Amazon’s “Joy Ride”: The Ad That Keeps on Giving

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Amazon have had a fantastic streak of Christmas ad success recently. From 2022 to 2024 they’ve deployed heartfelt storytelling (with a little product placement) to make ads whose wordless narratives can touch hearts around the world. In our Test Your Ad platform they’ve scored three maximum 5.9-Star scores in a row.

This year, to some commentators’ surprise, they’ve taken an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” route. The Amazon 2025 Christmas ad is a re-run of their instant classic from 2023, with three elderly women seeing people sledging down a hill and deciding to recapture their own youth. With the help, of course, of Amazon’s low prices and rapid delivery. Soon the women are racing downhill themselves and we see them flash back to the joy they felt doing it as girls.

Re-releasing this ad raises a lot of questions. Is it more effective to re-run an old ad or commission a new? Should other brands follow Amazon’s lead and play the “greatest hits” occasionally? And has any wear-out occurred with this specific commercial?

This last question is the easiest to answer. No. We’ve used Test Your Ad data in the past to show that in the vast majority of cases “wear-out” is a myth: ads do not lose effectiveness over time. In fact, often familiarity breeds contentment and people grow to like long-running ads more over time.

In the case of “Joy Ride”, the ad had already scored a maximum 5.9-Star Rating on Test Your Ad, so our predictions were sensitive to even the slightest decrease in effectiveness. Instead, the ad scored 5.9-Stars again. In fact, with the Christmas ad season half over, it’s currently sitting on top of System1’s effectiveness tree as the year’s best Christmas ad release. Once again, no sign of wear-out.

So that lets us answer our other questions with more confidence. When we talk about creative consistency as a really vital part of ad effectiveness, it’s often with long-running creative platforms in mind. Recurring characters, logos, slogans and other distinctive assets are the foundation of consistency, alongside long-term agency relationships and a reliable brand experience. Creative consistency delivers greater returns over time, as our Compound Creativity report proves.

But consistency can manifest in something as simple as re-using a brilliant ad, like Amazon do here. It’s not that Amazon can’t produce another great maximum score ad – they did just that last year. But when you have superb creative work to hand, why not reuse it? Amazon left the ad to rest for a year so when it comes back it’s greeted as an old friend. In our Test Your Ad report, the re-released ad actually improves on the original’s Brand Fluency score, showing a higher level of recognition for Amazon, helped along by familiarity with the ad itself.

So yes, it can be more effective to re-use a Christmas ad than run a new one. And yes, brands who’ve made something as good as “Joy Ride” should seriously consider giving it another run. Nobody complains when the decorations on the Christmas tree are familiar favourites. It turns out Christmas ads aren’t so different.