For years the “Christmas advert moment” has belonged to one brand. John Lewis’s syrupy commercials featuring piano ballads and tearjerker storylines have given the 160-year-old department store a cultural head start in the dash for festive profits.

This year, however, there’s one high-street rival with a sackful of tricks to make up the ground. Marks & Spencer has brought out the big guns – in the form of a topless Santa, played by the small-screen heart-throb James Norton.

The lively M&S Christmas ad has already drawn comparisons with John Lewis’s effort, which features Kristin Scott Thomas as a glamorous granny on the hunt to turn one room of her huge townhouse into a fun “gran cave”.

In the M&S corner Norton and Lucy Punch play a youthful Mr and Mrs Claus – with a lingering shot of Norton with his top off.

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

But shots of Norton topless aside from an M&S white cotton towel have gone 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, a business magazine that covers advertising and marketing, described the M&S ad as “playful and tongue in cheek without being silly”.

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

After the couple gatecrash a dinner party, swing by a children’s carol service and discover “picky bits”, the key takeaway from M&S is that Christmas is about shared moments rather than just big gifts. Although of course the advert is very much about shopping. Every element of it – from Punch’s pyjamas to that towel and the prawn cones Norton said he saw “hundreds” of during filming – is available to buy. Meanwhile, the main message derived from the John Lewis campaign is to give physical gifts rather than cold, hard cash.

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 believes the ad still captures the emotion of Christmas thanks to those 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 is a lot weighing on the adverts’ success for the retailers. M&S is still trying to bounce back from a 2025 cyber hack that forced it to close its website for more than six weeks, costing it over £100m; John Lewis is trying to revive interest as it grapples with higher costs alongside a decline in consumer confidence.

Jonathan De Mello, the founder of JDM Retail consulting, describes 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 is a reflection of how the retailer has 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 this.”