Brands that command user attention as early as possible tend to convert those impressions into sales. That’s also why Super Bowl advertisers ruin their surprises by putting their spots on YouTube before the game.

“The advertisers are just trying to cut through the clutter,” said Michael Davis, a Professor at the SMU Cox School of Business, in an interview with CBS News.  “With the attention comes the dollars. It’s a tough economy out there in a lot of ways these days. I think the kind of downer message here is retailers are really worried that this Christmas season is going to be down, and they’re trying to get as much money in the cash box as soon as they can get it.”

That sense of economic insecurity has informed several prevailing marketing trends. Brands want to make the most of their budgets, so they’re trying to preempt their competitors. And if a Christmas ad uploaded to YouTube in October gets millions of views before rival commercials have even premiered, that’s an added bonus.

There’s a clear logic here for advertisers, but some consumers have had enough. Some of them are cheering the takedown of premature Christmas decorations, while others get anxious about what Christmas creep represents. “For adults, it is possible that earlier and earlier starts to Christmas marketing amplify time pressure and a sense of stress,” Liverpool John Moores University Professor Ruth Ogden told the Daily Mail. “It’s easy to see how you could feel like life is speeding by if, as soon as you finish the summer holidays, it is immediately the run–up to Christmas.”

Christmas creep may be nothing more than a simple strategy favored by opportunistic brands, but it reflects a bigger issue that currently consumes the ad world: The disconnect between what advertisers want and what consumers want. It’s how we’ve ended up with uncapped ad frequencies that torture repeat viewers and inflated view counts that strip away valuable context in favor of bigger numbers. Holiday advertisers may feel that earlier is better, but they can’t ignore the feelings of their customers — unless they want to go the way of the Sega Dreamcast.