Amazon is right to bring back ‘Joy Ride,’ its most successful Christmas campaign

They were grinning. 

I could only assume Jeff had shown the team my private Amazon Prime order from the week before and wanted an invite over to my place.

Alas, it was even better news.

They were keen to re-run my favorite Christmas ad from 2023, Joy Ride, the one with the sledding grannies that almost everyone loved.

But first, they wanted to test it to see if it would still work. Two years after it excelled in testing and ran all Christmas, once again, it scored 5.9 with fresh audiences. 

I was so proud.

This choice embodies four of the most essential principles of modern marketing effectiveness.

1. The power of fluent, emotional storytelling

I quizzed the Amazon team about the decision.

Originally, they got pushback when making the ad because the sledding cushion featured wasn’t even available in all the markets where it aired.

How can Amazon increase sales if the featured pillow isn’t even available?

Decades of marketing research by the likes of Les Binet, Peter Field, Orlando Wood and, well, myself (honks own horn) across all media channels conclude the same thing: emotional tugs trump rational pushes [editor’s note: quite the tongue-twister].

We know that distinctive ads with a story capture attention and drive positivity about a brand while building relevant memories. We know this leads to brand and business growth. Mark Ritson and I, with Effie data, showed this at Cannes this year. It increases the chances of selling anything on Amazon.

This ad may not sell a specific product or land a rational message, but it leaves loads of light and future Amazon buyers feeling great and shows them how an Amazon order can transform a moment. This is exactly why it scored 5.9 Stars in System1 testing back in 2023.

This isn’t just theory.

The astute marketers among you with a university MBA or something similar, like a swimming certificate, will have clocked that Amazon re-running this must mean this emotional-rocket fuel created real business results in 2023.

Claudine’s internal analysis revealed it was “the most effective Christmas ad Amazon had ever run.”

This is what broad-reach emotional advertising can do for your brand. If it works for Amazon, you’re not too good to shrug off emotion.

Watch the ad here.

2. You are not the customer

I have no idea how I ended up writing a column.

I’m dyslexic and busy as hell. But it’s almost two years to the day since I wrote my first entry for The Drum: ‘Amazon’s ‘Joy Ride’ is no Christmas turkey – it’s one of the world’s most effective ads.’

The journos at Campaign had crowned a “turkey” (an advertising fail) before System1’s consumer creative testing data pegged it as one of the strongest Christmas ads that year, from an increasingly impressive set of ads from the brand.

Two years later, hundreds of thousands of views on Tindall on Effectiveness later, the turkey has come home to roost. 

Here’s a cornerstone of modern marketing: when you start reading The Drum or Marketing Week, when you learn who Daniel Kahneman is, or what the Dirichlet model of buying behavior is, or when you take Mark Ritson’s excellent Mini MBA, you are no longer the customer. You must rely on customer data to make decisions. Even Byron Sharp proved marketers are only as good as a coin flip at selecting effective campaigns.

One of my favorite charts from my recent Effie and System1 research proves this brilliantly.

The longer the list of research tools to create a campaign, the more profit those campaigns create. Repeatable, scaled behaviour change (effective marketing) comes from marketers who use customer data, not their opinion.

3. Only marketers get bored of ads

Analytic Partners researched ad wear-out in 2022 and found that 51,218 ads hadn’t worn out yet, but only 14 had the chance to do so. 

It’s a topic I’ve been fascinated with for the past three years, leading me to research Compound Creativity with the IPA – a marketing consistency framework proven to increase brand growth.

The extreme of consistency is ad wear-in: a brand using the same asset for longer. Exactly what Amazon has done here. It’s smart in various ways. Not only does it help Amazon drag a few extra million from non-working to working spend buckets, but there’s rarely any downside.

A consistent brand not only creates more emotional advertising, but its advertising gets more emotional and distinct over time as memory structures are reinforced – and because humans love the familiar. It really shows you how advertising works and how consistency is what grows distinctiveness.

But again, because Amazon is a world-class marketer, it knows it is worth spending a couple of quid on research before turning on the global media money hose. Not surprisingly, 2023’s 5.9 Star Rating ad turned into a 5.9 Star Rating ad in 2025 in the US and UK research again. People simply love it, even after being whacked with the high frequency only Amazon can afford.

We must shift our definition of strategy.

Strategy is not just deciding what not to do; sometimes it is deciding what we must do again.

Because System1 tests every US and UK TV ad with millions of people, we can see this is just one of the excellent creative choices this in-house team is making – as the predicted long-term effectiveness of Amazon’s US and UK TV ads keeps on going up.

Are you getting that tingly feeling yet?

4. Excess share of creativity

Finally, and this is a new concept, Amazon’s planning team is achieving an Excess Share of Creativity. I’ll share more about this in System1 and Effie’s new book, which will be released in January, but in essence, Amazon is putting more reach behind its best creative.

It saw the creative results. It saw the market results. It is now letting Joy Ride reach a couple of hundred million more customers.

It isn’t just achieving this with a single campaign though.

In System1’s Premium platform (soon to be called Competitive Edge) you can weight each ad’s Star Rating from a category by the media spend behind the ad. Amazon clearly knows which ads are working harder and spends more behind them to achieve Excess Share of Creativity in the market. The higher the emotional response to an ad, the more Amazon generally spends on it.

This is world-class planning.

I’m rather depressed about marketing at the moment. There’s clear evidence that we are spending more on it, but it’s doing a lot less.

Marketing allows us to sell fruit heading for landfill as premium wonky goodness. Or a bit of foam as a life-transforming sledding moment. It keeps our society spinning. But the wheels appear to be coming off.

Marketers should feel very proud when they catch Joy Ride again over the Christmas period. It’s an effectiveness North Star that we can all learn from.