YULE The ads have loved
‘Tis the season to start shopping for presents. MARION McMULLEN unwraps the commercials of Christmas past
IT’S beginning to look a lot like Christmas with the festive adverts counting down to the big day. There have been lovelorn snowmen, bouncing dogs and even the Spice Girls over the years to get everyone in the mood for December 25.
The John Lewis Christmas campaign was one of the first to become a fixture of the consumer festive calendar.
It began a decade ago with a group of people stacking high a pile of gifts including a desktop lamp, a computer and a leather satchel in an empty room. The end result created a shadow of a woman walking her dog through the snow and was accompanied by the tagline “Whoever you’re looking for this Christmas.”
A member of the John Lewis IT department, Matt Spinner sang a cover version of the Beatles song From Me To You the following year and we saw people being matched with presents as the advert promised: “If you know the person, you’ll find the present.”
The 2009 advert was the store’s first Christmas campaign created by advertising agency Adam & Eve – now adam&eveDDB – and was also the first to feature a musical cover by a current artist, with Taken By Trees singing Sweet Child O’ Mine by Guns N’ Roses. The advert showed children opening gifts for adults including a laptop, coffee machine and handbag to the line: “Remember how Christmas used to feel? Give someone that feeling.”
Ellie Goulding’s cover of Elton John’s Your Song was the soundtrack of the 2010 offering, which showed parents sneaking a rocking horse upstairs while their children watched television, a man struggling to wrap a pair of candlesticks, a mechanic attempting to wrap a teapot at work and a young boy hanging a stocking on his dog’s kennel.
Set to Slow Moving Millie’s cover of Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want by the Smiths, the 2011 advert showed a young boy impatiently counting down to Christmas, only to show that his real motivation was to give presents to his parents.
The next year a snowman travelled across mountains and motorways to get to a shop to buy his snow girlfriend a scarf to keep her warm as Gabrielle Aplin sang a cover version of The Power Of Love by Frankie Goes to Hollywood.
It was Lily Allen’s cover of Keane’s Somewhere Only We Know that was the 2013 soundtrack to an animated tale that opened with the line: “There was once an animal who had never seen Christmas.” It showed the friendship between a bear and a hare with the bear departing to hibernate when the snow started to fall. The hare thinks of the perfect Christmas present for the bear – an alarm clock to allow him to wake up and experience Christmas.
Monty the Penguin was a big hit in 2014 with Tom Odell singing a cover version of John Lennon’s Real Love and the following year saw the biggest tearjerker of them all with a young girl sending a telescope to a lonely old man on the moon. The partnership with Age UK had the tagline: “Show someone they’re loved this Christmas” and budget supermarket Aldi later spoofed the commercial with its own funny take on the tale. Last year John Lewis gave us Buster the Boxer, who made for the new Christmas trampoline after having to suffer watching foxes, a badger, squirrels and a hedgehog try it out first. It was accompanied by a cover of Randy Crawford’s One Day I’ll Fly Away by electronic trio Vaults.
A host of celebrities have featured in Marks & Spencer’s Christmas adverts over the last decade from Hollywood leading man Antonio Banderas to Twiggy, Danni Minogue, Dame Shirley Bassey and funnyman Peter Kay, who featured in a West Side Story-style dance routine.
Jamie Oliver famously fronted Sainsbury’s Christmas adverts for many years and the Spice Girls appeared in the Tesco advert in 2007 going to the supermarket to stock up on presents for each other.
Waitrose has had TV cook Delia Smith and top chef Heston Blumenthal offering tasty treats in its adverts while Freddie Flintoff and Richard Hammond have both appeared in festive campaigns for Morrisons and Julie Walters was a Christmas elf for Asda in 2004.
This year we have Paddington Bear joining forces with M&S, John Lewis with Moz the Monster and Aldi with Kevin the Carrot. Waitrose has focused on community spirit with the story of villagers who find themselves snowed in at the highest pub in Britain for Christmas lunch.
Director Michel Gondry, who won an Oscar as a writer of the film Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, is behind this year’s John Lewis offering. He says it is a big responsibility to get it right.
He says: “When I told my ex-girlfriend I was doing the next John Lewis Christmas film she said, ‘You have big shoes to fill, this John Lewis commercial must make people cry, don’t forget’. Last week I showed it to her and she cried. Phew.”