Every New Year’s Day, Emma Bisley starts asking herself the same question: who is going to win Christmas this year? Since 2023, the cherubic 34-year-old has been head of campaigns for Sainsbury’s, Britain’s second-largest supermarket chain. She thinks about winning Christmas the same way the Grinch thinks about stealing it, which is to say nearly all the time.

When Bisley’s friends think of her, they often think of Christmas too. For her hen do, someone dressed as a giant electrical plug after the breakout star of “The Big Night”, the first Christmas campaign Bisley worked on, back in 2018. It featured an elaborate school musical, in which a little boy dressed as a plug launches himself, prongs first, into a giant socket, thereby turning on all the lights on the stage.

Plugboy became a minor celebrity. Sainsbury’s had him turn on its Christmas lights in a car park in Cornwall, even as some anxious parents complained about the ad. (What if their children attempted to plug themselves into real sockets?) That year, most in the advertising world agreed that Sainsbury’s won Christmas. Ever since, Bisley has been hunting for the next big idea.