Pink is the New Red and Green: How Holiday Visuals Impact Performance 

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The holiday season isn’t just the busiest shopping period of the year, it’s also the most competitive time for brands to capture shoppers’ attention. In a crowded, fast-moving holiday feed, it’s the visual strategy as much as the message that determines whether an ad transforms a simple scroll into a conversion. From cozy storytelling to bold color choices, glittering visuals, and standout promotions, the most effective campaigns combine emotion, aesthetics, and clarity to cut through the noise and drive engagement.

Below, we break down the visual themes shaping this season, and the performance impact behind each one.

Cozy Comfort: +40%–50% uplift in CTR

At Alison.ai, we observed a +40–50% uplift in CTR for creatives that incorporate elements such as warm holiday tones, natural textures, soft glow lighting, and authentic communal moments. By anchoring visuals in real warmth and togetherness, brands create content that feels emotionally rich, culturally relevant, and universally relatable.

Warm, familiar tones have long been a holiday classic, evoking comfort, nostalgia, and connection. Many lifestyle and home-focused brands continue to lean into this tradition, turning to creatives that show bundled-up friends and families enjoying hot drinks, shared meals, and festive gatherings. This season, that sense of unity expands beyond the family unit, capturing a broader societal connection that brings communities together in a divided world.

“Cozy” has become more than a seasonal mood; it is one of the strongest performance drivers of the holiday period. Campaigns using soft lighting, warm color palettes such as deep burgundy, candlelit gold, mulled-spice orange, and subtle woodland greens, along with real-life settings like living rooms, fireplaces, or snow-dusted cabins, consistently outperform overproduced or graphic-heavy content. These grounded visuals generate stronger retention and engagement because they feel intimate, familiar, and emotionally resonant.

Pink Is the New Red and Green: +5% to +50% CTR Uplift

We’ve observed that pink doesn’t just elevate aesthetics; it often elevates performance. Creatives that feature pink show a wide range of CTR uplift, from around +5% to as high as +50%. While the results vary, the consistent takeaway is clear: pink has strong potential to drive engagement across a broad spectrum of holiday creatives.

Traditional holiday colors such as red, green, and gold continue to dominate, but this season, pink is emerging as the unexpected hero. Shades of baby pink, rose, and magenta are appearing across categories, from loungewear to beauty, fragrance, and more, bringing a fresh and joyful energy to the holiday palette.

Pink communicates confidence and optimism. It delivers a softer sense of celebration that feels expressive and uplifting rather than conventional. For younger female audiences especially, pink represents individuality and empowerment, offering a contemporary take on holiday spirit.

By replacing the familiar tones of red and green with something brighter and more personal, brands are signaling a creative shift. The result is content that feels vibrant, emotionally resonant, and unmistakably current.

Glitter, Glamour, and Glow: +20% increase in CTR

Based on our analysis, creatives that incorporate elements such as disco balls, ornaments, sparkling lights, and glitter have shown around +20% increase in CTR, reinforcing that sparkle isn’t just visually striking but performance-driving.

If pink captures personality, sparkle delivers presence. This season, shimmering textures, glowing ornaments, and disco ball-inspired visuals are taking center stage. Brands are combining real-world metallics with digital effects like animated glitter, twinkling highlights, and soft lens flares to create motion, energy, and festive excitement.

Disco balls and reflective surfaces add playfulness while naturally guiding the viewer’s eye across the scene. Sparkle is appearing across fashion, retail, tech, and lifestyle campaigns, transforming simple content into scroll-stopping, memorable moments. In feeds filled with cozy neutrals or minimalist layouts, a well-placed shimmer signals celebration, energy, and premium quality.

Season of Saving, “Buy More, Save More”: +10% uplift in CTR

More deals than ever are appearing across holiday campaigns this season, with brands leaning heavily into “Buy More, Save More” messaging. Bold typography, high-contrast colors, dynamic overlays, countdown timers, and attention-grabbing animations make discounts impossible to miss, signaling value instantly to consumers. At Alison.ai, we found that creatives using these elements saw around a +10% uplift in CTR, reinforcing that strong promotional design not only communicates value but also boosts performance.

Visuals often combine clear promotional messaging with festive elements, ensuring offers feel both exciting and seasonal rather than purely commercial. In a feed crowded with emotion-driven content, these campaigns cut through the noise, driving attention, engagement, and conversion, while reflecting the broader consumerism that defines the holiday shopping period.

Holiday campaigns in 2025 show that creativity and performance are not opposites. The strongest work blends emotional resonance with visual clarity, using warmth, sparkle, and smart value communication to engage audiences in meaningful ways. Whether it is the comfort of cozy moments, the freshness of pink, the excitement of shimmer, or the immediacy of bold discounts, successful brands are telling stories that make people stop, connect, and take action.