Can You Guess YouTube's Top 15 Christmas Retail Ads?

With Black Friday and Cyber Monday behind us, Google took time to see which retailers managed to captivate audiences with their Christmas ads. 

While John Lewis is an obvious surprise winner with over 18 million views (5 mil ahead of Sainsbury's), it's a surprised to see that 3 out of the top 15 ads are from Tesco.

View the top 15 Christmas retail ads on YouTube on the playlist below.

Here's a view from Google about the top three trends that the leaderboard unveils:

- Social is at the heart of the creative process behind this year’s most successful Christmas ads. The YouTube Christmas Leaderboard features campaigns with millions of views on YouTube called #MontythePenguin, #WinChristmas, #Christmasisforsharing, #FollowTheFairies, or #specialbecause, encouraging viewers to share the story and be a part of it. Christmas ads are no longer being made to be watched on TV with your family: they’re made to be shared with the world, commented, parodied. YouTube is the platform of choice for viewers to truly engage with Christmas ads from UK retailers.

- Christmas ads are trying to keep away from the traditional end-of-year consumerism. Christmas is for giving, and the most popular ads are featuring a charity: WWF for John Lewis, The British Legion for Sainsbury's, three different UK charities for Waitrose.

- Sentiment works. And that's what we see in the YouTube Christmas Leaderboard: the big retailers all following suit, and none more so than Sainsbury's. To acknowledge the centenary of the outbreak of WW1 is amazingly confident and has sparked a lively conversation across social media. 

As the Head of Design at Google, Patrick Collister, puts it: 'What the YouTube Christmas Leaderboard shows is that the brands that tug at our heartstrings are the brands which get us to open our wallets. We simply don't want to be rational about Christmas.'