UK Advertisers of the Month for December: Coca-cola, Waitrose and Tesco

Key Insights:

• Coca-Cola saw a 13.7 percentage point increase in Ad Awareness, driven by the return of its Christmas Truck Tour and AI-enhanced "Holidays Are Coming" campaign.
  
• Waitrose recorded an 11.1 percentage point gain following the release of The Perfect Gift, a festive film featuring Keira Knightley and Joe Wilkinson.
  
• Tesco gained 10.3 percentage points with its "That’s What Makes It Christmas" campaign, highlighting perfectly imperfect holiday moments across the UK.

December’s top advertisers in the UK are Coca-cola, Waitrose and Tesco, each showing significant increases in Ad Awareness as tracked by YouGov BrandIndex. Ad Awareness measures the percentage of consumers who have seen an advertisement for a brand in the past two weeks.

Coca‑Cola leads Ad Awareness growth in the UK during this period, rising from 19.8% on November 26 to 33.5% by December 25, a 13.7-point increase. The lift aligns with its 2025 “Refresh Your Holidays” campaign, which brought back the “Holidays Are Coming” ads and reintroduced the Coca‑Cola Christmas Truck Tour, covering 15 UK locations. This year’s ads featured updated, AI-powered visuals of the iconic red trucks.

Waitrose posts a strong increase in Ad Awareness, rising from 17.3% on November 26 to 28.4% on December 20 with a gain of 11.1 percentage points. The rise aligns with its 2025 Christmas campaign, “The Perfect Gift”, which debuted in early November as a four‑minute festive film starring Keira Knightley and comedian Joe Wilkinson.

Tesco rounds out the top three with a 10.3‑point increase in Ad Awareness, rising from 29.4% on November 26 to 39.7% on December 23. The gain aligns with its 2025 Christmas campaign, “That’s What Makes It Christmas,” which launched on November 12 and used a series of short, festive films celebrating the perfectly imperfect moments of the UK holiday season.

Methodology: YouGov BrandIndex tracks daily perceptions of thousands of brands. Ad Awareness is based on the question: “Which of the following brands have you seen an advertisement for in the past two weeks?” Scores are reported as percentages, based on daily surveys of UK adults. Data is weighted by age, gender, region, social grade, and ethnicity using a raking methodology. Figures are shown as a four-week moving average between 26 November- 25 December 2025. The change in scores is calculated as the difference between the highest and lowest daily scores within the period.

image credit: gettyimages