What do Christmas adverts have to do with wellbeing?   

As I approach my first Christmas as head of research and insight at Carnegie UK, I can’t help but to be taken back to where my career started out every time I switch on the TV.

My career up to now has covered a range of sectors and topics, including advertising pretesting and evaluation. I am delighted to now be working in the wellbeing space and using robust measures to look at collective wellbeing. Spotting this article on the BBC website about this year’s Christmas ads, it struck me that we can actually understand wellbeing in a whole host of ways.

Retailers have been thinking about their Christmas ads for months now, spending vast amounts of money researching what will work in terms of awareness and getting people through the door so they need to understand how the country is feeling. Whilst there is a mix of types of ads this year, a number of big retailers have gone for tugging at the heartstrings or kindness and as it says in this article, ‘it feels like there’s a nation that’s quite exhausted’ – these ads reflect that mood.

 

So, what does this have to do with Carnegie UK’s work around collective wellbeing? Spotting this article on the back of our recently launched Life in the UK 2024 report reminded me that there is ‘data’ and metrics all around us, it is not just that which we find in publications or official sources. Our results on Life in the UK showed us that wellbeing has stagnated since last year, with the average person’s life not having improved at all.   

The Life in the UK index found that across all nations of the UK, people on lower incomes, disabled people, people from minority groups, people living in social housing, and people under age 55 all have lower than average wellbeing. But the baseline figure for an ‘average person’ also isn’t great and hasn’t improved year on year.

We will be continuing to track Life in the UK until at least 2030 and we will be using a number of other great data resources, but I will also be keeping an eye on everything else that is going on out there, to get a feel for how the nation is feeling. Advertisers have to understand how people think and feel so the direction of travel in ads can quite often be an early indicator of what more official data tells us.

Without giving away my age, I started my career evaluating advertising campaigns back in 1997, the last time we came out of a long period with a Conservative government and Labour coming to power, when ‘things could only get better’. Back then, I’m not sure people would have described the nation as ‘quite exhausted’. Let’s hope that as we move towards 2025 things do in fact get better.