There is a certain kind of marketing asset that gets invited to every party all year long, only to discover that the Christmas party has a different guest list entirely.

Content creators — the social media personalities who have spent 2024 collecting bigger budgets, longer contracts and increasingly prominent roles in global campaigns — might reasonably have expected a seat at the holiday table. Instead, the first wave of Christmas advertising suggests that December remains celebrity season, as it has been for as long as anyone on Madison Avenue can remember.

The evidence is abundant. Sephora has enlisted Seth Rogen to play a man bewildered by the cosmetics aisle. Kay Jewelers features Colin Jost of "Saturday Night Live" in that most durable of holiday scenarios: the desperate search for an acceptable gift. Sports Direct recruited a roster of Nike athletes. And Gucci has Mariah Carey, who at this point functions less as a celebrity booking than as a seasonal inevitability, passed from brand to brand each December like a particularly glamorous fruitcake.

"Part of the reason brands use celebrities in ads is because they're borrowing fame," said Lynne Deason, head of creative excellence at Kantar. "Christmas is this mass market moment where brands are trying to reach everyone."

The logic, if unexciting, is sturdy. A holiday campaign is typically the most expensive, most scrutinized piece of work a marketer releases all year, requiring approval from executives who may not have opinions about the rest of the media plan. The formula — large film, broad audience, recognizable face — has barely shifted in a decade. (Which is, one supposes, how formulas work.)

Creators have not been shut out entirely. Anthropologie handed its holiday effort to Pooja Tripathi, the comedian behind the web series "Brooklyn Coffee Shop," who wrote and directed a micro comedy about a holiday party. Marc Jacobs assembled a cast mixing traditional celebrities with social media personalities, giving them roughly equal billing.

Still, the transition appears to be proceeding at the pace these things usually proceed — which is to say, gradually, and with many meetings.

Original story published in Digiday: "Creators had a big year. Christmas still went to the celebrities", by Seb Joseph