Judging holiday content when every brand posts on the same day

Pull up a handful of brands’ holiday posts from the same week and they look like siblings. Same warm colour wash, same soft lights, same caption about togetherness. Somewhere in that set is a real difference in thinking, and the surface gives you nothing.

Lateness is not the failure mode here

A holiday sits on the calendar. Everyone has known the date since the previous one ended. That removes a category of defence. Judging an agency’s speed on an unplanned trend is a different question, because that moment arrived without warning and closed fast.

So stop asking whether seasonal work was fast. Ask what the lead time was spent on. The honest failure mode is genericness: a post anyone could have made, for anyone, in an afternoon, on a year of runway.

The test: could this post carry a different brand’s logo

This site already has a method for this, and it is not new here. It is the removal test: strip out the borrowed part of a post and look at what is still standing. Seasonal work is where everyone is handed the same borrowed part. So cover the logo and the brand name in the caption. Is anything left that tells you whose post this is? The product, a particular customer, a visual world the brand has built, a joke that only lands if you know what the company sells. If what survives is a sentiment that would fit any client in any sector, the agency did seasonal thinking and attached a client afterwards.

What the holiday adds is scheduling. Pick the date in advance and read the set weeks later, because the posts are still there.

Passing does not mean avoiding the holiday’s shared symbols. A specific post can use snow, fireworks, a countdown. Borrowing them wholesale and stopping there is the problem. The question is whether the brand did something with the symbol that only it could.

What a swappable holiday post looks like

Picture the product shot that ran in spring, now under a red and gold gradient with a snowflake in the corner. The caption is assembled from the season’s stock vocabulary: cheer, giving, togetherness. None of it refers to what the company sells or who buys it. Beside it, a countdown graphic any retailer could run unchanged.

The tell: drop that post into a competitor’s feed, swap the logo, and nothing reads as wrong.

Production value does not rescue it. A beautifully shot generic post is still generic, just expensive genericness.

What a brand-specific holiday post looks like

The passing version uses the holiday to make a point only this brand, given what it sells or who it serves, would have reason to make.

Picture a company whose product solves a problem people have around a holiday: hosting anxiety, travel logistics, the gift decision made at eleven at night. A luggage brand can talk about the indignity of the return journey. The holiday supplies the setup, the brand supplies the punchline.

Specificity has nothing to do with budget. A single unretouched photo with two lines of copy passes if the idea underneath could not have come from anyone else. Origin, not polish.

Running the comparison across several brands at once

• Pull up three or more brands in the same category, posting about the same holiday within the same few days. Because the date is calendar known, that sample is easy to assemble.
• Apply the removal test to each, without softening it for the brands you like.
• Count the convergence. How many landed on the same colour wash, the same set piece, the same caption cadence, and how many diverged?
• Hold the finding loosely, because one good campaign doesn’t tell you much on its own.

The convergence count is worth sitting with. When most of a sample lands on one template, that template is what the category treats as the safe answer, which reframes the post that diverged. It is not only better work, it is work someone argued for against a default everybody else took.

Where the excuses fall apart

The first defence: the client wanted something safe, inside the brand guideline. Safety and specificity are not opposites. A guideline constrains the palette and the tone, not the idea. A post can sit inside a locked template and still say something only that brand could say.

The second is that a holiday post is a minor touchpoint, not a place for a big idea. That has it backwards. A low stakes post is where genericness shows most, because no deadline or budget covers for it.

The third is that everyone was buried in year end work. The date did not move. If the workload around a known date crushed the thinking, that is a planning failure, not a creative one, and it is the kind of thing a reel never shows, part of what a portfolio leaves out.

Try it on a set you did not choose

The test is more honest on work you did not pick. Our page of this year’s selections gives each agency a line on what it does and its domain as plain text, not a link out. Take a few of those names, go and find the accounts, then run the removal test over their seasonal work. If you know an agency that survives it, nominate an agency.

FAQ

Does a generic looking holiday post always mean the agency did bad work?

Not automatically. A client can ask for a safe, low risk seasonal touchpoint, and an agency executing that well is doing its job. The signal is repetition. If the generic version appears at every seasonal date, year after year, ask whether the constraint comes from the client or whether the agency stopped proposing anything else.

Why single out holiday content instead of assessing craft generally?

Not because it is the only content type that puts several brands on one subject. Trend work does that too, when every account works from the same audio. What a holiday adds is planning: you can choose the date in advance and assemble the set long after it passes.

Can a brand reuse a holiday idea from a previous year and still pass the test?

Yes, if the idea was brand specific the first time. Refining a concept only that brand had reason to make is a different act from pulling a seasonal template off the shelf again. The test asks where an idea came from, not whether it is new this year.