How to Create a “Clear Sense of Place”

Setting the Scene 

Across the UK and US, “a clear sense of place” consistently shows up as one of the strongest features in top-performing Christmas and holiday ads. But what does that actually mean in practice? And how can brands use it deliberately to create emotional pull and capture audience attention? 

In Lemon and Look out, Orlando Wood identifies “a clear sense of place” as a backbone feature of right-brain advertising. This style of advertising widens attention, stirs emotion and builds long-term brand memory. You only need to look at the travel category to see how powerful place can be. Averaging 3.3 Stars in 2025, travel advertising thrives on evocative settings and emotional resonance. But it also comes with a clear warning. Travel and holidays is the least distinctive category in System1’s Competitive Edge database, with a fluency score of just 72%. In other words, place without purpose is not enough. Beautiful scenery on its own can quickly dissolve into a “sea of sameness”. 

So, the real challenge is understanding what effective place looks like. To explore this, we examined the ads that manage to be both emotionally compelling and genuinely distinctive. These are the ads that use place to support story, character and meaning, not simply as visual decoration. 

Christmas and holiday advertising provides the perfect canvas. In this season, place is not only present, it often drives the emotional arc. From chocolate-box cottages to snow-covered hills to warm, glowing homes, these settings do more than decorate the frame. They set tone, trigger memory and anchor the story in a world viewers instantly recognize. 

The Magic Triad  

In Lemon and Look out, Orlando Wood shows that the most effective advertising does more than place characters in a setting. It creates a world where character, incident and place work together to capture broad-beam attention and guide viewers through an emotional journey. This is the “magic triad”, and it provides a clear structure for how place becomes meaningful rather than merely beautiful. 

This is where the travel category becomes especially instructive. Everyday travel advertising often leans heavily on scenery and emotional tone, which is why the category can feel visually saturated and hard to distinguish. But during the Christmas period, some travel brands break out of that pattern by leaning into the full magic triad. In these examples, place is present and often beautiful, yet it is not the focal point. Instead, place works quietly in the background, creating the conditions for characters to live, act and connect, and for a story to unfold with emotional clarity. 

To show what this looks like in practice, I am spotlighting three travel Christmas ads that use the full magic triad with real clarity: Airbnb, TUI and Heathrow. Each of these ads features relatable characters, a clear emotional moment and a sense of place that adds context without overpowering the story. All three earn strong emotional responses and high Star Ratings, which reflects exactly what Wood highlights in his work on right-brain advertising. They cut through the “sea of sameness” not by abandoning place, but by giving it purpose. 

Aural Depth 

So we have the foundational framework for place with purpose. But how do we elevate “a clear sense of place” even further, to bend time, bind characters together and anchor the story in cultural meaning? 

In Lemon, Wood describes harmony and timbre as “the aural equivalent of visual depth”. Music adds layers that visuals alone cannot. It sets tone, creates dimensionality and strengthens our sense of place. 

And just like place, music should never be treated as a passive bolt-on. It is an active device for shaping the world of the ad. Music can create tension, guide interpretation, help the audience understand what is happening as a scene unfolds, or reveal something about the relationship between characters. Wood makes this point clearly when he writes that music can “convey a sense of time and place” as a story develops. 

His example of Hovis’ “Boy on the Bike” brings this to life. The Ashington Colliery brass band instantly signals place, tradition and the passing of time, creating a rush of nostalgia before the story has even begun. The ad already has character, incident and place, the full triad, but the music gives it something extra. Swap the brass band for Daft Punk or Jay Z, and the emotional world collapses. The place would remain, but the feel of it would disappear. 

Music does not just sit alongside place. It completes it. 

Create a “Clear Sense of Place” with Confidence 

System1’s Test Your Ad platform helps you see exactly how your sense of place is working on screen. With second-by-second emotional response, you can pinpoint the scenes where character, incident and place come together, and where the story might need strengthening. You can also compare multiple soundtrack options to understand which one best supports the world you are building. 

Our expert team is on hand to help interpret the data and translate it into practical creative decisions that elevate narrative and emotional impact. 

If you want to create richer, more distinctive worlds in your advertising, get in touch with the team today.