The Bears Are Back in Town

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Cast your mind back to the mid-2010s, before M&S’ Fairy took flight and when Kevin The Carrot was barely a green shoot, and you might remember the characters who topped System1’s Christmas charts back then. Doris and Edward Bair, Heathrow Airport’s two adorable teddies, captured the hearts of viewers with a run of wonderfully sentimental Christmas films using Britain’s biggest Airport as a backdrop.

But the Heathrow Bears last appeared in an ad in 2018, and it looked like their travel adventures might be over. Luckily Heathrow and agency St Lukes know that you can’t keep a good brand character grounded, and this year the Bears are back in an ad which sticks to the template of their previous appearances.

The Bears, a devoted – but rather tiny – couple, explore Heathrow’s travelators, ticket machines and duty free shops on the way to the departure gates, where Edward has a romantic surprise for Doris, a pair of boarding passes so they can both head off on their winter holidays. The charm of the ad comes from the contrast between the high-tech, thoroughly modern, human-size airport and the old-fashioned, bumbling teddy bears.

We tested the Bears’ return on our Test Your Ad platform and the verdict came back: the new ad is a triumph. In fact, it’s scored our first maximum 5.9-Star Rating of the 2025 Christmas season. That’s even higher than the 5.8-Star the 2018 ad scored. Combined with an Exceptional Spike Rating, predicting high short-term sales potential, it’s clear Doris and Edward have come back better than ever.

So what’s the secret of this success? Creative consistency plays a big part. Investing in distinctive brand assets, including Fluent Devices like the Heathrow Bears, pays business dividends over the long run – download our Compound Creativity report to find out more. But the Heathrow Bears show that once you’ve established this kind of brand asset, it can weather even quite a long gap between appearances. Whether the Bears are new to a viewer or an old friend, they get as powerful a response now as they did back in 2018.

There are also specific things this particular ad does well. Heathrow are backing the Bears across a range of physical and social executions, including renaming Terminal 4 “Terminal Paw” to celebrate the campaign. This ad also makes brilliant use of surprise, with a twist after the reveal of the boarding passes. The camera shifts and the two bears are suddenly revealed as a middle-aged human couple, looking happily at each other as they go off on their holidays. It creates a spike of surprise going into the final moments of the ad, which makes it end on a memorable high.

This final reveal shows another strength of the ad. Edward and Doris aren’t explicitly shown as older until that final shot but their very traditional look and their movement suggests it. If you’ve read our Wise Up! Report – and if you haven’t it’s free to download! – you’ll know that advertisers often struggle with portrayals of older people in commercials. Too often they’re shown as simply accessories to families, or as people lacking agency. The Heathrow Bears are nothing like that, and the final reveal that they’re people makes the ad a lovely example of using older characters well.