Holiday timelessness

Popular culture, by definition, is always changing. But when it comes to the holidays, everything is frozen in time. 

The songs and artists are the same, year after year.  People watch the same holiday movies, year after year. Some of the most-watched and most-loved TV specials were made in the 1960s. And even many holiday ads remain the same.

The Hershey’s “Christmas Bells” ad is 35 years old, and when they dared to update it a few years ago, people were up in arms.  Corona’s “Feliz Navidad” ad has been going strong for 34 years. In Pittsburgh, the Eat n Park restaurant chain has been running the same holiday ad for 42 years. 

And, if you’re old enough, remember the classic holiday spot for Norelco, with Santa riding a razor through the snow?  It was a donut, with the same open and close every year and the middle filled with whatever new razor they were trying to push that year.

This doesn’t happen at any other point in the year.  Campaigns can run for a long time, but it is very unusual for the exact same ad to run for years on end – except in December.

Robert Thompson, a communication expert at Syracuse University, says the whole season is about nostalgia – sleeping in your old bedroom, seeing the same ornaments on the tree – so people don’t get bored with seeing the same stuff over and over this time of year.  Plus, to a degree, the brands with these long-running ads have made themselves an integral part of the season.

As Thompson says, the real question is not so much why some brands do this, but why all brands don’t?