Creators now carry primetime TV, yet the 2026 Christmas ads went to celebrities again. Why creator-led Christmas campaigns are the gap brands keep missing.
Turn on BBC One this autumn and a YouTuber is in the castle. King Kenny, a Beta Squad member with a decade of videos behind him, sat at the round table on The Celebrity Traitors next to actors, broadcasters and a Dame. Next week I'm a Celebrity starts and, if the reported line-up holds, his Beta Squad colleague Sharky walks into the jungle. A TikTok creator baked on Celebrity Bake Off in March. A creator was planted in the Big Brother house as a mole in September. Niko Omilana was in the first Celebrity Traitors, whose finale was reported as the most-watched broadcast on British television in 2025.
The commissioners have made up their minds. Creators are mainstream talent, bookable on the same terms as everyone else, and audiences follow them from the phone to the sofa.
Then the Christmas ads landed, and the industry that spends more on creators every year quietly reverted. John Lewis cast Dame Kristin Scott Thomas. M&S cast James Norton. Waitrose cast Keira Knightley. Tesco cast Roisin Conaty and Anna Maxwell Martin. Of the twenty-nine UK Christmas ads out by the second week of November, we couldn't find one fronted by a social creator.
Why the biggest brief goes to the oldest playbook
Christmas is the campaign the CMO is judged on, so it's the campaign where nobody wants to be the person who tried something. Kantar's Lynne Deason put the logic plainly: brands use celebrities because they're borrowing fame. A famous face is a known quantity. It works on a poster, it works in a ninety-second film, it works in the trade press the morning after.
There's also a structural reason, and we've written about it before: the influencer team can't buy a festival. Christmas sits with the brand team and the ad agency. Creators sit with social. The brief for the big film never passes the desk where anyone would think to put a creator in it, so nobody does, and the absence looks like a decision when it's really a floor plan.
None of that is wrong, exactly. It's just a year out of date. The thing celebrities were being borrowed for, fame, is now something creators have in quantity, and in a form that comes with a direct line to the audience attached.
What television worked out first
Reality TV has a simple test for a cast member: will people watch them, talk about them and vote. On that test creators were always going to win, because that's the test they pass every day to exist at all.
What the commissioners also understood is that a creator brings their audience with them. A YouTuber in the castle is a few million people who already care about the outcome before the first episode airs, who clip it, post about it and argue about it on the platforms the broadcaster is trying to reach. The show gets a cast member and a distribution channel in the same contract. That's the same bundle we keep describing to brands: content, audience and the right to use both. Creators and publishers aren't priced in the same currency yet, and television, oddly, got there before advertising did.
The counter-examples already exist
It isn't that no brand has tried. Anthropologie handed its holiday campaign to the creator Pooja Tripathi. Marc Jacobs gave the creator Ashtin Earle the same billing as the celebrities in its festive film. Those are American examples and they're fashion, but the logic travels. Both brands chose the person their customer actually watches over the person their customer has merely heard of.
We've seen the same logic hold at scale closer to home. An audience built over years on Instagram filled four days at Twickenham Stadium with zero paid media behind it. That wasn't borrowed fame. It was owned attention, and it turned up when asked.
What a creator-led Christmas would look like for a food brand
Picture the supermarket Christmas ad and then picture what people actually do in December. They search for a recipe, they watch somebody cook the thing they're nervous about, they save it, and they buy what was in the video. The ninety-second film does the first job, which is making the brand feel like Christmas. It does nothing for the rest.
A creator-led Christmas campaign runs the other way round. The hero isn't a film, it's a person the audience trusts in a kitchen, doing the actual meal, with the brand's product in it because it belongs there. The format is a series rather than a spot, the way Taste of the North was sold: a run of content through the back half of November and December that people return to, with usage rights that let the brand put paid spend behind the pieces that work and cut them for the aisle.
It measures differently too. A Christmas film reports reach and sentiment. Tesco's ad was the most-discussed UK Christmas ad on social this year by Sprout Social's count, and about half of that discussion was positive. A creator series reports saves, shares, recipe clicks and, on TikTok Shop or a retailer link, what sold. For a food brand, the second set of numbers is the one the category team will ask about in January.
This is not a case for cheaper
The honest version of this argument isn't that creators are the budget option for Christmas. It's that they're a different instrument and the brief should be written for it.
A creator can't be dropped into a celebrity-shaped slot, handed a script and expected to deliver a creator-shaped result. Usage rights are where creator deals go wrong, and a Christmas campaign that wants to run the content in paid, on packaging and in store for six weeks needs to buy those rights properly and pay for them. The fee should look like a media buy because it is one. What the brand gets for it is content with a built-in audience, a proven format, and a person their customer will listen to when they're deciding what to cook on the 25th.
What this changes
Reality television has spent two years proving that a creator at the table holds a mainstream audience. The brands who sponsor those programmes and advertise in their breaks have watched it happen and then, for the one brief that matters most, gone back to borrowing fame.
The gap will close, because it always does. The question for a food or hospitality brand is whether it closes with you in front of it or behind it. If you're planning Christmas 2027 and the first slide is still a casting list of actors, there's a version of the plan worth seeing before you sign it off. That's the work we do. .