Santa Lazy – KIT KAT’s Saint Nick Earns a Break in Holiday Ad

Even Santa deserves a break in KIT KAT’s entertaining new holiday ad, in which the brand’s signature witty storytelling is put in the service of a new product line. KIT KAT Santas are Santa-shaped biscuit bars which are just as breakable and snackable as the usual KIT KAT treats, and the ad stars Saint Nick himself putting his feet up on a family’s sofa and tucking into several of the him-shaped snacks.

Santa is found by shocked parents and children and is hilariously unapologetic about his laziness, announcing to the family that he’s pulling an all-nighter. Mom holds up his sack of presents herself but dad is speechless and discovering Santa is real. It’s a funny, entertaining twist on Christmas storytelling in the tradition of previous light-hearted KIT KAT ads.

It’s also a great example of how to promote a seasonal or limited product line. The KIT KAT Santa product, available in multiple flavors, features prominently at the start and end of the ad, and is given a close-up when Santa breaks one and pops it in his mouth. But the emphasis all through is on the narrative of the ad, not on the snacks. The product is the hero but not the sole focus.

That means the ad can include high levels of what Orlando Wood, in his Lemon and Look Out books, calls “between-ness”. Between-ness includes all the connections and relationships between the human characters in an ad – things like gestures, facial expressions and physical actions as well as dialogue.

Between-ness isn’t just valuable for being where a lot of the emotional and comic impact of an ad happens. It’s critical for engaging the “broad beam” attention of the right side of our brains as viewers, which pays attention more to context and relationships than to straightforward goals. Right-brained elements are linked to higher emotional response and greater effectiveness in ads, which is one reason storytelling is so powerful as a Christmas ad strategy.

We see this in the scores Santa’s KIT KAT break gets on Test Your Ad. It earns a 4.8-Star Rating, a very strong score, and also manages a strong Spike Rating – in other words it’s performing well on both long-term and short-term metrics. By putting its limited edition product into an emotional and storytelling context, KIT KAT are giving it a higher chance of long-term success, so there’ll be anticipation for it in future years as a part of Christmas as well as sales now.

Hungry for more festive insights? For a comprehensive look at the 2024 holiday ads, download our “12 Gifts of Christmas” report.

Get Into the Holiday Spirit With Our Christmas Advertising Playlist!