ADdicted: Apple's Critter Carol

Apple posted "A Critter Carol" on its YouTube page on November 27, 2025.

The description that accompanies the video states, "In this handcrafted film, a ragtag group of woodland critters discover a lost iPhone 17 Pro and use it to film themselves singing a song of friendship as a gift, before returning it to its rightful owner."*

As of this writing, the video has 17,467,375 views.

If you're not at least one of those views, do yourself a favour and have a watch.

What's so special about this ad?

All of the things that had to happen before it could be brought to life.

At a minimum, you need:

1. A brand so strong that inauthentically plastering products or logos throughout is not required to ensure viewers know who produced the spot**;

   
   

2. A company so financially strong that it can afford not only to produce such an entertaining and expensive mini-film, but also to make the production MORE expensive than it needed to be for the sake of creativity and authenticity;

   
   

3. A marketing team so strong that they can boldly push for a creative, expensive, product-and-logo-light ad, and be confident it will do the job that needs to be done.

Based on these three factors alone, there might be fewer than ten brands in the world that could justify making a holiday spot like "A Critter Carol".

I'm certainly glad Apple is one of them.

P.S. Here's a hat tip to my friend ("La la la LA la...") Ben Lucier, who saw this ad shortly after it debuted and thought to send it to me via a LinkedIn message, because he "Thought it would make a good post." I LOVE when people do that: thanks, Ben!

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* What's a "handcrafted film", you ask? It's likely a reference to the fact that the singing animals depicted in the commercial are puppets, NOT AI-generated beings. That's right: one of the world's largest and most valuable technology companies chose not to use AI in their holiday ad, despite the significant cost savings that would have resulted from doing so. But given Apple's history of enabling and celebrating creativity, that makes perfect sense.

** Even though the iPhone itself is an integral part of the creative idea, it appears for fewer than 33 seconds out of a 141-second ad: that's just 23% of the total runtime. If you include the two seconds that the Apple logo appears at the end, the total increases to only 24.8%. I can't think of very many advertisements where over 75% of the time serves to entertain and amuse, rather than showcase the features and benefits of the product... can you?