Most UK Christmas ads this year want you to cry, or at least to feel a warm lump somewhere near the mince pies. Boots wants you to laugh at people who love their presents a little too much. “For Gifts They’ll Really Love”, the retailer’s 2026 Christmas film from WPP and director Phoebe Arnstein at Biscuit Filmworks, is the first festive outing for the new “Give It Some Boots” platform, and it trades sentiment for a minute of gleeful, slightly unhinged obsession. The 60-second spot went live on November 4 on the official Boots UK YouTube channel, ahead of a TV roadblock on November 6.
Christmas morning, then the side effects
The film opens like every other retail Christmas ad: a cosy living room, a tree, a husband handing over a wrapped box, a “Boots presents” card. Then it quickly shows its hand. A montage of unwrapping across different homes gives way to what happens next, weeks later, when the gifts have taken over people’s lives. One woman wears her LED light therapy mask to take the bins out, glowing red in the dusk like a horror-film extra. A teenager turns her attic bedroom into a neon fog of body mist. Another woman, at a candlelit restaurant table, hunts for a wall socket so she can curl her hair between courses while her date waits.
The gags escalate in a neat rhythm. A woman sprays fragrance with abandon while dancing down a leafy street, an older woman studies her new make-up with forensic intensity, and the whole thing peaks with the best image of the season so far: a commissioned oil portrait of a smiling family in which mum is wearing the LED mask, eyes and mouth glowing red. She unveils it proudly to her husband, mask under her arm. The endline, “For gifts they’ll really love”, lands over a final return to Christmas morning, before a quick button of a man in a paper crown brushing his teeth at the dinner table with his new electric toothbrush.
A product list disguised as a sketch show
The smartest thing here is structural. A Boots Christmas ad has to sell dozens of products, from stylers to toothbrushes to fragrance sets, and the usual answer is a glossy carousel of gift boxes. WPP’s script turns that commercial necessity into the joke itself. Each product gets its own mini sketch, and the punchline is always the same: the gift worked so well that the recipient cannot put it down. That is a sales message, a brand truth and a comic engine in one, and it means the ad never has to stop for a product shot because every scene already is one.
It also gives Boots something it has lacked in recent Christmases: an attitude. For years the brand’s festive work has been pleasant and forgettable, a catalogue with a soundtrack. This one has a point of view about its own customers, and it is an affectionate one. The women here are not passive recipients of nice things; they are enthusiasts, a little ridiculous, and fully in on it.
Where it slips
The weakness is the flip side of the format. Sixty seconds of quick vignettes leaves no room for any character to register beyond a single gag, and some of the middle beats blur together. The street-dancing and make-up moments feel like filler between the strong set pieces, and the men exist only as bemused onlookers, an old sitcom setup. The film also relies heavily on the portrait payoff; take that out and you have a well-made but familiar “people love our stuff” montage.
The music, a modern reworking of a classic carol according to Boots, adds pace but not much personality. Simon Lloyd at VML calls it a “deliberate music choice”, and it does keep the tone away from the usual piano ballad, but it is not the earworm that would push this into the cultural conversation.
Craft
Arnstein directs with good comic timing and a straight face, which is exactly what this kind of material needs. The performances are pitched just right, with obsession played as quiet devotion rather than slapstick. The grade by Time Based Arts keeps the homes warm and lived-in, then lets the mask scenes go full red glow and the attic scene go club green, so each gag has its own visual signature. Peter Sciberras at Trim cuts it tight, and the post work at GPS makes the painted portrait look genuinely like a slightly naff high-street commission, which is the whole joke.
Verdict
“For Gifts They’ll Really Love” is the most confident Boots Christmas ad in years: funny, product-dense without feeling like a catalogue, and built on a simple insight about what a good gift actually does. It loses points for thin middle vignettes and a soundtrack that does not stick, but the LED-mask family portrait alone will be remembered long after most of this season’s tearjerkers. A promising start for “Give It Some Boots”.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Credits: Client: Boots UK (CMO Charlotte Lock, Brand Director Leanne Carden). Agency: WPP (UK CCO Ryan McManus, Deputy CCO EMEA Simon Lloyd, CDs Gary Arnold and Christian El Asmar). Production: Biscuit Filmworks. Director: Phoebe Arnstein. Producer: Gustav Geldenhuys. Edit: Trim (editor Peter Sciberras). Post/VFX/Sound: GPS (sound Sam Cross). Grade: Time Based Arts (Ruth Wardell).
