A Perfectly Human Antidote to a Thoroughly AI Year

There’s a moment in the new John Lewis Christmas advert – somewhere between the silences, the passing years, and the slow realisation of the inevitability of time – where it lands. Not with a flourish. Not with spectacle. But with something far rarer (but no less effective) in advertising now: feeling.

A Year Saturated by Artificial Everything

This has been a year saturated with AI.

AI-written copy. AI-generated imagery. AI-driven efficiency in places that once relied on intuition and craft. The result, in many cases, has been work that looks impressive, functions perfectly… and leaves people cold. So, when an advert comes along that does the opposite – that feels deliberately human, even imperfect – it cuts through.

The John Lewis father-and-son story doesn’t shout the brand in your face. It doesn’t chase “novelty”. It simply observes time passing, aging, relationships changing, and the quiet ache that creeps in as these things come to pass. It trusts the audience to do some of the emotional work themselves. And that trust is precisely why it resonates.

Shared Emotional Language

This isn’t accidental. As Marketing Week notes in its analysis of the campaign, John Lewis has leaned heavily into 1990s nostalgia. Not as a gimmick, but a shared emotional language. The music, the pacing, and the domestic familiarity all tap into collective memory. You don’t just watch the ad… you recognise it. You experience it.

That recognition and that experience matters. It’s what often sets ads apart. Psychologists have long argued that emotional memory is stickier than rational recall, which is something explored in academic commentary on why festive advertising works so well year after year. Christmas adverts are sometimes about the product, but often they’re about reassurance, continuity, and belonging. In uncertain times, those themes become even more potent.

When Optimisation Becomes the Problem

What’s striking is how sharply this contrasts with other high-profile campaigns this season. Coca-Cola’s AI-generated Christmas visuals, for example, prompted a backlash not because they were technically poor, but because they felt soulless.

As The Conversation recently observed, audiences are beginning to push back against AI imagery in advertising. Not out of technophobia or because they’re luddites, but simply out of fatigue. And that’s fair enough. When everything is optimised, something essential gets lost.

The agency behind the ad, Saatchi & Saatchi London, instinctively understands this. The technology behind the ad is invisible. The craft is present but never foregrounded. There’s no sense of the brand saying “look what we can do.” Instead, it asks a simpler and more generous question: do you feel this too?

While it might lose points for not having brand imagery for recognition (or brand consistency) slapped all throughout, it wins points for doing what it’s supposed to do best: connect.

Treating the Audience Like Adults

The ad provokes conversation because it treats its audience like adults. It doesn’t sugar-coat family dynamics or resolve everything entirely neatly. And for many viewers, particularly those navigating complex relationships with parents or children, that honesty hits home. The Huffington Post captured this well, framing the ad as a meditation on reconnection through festivity.

At a time where AI has promised to make everything faster, smoother, and more efficient, the John Lewis campaign reminds us that the most powerful creative work isn’t always the most advanced – it’s the most attuned. The emotion, nuance, and restraint are the real advantages.

Technology is the Tool, Not the Story

This doesn’t mean AI has no place in creative work. Far from it. Used well, it can improve processes, remove friction, and free people up to focus on ideas. But when technology becomes the story, when novelty eclipses meaning, audiences do notice. And, increasingly, they’ll opt out.

What John Lewis has delivered is something closer to an antidote. A piece of storytelling that reminds us why advertising exists in the first place: not only to impress, but to connect. Not to optimise emotion away, but to honour it.

While this year has been somewhat defined by machines learning how to sound human, this advert succeeds by being true. And that, it turns out, works – and still matters.