A Mercedes-Benz holiday campaign extended into January delivered an Ace score nearly consistent with its December results, upending assumptions about a traditionally slow month for the luxury automaker.

Ryanne Webber, head of brand communications at Mercedes-Benz USA, shared the finding during a Brandweek 2026 fireside chat co-hosted by iSpot, where she sat down with Wes Howard, senior account executive of brand partnerships at iSpot. The session examined how the automaker uses year-over-year performance data to determine how much seasonal storytelling its campaigns can carry.

Howard opened with a question many brand marketers weigh during holiday planning: "How do you make sure that you're getting that emotional message across without jeopardizing some other elements that you have throughout the rest of the year?"

For Webber, the answer starts with the brand's foundation. "Craftsmanship, luxury, innovation, performance—that will always be true to our brand," she said. "Success is protecting that from a long-term strategy standpoint, but also doing something new and innovative."

The holiday season, she explained, creates space for creative risks the brand would not otherwise take. Last year's commercials brought holiday characters including Santa into the mix.

"It's an exciting time for us because it opens up different opportunities we normally don't have during the year," said Webber.

Testing the creative before it ships

Mercedes-Benz partners with iSpot for creative testing and reviews prior years' performance data when planning the next holiday campaign. The January extension of a popular December campaign became a case study in timing: "It was incredible to see that in January we had an Ace score that was almost consistent with what we were seeing in December," said Webber.

ISpot's Ace scores evaluate ads on relevance, likeability, information, change, attention, and desire.

Those timing insights now shape the brand's planning for the upcoming holiday season. "You can pick the data apart in so many different ways, but we've found where we can be a little bit more risky, where we can change and refine some things, but always remaining true to what we know performs well for our brand," Webber explained.

The data does more than validate risks. It tells the team where restraint pays off, too.

One campaign, one job

Webber's sharpest lesson cuts against the instinct to load a single campaign with every objective. "I think the biggest lesson is you can't solve for every brand opportunity and every business objective in one campaign. If you're doing that, then you're losing part of the storytelling."

For marketers weighing their own seasonal pushes, the Mercedes-Benz approach suggests a working formula: anchor campaigns in fixed brand pillars, test creative against prior-year data, and let the results define where experimentation is safe.

Source: Adweek (https://www.adweek.com/creativity/choosing-seasonal-magic-over-product-features/) / Original: acemetrix.com (https://www.acemetrix.com/how-it-works/)