Christmas campaign: nine weeks to Christmas Eve and your brand's script

Today is October 22. There are exactly nine weeks left until the night of December 24. That is precisely how long O Boticário took, from concept to final edit, to make its 2024 Christmas film, which Meio & Mensagem reported as the largest audiovisual production in the brand's history. The question that opens this series is simple and a little uncomfortable: where is your brand's Christmas campaign along that path?

The Christmas campaign calendar starts on Black Friday

The date that shapes Christmas 2026 falls on Friday, November 27. It is Black Friday, and it is when many Brazilians start spending on the holidays. In December 2025, Think with Google published a survey conducted with Offerwise among 2,000 Brazilians: about five in ten planned to start their holiday shopping on Black Friday, with 31% during the warm-up period and 17% on the day itself. About 19% intended to buy their gifts in the first half of December.

Translated into the schedule of anyone who manages a brand: the Christmas message needs to be on air before November 27. Counting from today, that gives you five weeks and one day. The calendar math is tight, and it already includes the script, approval, production, editing and the versions for each screen.

The same survey shows where that decision begins. Eight in ten Brazilians said they would search online before choosing a gift, looking at reviews, comparisons and videos. According to Google, Search and YouTube appear in about two thirds of the paths people take to discover new brands, products and stores. A Propmark report from December 2025 adds a figure from Shopee: almost half of consumers were looking for the perfect gift at least three weeks in advance. The audience takes its time to choose. The brand that speaks to them needs to get there first.

How long a well-made Christmas campaign takes

O Boticário's 2024 Christmas film, called "Casa de Vidro" (Glass House), runs over four minutes and tells the story of the tension between two sisters who share the care of their mother during Christmas Eve dinner. Meio & Mensagem reported the production figures for the film, created by AlmapBBDO with MyMama Entertainment: 250 people involved, 50 hours of shooting and nine weeks between concept and final edit. The 60-second version aired on broadcast TV, and the full film also ran during extended commercial breaks.

Time on set is usually the shortest part of this story. London's Heathrow Airport shot its first Christmas commercial, in 2016, in three days, with the terminals running as usual, according to the airport's official press release. The Drum reports that the studio The Mill spent months developing the shape and size of the two teddy bears who star in it, starting with pencil sketches. The three-day shoot relied on months of preparation.

That earlier stretch of time is where the script lives. Before the first day of shooting, someone needs to answer what the brand wants the audience to feel, which scene carries that emotion, who will live that scene and how all of it fits into 30, 60 or 240 seconds. When those answers come in a rush, the entire production ends up working on top of a doubt.

A reverse calendar for those starting today

If your brand does not have a Christmas campaign yet, there is still time, as long as the work starts now. Here is one possible schedule for a video campaign launching before Black Friday. Use it as a starting point for the conversation with your production company and with whoever will write the script:

• Week of October 26: briefing conversation, defining the core emotion and the audience, first story ideas.
• Week of November 2: script, drafts and revisions until approval.
• Week of November 9: pre-production, casting, location and shooting plan.
• Week of November 16: shooting and start of editing.
• Week of November 23: finishing, soundtrack, social media cuts and launch before November 27.

This schedule is tight and works for lean pieces. Films with animation, a large cast or many locations need longer timelines, like O Boticário's nine weeks in 2024. Every week lost now comes out of some later stage, and it almost always comes out of the script and the edit.

The size of Christmas in Brazilian retail

The competition for attention at this time of year has a concrete reason. The National Confederation of Commerce (CNC) projected R$ 72.71 billion in retail sales for Christmas 2025, up 2.1% from 2024. According to the organization, if the forecast held, it would be the best Christmas for Brazilian retail since 2014. Supermarkets accounted for 43.3% of that volume, and clothing and footwear stores for 31.4%.

The shopping intention survey by CNDL and SPC Brasil for the same Christmas estimated that 76% of consumers would buy gifts, about 124.3 million people, with an average of four gifts each and an average of R$ 174 per gift. That is a lot of people deciding at the same time, and almost every brand wants to talk to them in the same five-week window.

What happens when the Christmas campaign is left for December

When the Christmas film only gets on the agenda in early December, the calendar tightens: the brief comes out in one afternoon, the script has to be ready in two days, approval happens by text message and the shoot uses whatever is available that week. The result tends to take the shortest path: snow in a country in the middle of summer, bells, Santa Claus, a lavish table and a catchy line about togetherness. The piece goes on air when much of the audience has already started shopping.

Brazilian consumers offer clues that this shortcut delivers little. In the Google survey, 14% named a "creative or unexpected" gift as a selection criterion. The CNDL and SPC Brasil survey showed that 43% had already swapped or planned to swap material gifts for experiences, such as trips, dinners and outings. These are people looking for meaning in what they give and receive, and this audience notices when a brand is just going through the motions.

At Christmas, that question carries extra weight. It is the season when families gather and watch the commercial breaks together. The script is the stage where that emotion is decided, and it needs time to be written, tested out loud and rewritten.

What this series will cover in the coming weeks

This is the first of five posts, one a week through November 19. The second article gathers the data on emotion and results: the case of John Lewis, a retail chain where Christmas accounts for about 40% of annual profit, and what System1's tests say about the 2025 Christmas commercials. The third shows foreign campaigns that moved people with almost nothing, such as a grandfather who studies English on the bus. The fourth covers the Brazilian Christmas, which happens in the heat and has produced films that steered away from the obvious. The fifth is for those who reach November without a campaign and need to decide what still fits in the calendar.

In the next article, the numbers. Why a British retail chain turned its Christmas film into an annual commitment, and what that has to do with the time your brand sets aside to write its own film.