In the past week I’ve spoken to a number of companies who have all announced they are spending staggering amounts of money on advertising campaigns during Christmas and beyond.

Nescafé, for example, will be spending £30m next year as part of a £43m total campaign also covering the second half of 2009 – a sum that makes you wonder what on earth that could possibly entail. £30m is undoubtedly a huge amount of money, but what will it involve, and what will it actually mean for retailers?

It doesn’t stop there. Philadelphia has been backed with a £7.5m investment in 2009; Terry’s Chocolate Orange will be supported by a £2.7m marketing investment around Christmas; Heinz is launching its biggest marketing campaign in five years into 2010, worth £5m – and that’s just the announcements from this week.

These campaigns seem to work. For instance, Tango announced this week that its recent series of successful advertising campaigns have drawn more than 600,000 new households towards the brand, adding more than one million litres to the overall soft drinks category.

But one can be very easily bogged down in figures and lose sight of what they are worth to you, personally. Do retailers pay heed to these huge numbers? Do they even mean anything to those behind the counter? Do retailers look at what is being advertised on the television, roadside posters or in the newspapers and magazines?

Tango’s final figures show that large advertising campaigns work: it’s up to retailers to realise that although the figures at first may seem staggering and hard to grasp, it all boils down to one simple thing: campaigns mean more consumers, and more people will be buying the brands.