Thanksgiving is a time of year for family, food, and festivities. It is when we kick off the holiday season with a great feast which often includes such favorites as delicious mashed potatoes, aromatic roasted turkey, and mouth-watering sweet pumpkin pie. It’s a day to catch up, show love and celebrate while indulging.

Advertising at this time is especially important for brands as 50% of shoppers state that ad campaigns run during the holiday season has immediate impact on their purchasing choices. So, what are some of the messages that brands put into their advertising campaigns around Thanksgiving? Here, in no particular order, are some of the best from recent memory.

Ally Bank

Ally Bank stood out among the 2018 Thanksgiving campaigns with their “Happy Banksgiving” campaign. The ad added a touch of humanity to their service with the bank’s call center executives ending their calls with customers on a different, more giving, note; offering them financial assistance as a way of saying thanks. The word play of changing Thanksgiving to “Banksgiving” has proven to have paid off with over two million YouTube views to date.

Big Mama Jenkins

Big Mama Jenkins took the humorous route to grab the attention of their audience for Thanksgiving 2018. Their ad is entertaining in an unorthodox way because it features no actors and uses only dialogue to give its message. The viewer hears a distressed person calling 911 claiming her family was acting weird after their neighbor brought over some “white substance”. Well, the whole draw of the ad is the suspense so we won’t go any further with spoilers. Check it out yourself! Keep an ear open for what the neighbor pulls out of her purse at the end.

Publix

Publix’s 2018 Thanksgiving ad campaign just showed Thanksgiving. What else needs to be shown? It captured the family bonding that happens at Thanksgiving and a mother’s love for her son. The brand made the point being a supermarket for families without even mentioning it directly. Subtlety at it’s very best.

Meijer

Another brand that’s showcased its humane side in a Thanksgiving commercial is Meijer. In the current Thanksgiving campaign, the brand uses not just the element relatability, but also a very popular call-to-action pictures of #food. Meijer offers to feed a local family in need for every food photo posted with the hashtag #meijersimplygive. Talk about earning goodwill for one’s brand while getting it to trend. We look forward to seeing how this goes for them.

And we thought we would season it with some nostalgia with a treat from the past.

Red Bull

Red Bull in a relatively older Thanksgiving commercial took humorous route. The ad seems to suggest how the turkey came to be the Thanksgiving special it is today. Unlucky bird or lucky us? We are sure many of you have seen this before, but hey, let’s just sit back and allow this Turkey Day classic to take flight on our screens once again.

Emotion, humanity and humor seem to be the flavors of Thanksgiving and brands play on these lines to get into the hearts of people. We hope you find the right strategies for campaigns and wish you a successful holiday.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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