Banco Bradesco’s Hopeful New Year Message

Make creative your competitive edge; unlock insights and inspiration from 100,000+ ads, rooted in emotional response, to predict and improve your creative’s business impact. Access every Ad Of The Week in our Topical Ads categories.

Year-end remains the most competitive and potentially most powerful moment for advertising. It is when brands compete not only for attention but for meaning. Celebration, reflection and hope create fertile ground for campaigns seeking something increasingly scarce: genuine emotion and, as a result, lasting memory. Unsurprisingly, this period consistently produces some of the strongest examples of brand-building creativity. The inevitable question is: why do not brands operate like this all year round?

We closed 2025 with December’s LATAM Ad of the Month highlighting an unlikely winner: a bank. In a category historically less associated with emotional engagement, Bradesco secured the title for the second year in a row. A reminder that category constraints are rarely creative barriers; they are strategic opportunities.

Bradesco’s Christmas and New Year film targets one of the most difficult objectives in contemporary advertising: emotional connection. Starring Macaulay Culkin, a globally recognized cultural figure, the film leverages the 35th anniversary of Home Alone not as nostalgia for its own sake but as symbolic capital. Culkin does not revisit his past; he addresses the present.

Seated by a fireplace, in an intimate and understated tone, he invites viewers to reflect on the New Year as a moment to focus on what truly matters: relationships, presence and care for others. The message is simple and that simplicity is its strength.

The visual storytelling reinforces this emotional intent: a young couple in love, an older couple dancing and rediscovering the physical memory of earlier romance, a father gently helping his daughter fix her hair. These are everyday, recognizable moments. This is broad appeal and a long-established advertising approach, but here executed with emotional restraint and craft.

As Orlando Wood outlines in Look Out, this type of creative construction activates broad-beam attention: attention that is open to context, narrative and human interaction, rather than narrowly focused on isolated stimuli. Central to this is the concept of human betweenness, the sense of connection created through gestures, proximity and shared experience. Emotional impact emerges not from individuals in isolation but from the relationships between them.

Bradesco’s film exemplifies this principle. The everyday scenes are connected through the combination of a culturally embedded narrator, a restrained script and moments that depict relationships built over time. Look Out demonstrates that advertising which foregrounds human connection is significantly more effective at generating deep emotion and long-term memory, as it engages right-hemisphere processing associated with empathy, meaning and recall.

The effectiveness data supports this interpretation. In Test Your Ad Pro, spontaneous viewer responses show that immediately after “Christmas” the dominant associations relate directly to the film’s emotional content: valuing the people around you, family, using time more meaningfully and love. Each of these associations correlates with high levels of positive emotion.

A common concern with emotionally led advertising is whether the brand risks being overshadowed. In this case, the evidence suggests otherwise. Bradesco’s film achieves 95 percent Brand Fluency (the proportion of viewers who correctly and quickly identify the brand). This is particularly notable given the restrained branding approach, with the brand initially appearing only as a subtle watermark after the emotional narrative is established. Emotion and branding are not in tension here; they operate in synergy as they must.

Commercial effectiveness is equally strong. The film scores 4.8 stars, System1’s measure of predicted long-term business impact, placing it in the top 5 percent of all Brazilian ads across categories. Short-term performance is also robust, with a strong Spike Rating indicating potential for immediate behavioral impact.

These results align closely with findings from System1’s The Creative Dividend, which analyzed over 1,200 campaigns globally. The study shows that highly emotional campaigns deliver, on average, 3.2 brand effects (awareness, distinctiveness and equity) alongside 2.2 business outcomes (such as penetration, market share and profit). Emotion alone is insufficient. Brand recognition is essential if creativity is to translate into commercial return. Consistent investment in emotional creativity, the study finds, underpins more sustainable long-term growth.

Another insight from the data is that the most effective campaigns tend to evoke multiple emotional responses. In Bradesco’s case, diagnostics show above-average levels of inspiration, contentment and appreciation, a particularly effective emotional mix for low-affinity categories such as financial services.

The most obvious executional route would have been to rely heavily on Home Alone nostalgia. Instead, Bradesco and Lovely opted for a more demanding and ultimately more effective approach. The celebrity functions not as the message itself but as a cultural conduit for a human, sincere and generous idea. As one viewer summarized: “A mix of emotion, gratitude, generosity and warmth.”

As both Look Out and The Creative Dividend demonstrate, it is precisely this kind of emotionally grounded creativity that builds brands capable of sustained growth.