The festive season brings a surge in shopping activity. Consumers explore products, compare brands and look for offers before purchasing. For advertisers, this creates opportunities to influence decisions across the shopping journey. Consumers are spending more time evaluating their options.
Our festive consumer research found that over 70% of consumers compare at least three brands before purchasing. Their expectations of advertising are evolving too, with growing interest in product demonstrations, personalised recommendations and interactive experiences that make product discovery easier.
For brands planning their festive campaigns, these preferences highlight the role of high-attention ad formats in keeping consumers engaged and helping them move closer to a purchase.
What Consumers Expect from Festive Advertising
Product demonstrations emerged as the most preferred advertising experience in our festive research, with interactive advertisements ranking a close second. Consumers also showed a strong preference for relevant offers and personalised product recommendations, indicating that the content and utility of an advertisement can influence how much attention it receives.
The interest extends to AI-assisted shopping. More than 80% of respondents expressed openness to purchasing directly from advertisements and receiving AI-powered festive recommendations. When asked specifically about buying directly from an ad, more than 86% of respondents said they would definitely consider it. This signals an opportunity for brands to make festive advertising more actionable, giving consumers ways to explore products and move closer to purchase within the ad experience.
Interactive formats can bring product demonstrations, recommendations and offers into the ad experience, giving brands more ways to engage customers during the festive shopping journey.
Formats That Bring Festive Campaigns to Life
At VDO.AI, we bring together interactive CTV, online video and display formats. These help brands engage consumers across digital touchpoints. Each format presents products, encourages exploration or connects an ad with the next step in the purchase journey.
CTV Advertising: Extending Engagement on the Big Screen
Interactive carousels let viewers explore products on television. A map locator can direct interested customers towards nearby outlets.
Built for product discovery, this automated feature carousel will highlight key product features and the QR code will redirect users to a microsite to explore and purchase the product.
Interactive Video Ads: Bringing Product Demonstrations to Life
Scroll-triggered display keeps value-led messaging anchored on the left. Use-case visuals rotate on the right as users scroll.
Viewer choice will shape the journey as a trivia quiz invites them to select what matters most, unlocking tailored messaging and a prominent CTA will direct viewers to the website.
Rich Media Display Ads: Encouraging Active Participation
Scratch-to-discover ads invite consumers to reveal a festive offer or promotional message through an interactive creative.
User interaction expands the ad into a larger unit, showcasing festive collections and limited-time offers through a visual carousel.
Together, these formats help advertisers engage consumers at every stage of the purchase funnel, from initial discovery to active consideration and conversion.
Personalisation Makes the Experience More Relevant
Interactive formats create opportunities for consumers to engage with an advertisement. Personalisation helps make the experience relevant to their interests and needs.
Our dynamic creative optimisation capabilities allow brands to adapt creative messaging using available audience and contextual signals. It can respond to a range of inputs, including weather conditions, UV index, air quality, geo-location, live sports moments, stock market movements and metal prices. Multilingual creative can also help brands reach audiences across regional markets.
For brands managing campaigns across multiple categories, audiences, moments and geographies, this supports a more tailored approach to festive advertising. By combining interactive formats with dynamic creative, advertisers can deliver product information and offers that align more closely with the audiences they want to reach.
These formats offer brands multiple ways to build attention and encourage interaction across screens. Explore VDO.AI’s range of advertising formats to see how different creative experiences can support festive campaign objectives.
Making Every Festive Impression Count
Attention also depends on the relevance of the advertising environment and the audience receiving the message. During the festive season, when media investments rise and campaigns run across multiple platforms, these factors become important to campaign efficiency.
VDO.AI’s Least Spillage Model brings audience intelligence, contextual understanding and video signals together to evaluate advertising opportunities before an impression is served. This helps advertisers identify placements aligned with their campaign requirements and reduce media wastage.
By connecting creative relevance with contextual intelligence, VDO.AI helps brands approach festive advertising with greater precision across targeting, creative delivery and media allocation.
Give Your Brand a FestiveEdge
Customers discover products, compare options and explore purchases during the festive season. High-attention formats help brands engage at each stage.
The VDO.AI FestiveEdge campaign combines interactive CTV, online video, rich media display, dynamic creative optimisation and contextual intelligence. These capabilities help brands create more relevant festive advertising experiences.
Connect with us at hello@vdo.ai and give your brand a FestiveEdge this season with ad formats designed to capture attention and encourage action.
