Sainsbury’s Christmas advert 2026: a poorly BFG and the ultimate home delivery

Sainsbury’s has brought Roald Dahl’s BFG back for a third Christmas, and this time the supermarket goes to him. The two-minute film from New Commercial Arts premiered on TV on Sunday 1 November at 18:26, with the giant laid low by a cold and convinced he will miss Christmas. Sainsbury’s colleague Annie loads a delivery van with Taste the Difference food and heads into Giant Country with her sidekick Fred to make sure he doesn’t.

How the ad works

The trip is a chase. The Greedy Giant returns, posing as a tunnel with his mouth wide open, and the van swerves through a patch of snozzcumbers until it is left hanging over a cliff edge. A huge Squizzly Scotch-Hopper is bought off with a cheeseboard, and Annie finally stops the giant’s pursuit by tipping an avalanche of Brussels sprouts out of the back of the van, as Retail Times reported.

It ends in the BFG’s cave, where Annie tells him “nobody should miss Christmas” and the three of them sit down to a turkey crown. Rogue Films produced it with Sam Brown directing, according to the credits published by Creative Salon, and Electric Theatre Collective handled the visual effects. Ian Heartfield, founder and chief creative officer of NCA, called it “the ultimate Sainsbury’s home delivery”. A special version will also promote Sainsbury’s target of raising £30m for Comic Relief by 2030, Retail Gazette noted.

Why it matters

The story matters less than the media plan behind it. Sainsbury’s is sticking with the BFG this year while moving more spend away from TV, as Marketing Week reported. The 120-second hero film comes with 90, 60, 40 and 20-second edits for TV, social and online, and that is where a familiar character earns its fee: a 20-second cut of a giant and a Sainsbury’s van needs no set-up. It also fits the bold Christmas plan chief executive Simon Roberts described last month, built around value and quality.

Three years in, the risk is fatigue. Sainsbury’s answer is to move the action out of the store and into Giant Country, shrink the BFG to a supporting role and put Annie and the food at the centre. Tesco has gone the other way with a three-minute film starring Anna Maxwell Martin and Roisin Conaty, Marketing Week reported, a big bet on people watching the whole thing.

Characters that return each year are a well-worn route to Christmas recognition, as our Christmas ad playbook explains, and Sainsbury’s is now treating the BFG the way Aldi treats Kevin the Carrot. The question is whether that recognition holds when most people meet the campaign in fragments on a phone rather than in one sitting on a Sunday night.

See every UK Christmas advert of 2026 so far, with the films, updated as each one launches.