Marks & Spencer’s Christmas advert puts James Norton at the centre of its M&S Christmas advert push, casting him as an undercover Santa who ends up topless on screen. Lucy Punch plays Mrs Claus, and the campaign turns festive spectacle into a retail pitch built around products shoppers can actually buy.
The 160-year-old department store has folded its fashion, food, beauty and homeware strands into one campaign, rather than splitting them into separate adverts. That is a return to the 2017 approach, and it lands in a year when M&S has been trying to recover from a 2025 cyber hack that closed its website for more than six weeks and cost it over £100m.
James Norton and Lucy Punch
Norton said the role appealed because of its “playful, funny and reverent script”, while Punch said, “I don’t want any more Christmas tearjerkers.” She added, “I want fun and joy,” and described the tone as festive with “a bit of a wink.”
The ad shows the pair gatecrashing a dinner party and swinging by a children’s carol service, with Norton shaving off his beard so he can experience Christmas incognito. There is also a lingering shot of him with his top off, the kind of visual that turns a seasonal campaign into a talking point before shoppers have even reached the checkout.
John Lewis in the Christmas battle
The competition is direct. John Lewis in the Christmas campaign features Kristin Scott Thomas as a glamorous granny trying to turn one room of her huge townhouse into a fun “gran cave”, and the piece has already been criticised for presenting wealth as out of step with the wider mood of the nation.
M&S is leaning the other way: playful and tongue in cheek without being silly, as Gurjit Degun put it. That approach matters because the advert is not just selling a story; every element on screen, including Punch’s pyjamas, Norton’s towel and the prawn cones, is available to buy.
Hundreds of prawn cones
Norton said he saw “hundreds” of prawn cones during filming, a detail that captures how tightly the ad links fantasy to merchandise. Men’s Health called him a “shredded Santa”, but the sharper commercial point is that the joke is also a product catalogue.
For shoppers, that means the campaign is built to move from screen to store in one step. For M&S, the risk and reward sit in the same frame: a festive ad can create momentum, but only if the mix of fashion, food, beauty and homeware feels more inviting than forced.
The topless Santa is doing more than selling a gag. He is carrying the retailer’s attempt to reconnect Christmas marketing with spending, and the real test is whether a wink and a prawn cone can pull attention back to M&S after a bruising year.
