Serving Inspiration: Memorable Thanksgiving Advertising by Brands
Beyond turkey and pumpkin pie, Thanksgiving is a great opportunity for brands to connect with audiences on a deeper, more emotional level. Wondering how to make your Thanksgiving campaign stand out? We’ve rounded up 8 standout examples of Thanksgiving advertising to inspire you.
From heartwarming commercials to themed limited-edition launches, product discounts, and festive emails, brands have celebrated Thanksgiving in creative ways over the years. Which of these ideas could work best for your brand? Let’s dive into these campaigns and explore what made them memorable.
- The Story Behind Thanksgiving
- A Few Quick Thanksgiving Statistics to Begin With
- 8 Thanksgiving Advertising Examples + What to Learn From Them
- 1. KFC Canada’s “Thankfully There’s KFC Delivery”
- 2. Redbull’s clever use of humor
- 3. Flights.com’s “Don’t Skip the Trip”
- 4. National Geographic’s “Savage Thanksgiving”
- 5. Tyson’s Thanksgiving Chicken Nuggets
- 6. Whole Foods’ social media post
- 7. DiGiorno’s Thanksgiving Pizza
- 8. Butterball’s Turkey Talk-Line
- Design Unforgettable Thanksgiving Campaigns With KIMP
The Story Behind Thanksgiving
So, why is Thanksgiving celebrated? Thanksgiving has its roots in early 17th-century colonial America, where the English colonists in Plymouth held a feast in the fall of 1621. For the feast, they invited the Wampanoag people, who taught them how to plant crops and survive the harsh winter.
Over the centuries, the holiday evolved, becoming a national celebration in the United States during the 19th century, largely shaped by Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation designating it as a day of gratitude.
When is Thanksgiving celebrated? On the fourth Thursday of November.
Today, Thanksgiving is a blend of history, tradition, and culture, a celebration of gratitude marked by family gatherings and shared meals.
A Few Quick Thanksgiving Statistics to Begin With
Thanksgiving is a crucial holiday, no doubt. But is it crucial to your brand? Is it crucial to your audience? Let’s answer these questions with a few quick stats:
- Thanksgiving Day spending is estimated to reach $6.4 billion with a 4.9% YoY. This shows the holiday’s continued impact on consumer behavior and highlights the potential revenue opportunity for brands that plan ahead.
- As of 2023, nearly 55-60% of all Thanksgiving sales in e-commerce came from mobile devices. Hence, optimizing your mobile experience isn’t optional; it’s essential to capture the majority of shoppers where they’re already spending.
- Moreover, a quarter of the conversions during Thanksgiving Day come from email marketing focused on early access deals. Well-timed, targeted emails can drive significant engagement and revenue, making them a key piece of any holiday strategy.
8 Thanksgiving Advertising Examples + What to Learn From Them
1. KFC Canada’s “Thankfully There’s KFC Delivery”
In 2023, KFC Canada launched the “Thankfully, There’s KFC Delivery” campaign. This campaign turned Thanksgiving kitchen disasters into a humorous and relatable marketing opportunity.
For this the brand featured a series of ads featuring charred, burned turkeys in place of delectable food. The idea was to grab attention and convey the convenience of KFC delivery.
The campaign’s standout feature was its bold and striking visual design. A hint of drama and lots of relatability made these visuals shine.
KFC’s Thanksgiving advertising combined high-quality photography with raw and relatable visuals, combined with the campaign’s tagline, “Thankfully, There’s KFC Delivery”, in large, bold fonts, made the message clear and memorable.
2. Redbull’s clever use of humor
The best kind of campaign, be it for a holiday or for general promotions, is the kind that resonates with your brand’s unique personality. One that sounds and feels like your brand in every way. That’s exactly what made this Red Bull ad work.
Similar to KFC’s approach to Thanksgiving advertising, Rebull also used humor as its central theme in this commercial.
This commercial is a Thanksgiving-themed animated clip that humorously depicts a turkey’s attempt to escape its fate. A creative and funny explanation of one of the defining elements of Thanksgiving – the turkey. It’s a clear example of clever humor that does not hurt sentiments or contradict cultural beliefs but rather keeps it light-hearted.
As you can see, this animated ad cleverly combined the brand’s iconic “Gives You Wings” slogan and a fun take on Thanksgiving traditions to engage viewers. The pace, the choreography of the scenes, and the way they come together deliver the playful narrative effectively and clearly.
In terms of design, the commercial uses the iconic hand-drawn style illustration, which most people instantly relate to the brand. All these elements meet at the sweet spot between brand resonance and relevance to the holiday.
3. Flights.com’s “Don’t Skip the Trip”
This ad from Flights.com again proves the effectiveness of well-placed humor in Thanksgiving advertising. Given the prevalence of common themes like family gathering and turkeys, the brand chose to take a different path with its messaging. It crafted a campaign built around the concept of making the most of the holidays to finally wind down and plan that vacation that’s been on the cards for a long time. Here, the brand wins with its relatability factor.
The fun and fast-paced video makes it easy to grasp the theme and boosts its memorability too.
No hard sells, no cliched stories or scenes, pure brilliance in delivery made this a creative example of Thanksgiving advertising. Besides all these visible cues, the other detail that makes the animated ad different from the rest of the Thanksgiving advertising is that it avoids heavy narration and hard lecturing.
By not performing emotion directly, it lets people project their own tension, wanderlust, or urge to escape onto the story. This demonstrates that a hint of creativity helps expand the boundaries of visual storytelling.
Finally, the brand created an adaptable format for its video that made it easier to come up with a series of holiday-themed videos timed around Christmas and the other year-end holidays as well.
4. National Geographic’s “Savage Thanksgiving”
In this campaign, Nat Geo Wild hosted a live-streamed “Savage Thanksgiving”, a Thanksgiving dinner set up for lions at the Columbus Zoo.
Here again, the brand went with a narrative that aligned with the holiday but resonated with the brand and, most importantly, fulfilled the brand’s goal of promoting its show, Savage Kingdom.
But most importantly, this is a unique example of Thanksgiving advertising because of the element of interactivity that was built into it. The campaign was anchored around the idea of integrating user-generated content into the process.
The audience wasn’t just watching; they were voting on what the lions would eat, leaving comments that were displayed during the live stream, and the four-camera setup made it immersive. This interactivity turned a traditional broadcast into a live event and increased viewer investment.
KIMP Tip: Irrespective of the channel you choose for your holiday marketing, find ways to make your campaign interactive. Make your audience participants, not just viewers. This could be in the form of polls, live streams, AMA sessions, and other formats that encourage engagement and boost UGC for your brand.
5. Tyson’s Thanksgiving Chicken Nuggets
Introducing limited-edition products that drive conversions through time constraints and the allure of scarcity is a common approach to Thanksgiving advertising. For Thanksgiving 2025, Tyson has taken this approach and introduced its Thanksgiving Chicken Nuggets, limited-edition turkey-shaped chicken nuggets.
This Thanksgiving advertising campaign has a clearly defined target audience – families with little kids looking for kid-friendly alternatives to traditional turkey dishes.
With this campaign, Tyson taps into the holiday spirit while catering to picky eaters or those seeking a lighter option than roast turkey. In terms of design for the campaign, the product packaging features autumn-themed packaging with vibrant colors and leaf motifs, aligning with the Thanksgiving season.
What makes this an effective approach to Thanksgiving is that it defines one solid problem many families face during Thanksgiving, and that is tackling picky eaters. The product is designed as a kid-friendly alternative for those kids who do not enjoy turkey and yet want to feel part of the family Thanksgiving meal.
6. Whole Foods’ social media post
Not all Thanksgiving advertising has to be elaborate and spread across multiple channels. Some of them are just thoughtful and useful. One such is the post below from Whole Foods.
This Thanksgiving post demonstrates the benefit of creating value to customers. To begin with, Whole Foods is known for its engaging and informative content on social media. Keeping up with this trend, they shared an engaging and informative carousel post during Thanksgiving, 2024.
To create posts like this, understand what your target audience is searching for. What are the burning questions that people have when prepping for big holidays like Thanksgiving? Knowing these and creating educational videos, how-to guides, blog posts, social media carousels, or even infographics that answer these questions helps your brand cut through the noise. Besides, posts like these boost the shares and enhance your brand’s digital presence.
What makes this idea for Thanksgiving advertising special is that, without being overly promotional, it answers your customers’ questions and seamlessly places your brand in the narrative.
7. DiGiorno’s Thanksgiving Pizza
Your signature product, but make it holiday-themed? Yes please! That’s a Thanksgiving advertising idea you cannot go wrong with! DiGiorno proved this with its Thanksgiving Pizza.
DiGiorno’s Thanksgiving Pizza is a limited-edition frozen pizza that brings traditional holiday flavors to a convenient, ready-to-bake meal. Introduced in 2023, this unique offering quickly became a fan favorite and returned in 2024 due to popular demand.
The special trait of this pizza is that it brings all the special Thanksgiving ingredients and flavors into one single pizza. So, the Thanksgiving vibe without tedious experiments with turkey! Like Tyson’s limited-edition turkey-shaped nuggets, this one too was designed with a clear picture of the target audience in mind – busy individuals with little to no time to cook.
Similarly, the packaging was not too complicated but featured a clear integration of autumnal themes with leaf doodles. This shows that a clear, well-planned, and simple execution can be a hit when placed in the right context and in front of the right audience.
8. Butterball’s Turkey Talk-Line
There are many ways in which brands can be useful to their customers. Earlier, with Whole Foods’ example, we discussed the idea of sharing educational content. Butterball took this idea one step further by introducing the “Turkey Talk Line”.
For this campaign, Butterball created a dedicated helpline to provide live guidance on buying, roasting, carving, and general turkey tips. Consumers could call or text the given number, making expert help accessible from anywhere.
As with many other brands, this one identified the biggest pain points of its customers during the holidays and found a creative way to address them. In other words, a creative way to bring people to the brand, organically.
Real-time execution, personalized answers, and the element of convenience together made this campaign a hit! Instead of traditional ads and sentimental narratives, this was a very practical approach that emphasized support rather than selling, thus enhancing the brand’s relatability.
Design Unforgettable Thanksgiving Campaigns With KIMP
These Thanksgiving advertising examples prove that the brands that resonate are the ones that combine creativity with relevance. Whether it’s KFC turning kitchen mishaps into humor, Red Bull animating a fun narrative, or Butterball offering real-time turkey tips, each campaign shows the power of strong design, storytelling, and audience insight.
Your brand can do the same – for Thanksgiving and all other holidays that are relevant to your audience. It is all about creating campaigns that capture attention, engage your audience and leave a lasting impression. It is about getting creative and stepping beyond traditional approaches to holiday advertising and focusing on creating a formula that actually works for your brand, for your audience, and for your goals.
Having a dedicated design team comes in handy during such executions. With your marketing team focusing on the ideas and strategies, your design team will focus on bringing these ideas to life. They will work on creating designs that set your brand apart and cut through the seasonal clutter. For such dedicated design support, sign up for a KIMP subscription today.
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