M&S and John Lewis Go Head-to-Head in Festive Ad Clash Over ‘Shredded Santa’

For years, the “Christmas advert moment” belonged to one brand. John Lewis’s polished commercials, built around piano ballads and tearjerker narratives, gave the 160-year-old department store a cultural head start in the race for festive profits.

This year, however, a high-street rival brought out a sack of tricks to close the gap. Marks & Spencer enlisted small-screen heartthrob James Norton to play a topless Santa, paired with Lucy Punch as Mrs Claus.

The M&S Christmas ad drew immediate comparisons with John Lewis’s latest festive film, which featured Kristin Scott Thomas as a glamorous grandmother on a mission to turn one room of her huge townhouse into a fun “gran cave.”

In the M&S version, Norton and Punch played a youthful Mr and Mrs Claus, with a lingering shot of Norton shirtless.

When John Lewis launched its advert this week, its portrayal of wealth was criticised, with a sprawling house and seemingly ungrateful grandchildren said to be out of step with the wider mood of the nation.

But shots of Norton topless aside from an M&S white cotton towel went viral. Men’s Health magazine described him as a “shredded Santa,” saying his Saint Nick “leaves the traditional mince-pie physique looking a little dated.”

Gurjit Degun, the creativity and cultural editor at Campaign, described the M&S ad as “playful and tongue in cheek without being silly.”

M&S combined its fashion, food, beauty and homeware strands into one campaign rather than separate adverts, a strategy it last used in 2017. Norton played an undercover Santa who shaved his beard so he could experience the buildup to Christmas incognito, while Punch played a snobbish Mrs Claus, similar to her character in Amandaland.

After the couple gatecrashed a dinner party, swung by a children’s carol service and discovered the “picky bits,” the key takeaway from M&S was that Christmas is about shared moments rather than just big gifts. Although the advert was very much about shopping.

Norton said the combination of a “playful, funny and reverent script” appealed to him. He is a “huge fan” of the advert’s director, Shannon Murphy, who has worked on shows including Killing Eve and Babyteeth.

“I trusted that Shannon would deliver on the tone,” he said. “She’s such a cool cat.” While he is usually “a sucker for a traditional tearjerker,” he believed the ad still captured the emotion of Christmas through the family-and-friends moments that speak to “connection and joy.”

Punch said she liked the deliberately humorous script. “I don’t want any more Christmas tearjerkers,” she said. “I want fun and joy. Life is enough of a tearjerker; it’s fun to have something festive with a bit of a wink.”

In a tough consumer market, there was a lot weighing on the success of the adverts for the retailers. M&S was still trying to recover from a 2025 cyber hack that forced it to close its website for more than six weeks, costing it over £100m; John Lewis was trying to revive interest as it grappled with higher costs alongside a decline in consumer confidence.

Jonathan De Mello, the founder of JDM Retail consulting, described the John Lewis strategy as smart, explaining that the casting of Scott Thomas reflected the type of customer the retailer was trying to appeal to.

“They are targeting a group that is fairly affluent,” he said. “They have a decent chunk of disposable income because they have paid off their mortgages.” However, this approach could “alienate the mass market,” he cautioned, as for a younger generation “it portrays a type of lifestyle that for many is unattainable.”

The M&S advert was a reflection of how the retailer had successfully turned its business around, De Mello said. “Before, there was a dichotomy between the food and the fashion, and now they are very much aligned. M&S now taps into the younger consumer psyche, and this advert reflects that.”

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