Forget writing your cards.
Or making the Christmas cake or testing the fairy lights — you know that Christmas is truly getting close when you see the John Lewis Christmas advert on TV.
British retailers will spend almost £400m on advertising between October and December this year, with an increasing percentage of their budget being spent on Christmas television campaigns. What message do these highly-anticipated two-minute teasers communicate?
Fastest selling coat
This year Debenhams have offered a multi-million pound fashion-focused spot, with plenty of designer labels. Perhaps they are learning from 2012, when the featured red ‘hero coat’ experienced a 400% rise in sales to become their fastest selling coat ever. This year their 90 seconds of screen time is packed with party clothes and concludes with a slogan that makes it clear what the advert is about. It aims to make people want nice things for themselves: ‘Whatever you wish for this Christmas, make it fabulous with Debenhams’.
Modern-day Alice
By contrast, Marks & Spencer have created a glitzy fairytale advert that shows a modern-day Alice in a reimagined wonderland. Here, alongside the iconic consumables pleading ‘Drink Me’ and ‘Eat Me’, there is a leather handbag demanding ‘Love me’. Alice snatches it and runs, becoming another insatiable Christmas shopper desperate to consume anything put in her path.
It is perhaps no surprise that Christmas adverts from Britain’s biggest retailers are designed to make us want things that we don’t have. But John Lewis have bucked this trend and taken a completely different approach.
Ad has its own premier
The John Lewis advert is the pinnacle of Christmas advertising. This year it was deemed so important that, like a Hollywood film, it was given its own premiere. For weeks before it was launched, the media speculated about its content, and rumours spread that Lily Allen would be providing the soundtrack. The internet buzzed with analysis and discussion as soon as the advert appeared online.
The advert is strikingly different from this year’s other offerings, not least because it is animated. With imagery provided by the makers of The Lion King, it’s an old-fashioned tear-jerker. ‘The Bear and the Hare’ is set in a snow-sprinkled woodland where a sleepy bear is about to experience Christmas for the very first time. Nature is all around and as the adorable forest creatures busy themselves decorating their Christmas tree, the emotive background song asks, ‘Oh simple thing where have you gone?’
This back-to-basics approach began in 2008 when Craig Inglis joined John Lewis as its Marketing Director. He stated that, from then on, their ads would deliberately avoid images of excessive consumerism. Instead, their 2008 Christmas advert announced: ‘If you know the person, you’ll find the present’. This is the message he’s been promoting ever since.
Award winner
The award-winning 2011 Christmas advert was their most popular ever. It showed a young boy impatiently counting down the days until Christmas. Set to the song, ‘Please, Please, Please let me get what I want’, it subverted expectations by showing that in fact all the adorable child wanted to do was give his parents their gift.
Viewers confessed to crying at the 2012 Christmas ad which told the touching story of a snowman who goes on an epic quest to find his special someone the perfect gift. It promoted ‘the power of love’ and encouraged us all to give a little more at Christmas. Inglis said: ‘We know that our customers put real effort and emotion into finding the perfect gift for their loved ones’.
‘The Bear and the Hare’ continues the story. There’s no direct instruction to buy and barely any sight of a product. Instead, everything is understated, emotional and sweetly sentimental. Inglis said: ‘Through the use of hand-crafted animation, we're hoping to evoke nostalgia and build anticipation ahead of Christmas’. In two days it had received over three million hits on YouTube.
What is chiming with viewers is not a message of wanting and getting. It’s a message of love and generosity — one that the Church can support and encourage. In fact, I’ve got a suggestion for next year’s slogan: ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive’ (Acts 20.35).
