Why Christmas Should Come Early for Your PR Team

For a campaign to cut through during the most magical time of year, the work has to start now, not in November. Success lies in making sure that a strong strategy for broadcast PR impact is baked into your Christmas campaigns, not bolted on once all the major creative decisions have been made. So what do PR teams need to be thinking about now? 

“When we get to January, we’re thinking, ‘That’s Christmas wrapped. What does next Christmas look like?'”

Pete May, Heart Breakfast Creative Producer

The Many Waves of Broadcasting as a First Thought, not an Afterthought

That’s the whole premise of turning your thoughts to Christmas, even as the summer holidays swing into gear. Broadcast planning has to sit at the start of a campaign, not scrambled for once everything else is signed off. It’s a message worth repeating every year, precisely because it keeps catching brands out. 

Heart Breakfast creative producer Pete May put the scale of this in perspective when we spoke to him: as soon as one Christmas wraps, thinking has already turned to the next. Planning properly gets underway as early as April, and by mid-November, the diary is nearly locked down. On the BBC side, Radio 4’s You and Yours starts its Christmas planning in September, partly because newsrooms thin out with annual leave as December approaches. Wait until the festive period itself to pitch, and you’ve already missed the window.

But the reason this matters isn’t just about beating a deadline. Every show has its own cadence, tone and audience, and shaping a campaign to fit takes time. Heart wants something familiar and feel-good; You and Yours wants a case study and hard data. Start early, and there’s room to build the right version of the campaign for the right outlet, rather than one generic pitch sent everywhere and hoping something lands.

What’s more, it’s really important to get to grips with how broadcast PR fits into the wider campaign and the business results a brand is actually working towards. Build the creative first and bring broadcast in afterwards, and it’s easy to end up with a campaign that doesn’t match the outlets you actually want, forcing the need to backfill or reshape it after the fact. 

Bring in broadcast expertise from the start, and the outlets, the campaign and the creative are built to work together from day one, which makes for a stronger campaign overall.

Long-Lead Campaigns and Reactive Newsroom Moments

There are two distinct opportunities to plan for, and they need different kinds of readiness.

The first is long-lead campaign work, brand campaigns built on relationships and assets developed over months, sometimes years. Our work with The Elf on the Shelf, for whom we’ve achieved widespread Christmas coverage across major stations, is the clearest example. 

Now in our third year working with the brand, we’ve built strong profiles for founders Chanda Bell and Christa Pitts with stations from Heart Breakfast to BBC regionals, many of whom were keen to speak to them again simply because the seasonal campaign has been established – driving repeat coverage that compounds year on year rather than starting from zero each Christmas.

Knowing how far ahead podcasts plan, in 2025, we also reached out early to secure coverage with Ladies Who Launch and The Room Where It Happened to connect with audiences particularly invested in entrepreneurship and cultural storytelling. 

The second is the reactive newsroom opportunity – retail footfall figures, seasonal spending trends, predictions about what’s flying off shelves. These moments can look spontaneous from the outside, but the readiness behind them- case studies already lined up, data and research partnerships in place, spokespeople media trained, briefed and available– has to exist well before the campaign breaks. 

Our Monzo “Year in Monzo” work is a good example of this in practice. Rather than relying on a single spokesperson interview, we built the pitch around cultural spending data we knew broadcasters would want to discuss on air regardless, which secured coverage across Lorraine, Capital and Capital XTRA, plus a deeper-dive interview for Monzo’s VP of Marketing on Sky News and BBC Radio London. This put Monzo’s brand in front of exactly the mainstream, mass-market audience its team was trying to reach. 

Content is a Long-Lead Asset Too

It’s not just media relations that needs a head start. Production work does too. Our “Couch to Christmas Day” series with Sainsbury’s and Joe Marler demonstrates how content has to be built well ahead of the December push. In this case, the format, scripts, visual identity and podcast artwork (as well as the audio and video assets themselves) were all developed in partnership with Hope & Glory in the months before launch, not the weeks. 

It’s a useful reminder that broadcast readiness isn’t only about pitching a campaign to a producer. Sometimes it’s about having a finished, on-brand piece of content ready to go the moment Santa starts loading up his sleigh. 

There are also opportunities to make your campaigns go further by producing social assets that play into the themes of your broadcast campaigns, both for owned channels and to make offers more enticing for journalists trying to operate in an increasingly multi-platform media environment. For example, last year BR Studio supported the Lakeside Shopping Centre’s broadcast PR campaign by filming key social content with Denise Van Outen to showcase their free aurora borealis light show.

B-roll: Readiness Producers Actually Ask For

Further to social assets, one part of Christmas readiness that’s easy to underestimate is visual material. Producers are constantly looking for B-roll, and it’s worth understanding why – it isn’t there to showcase a brand, it’s there to give a newsroom the visual storytelling tools they need to support whatever they’re discussing. 

For example, a retail Christmas campaign needs footage of shoppers, shelves, wrapping, queues – whatever brings the campaign to life on screen. Brands that have this ready to go, rather than racing to source it once a journalist asks, are simply easier to say yes to.

The Twixmas Opportunity

The week between Christmas and New Year is often written off as dead air. It shouldn’t be. BBC’s Jonathan Hallewell made the case for it directly. With the news diary more empty than usual and many press offices closed, a brand able to offer genuine data alongside a strong, ideally local, case study during that period is in a stronger position than at almost any other point in the year.

It’s not enough to have an opinion, however. It has to be backed by real numbers and a human story that makes it land.

There’s a sharper, more commercial version of this argument too. Producers working over that period have limited access to active press offices, so a brand able to offer footfall or sales figures the moment Boxing Day trading closes finds a genuinely grateful newsroom on the other end. The bar for a good pitch doesn’t drop just because it’s quiet. If anything, a well-prepared campaign stands out more precisely because there’s so little else competing for space, giving brands outsized visibility so great stories can really shine through.

Getting Ready Now

None of this requires a Christmas campaign that’s wrapped with a bow and ready for launch in July. Instead, it requires the groundwork – preparation that’s easy to overlook but is absolutely vital to land the strategic coverage that translates to real business impact.

This might be spokespeople who are media trained and briefed, availability confirmed rather than assumed, a case study secured before the pitch goes out, and visual assets ready to hand over the moment they’re asked for. Get the foundations in place now, and by the time the rest of the industry starts panicking in November, you’ll be well ahead of the rush.