McDonald’s and Kmart top Cubery’s 2025 Australian Christmas Ad Rankings

With the release of this year’s Christmas Ad Rankings, 2025 represents a major milestone for Cubery, marking a decade of decoding Australia’s most creatively disruptive and commercially effective festive adverts.

This repository of insights is unrivalled within the Australian market, and has time and time again shown that no one single formula exists for creative success. But the brands that have consistently risen to the top—and been able to separate themselves from the sea of festive sameness—have been those that added a touch of festive magic while not relegating the brand to an afterthought.

From its humble beginnings in 2016 to now being one of the industry’s most hotly-anticipated releases, the Cubery Christmas Ad Rankings represent the barometer of what’s really resonating with the general public—and which brands are cutting through and being remembered during the busiest time in the advertising calendar.

The 2025 Christmas List

This year’s top ads took many different paths in the pursuit of creative excellence. Tied in first place, the latest addition to Kmart’s embedded platform (Clemenger BBDO), featuring simple but vibrant retail creatives was matched only by McDonald’s fun new collaboration with The Grinch (Wieden+Kennedy Sydney). In third place was TK Maxx, with the re-airing of the retailer’s 2024 earworm “Shut Up” (Howatson+Company) proving a savvy move off the back of their top billing last year.

According to Senior Consultant, Wil Logan, by ensuring the brand was front and centre this year’s top performing festive ads were able to build a strong platform for themselves: “Kmart, Coca-Cola, and IGA all deployed entrenched assets to ensure the memories they left couldn’t have been mistaken for anyone else. Elsewhere, McDonald’s and Seek achieved this same outcome by making their brands the hero of the story. It’s a reminder that, whatever the strategy, by not treating the brand as a second-class citizen these advertisers then had the creative license to be more playful and to ultimately ensure they would be remembered for all the right reasons.

“While UK advertisers typically lean more heavily on warmth and sentimentality during Christmas, Aussie brands tend to adopt a more laidback approach to the festive season. Kmart’s no-frills approach struck the perfect note in the current economic climate, McDonald’s tied its assets into a fun narrative that got people into the festive spirit and wider summer holidays, while Aldi’s now familiar quirkiness worked well to stand out and grab people’s attention.”

Read Cubery’s full deep-dive into all the 2025 ads here.

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