Festive ads that tell the story of a nation in need of good cheer on the cheap... and ho-ho-ho they ain’t!
Extravagance is out. Restraint and compassion are in. JAN MOIR on the message behind this year’s...
The Christmas television adverts are upon us once more, heralding the dawn of the festive season and awakening the urge in consumers to start spend, spend, spending. At least, that is what high Street brands and supermarkets will be hoping, as they pray for the onscreen magic of their festive campaigns to tempt consumers.
Yet how can advertisers encourage the urge to splurge in the context of the Christmas 2022 cost-of-living crisis?
At turbulent times like this, advertisers are prescient at taking the nation’s temperature. After all, it is their business to know us better than we know ourselves; to map and chart our secret desires, needs and impulses down to the very last chocolate coin.
Who better than advertisers to predict whether there will be a spend or save mindset this year? Or accurately measure the bounce on the trampoline of consumer confidence — which, incidentally, has fallen to its lowest level since records began in 1974.
Once you get past the glitter showers and the blizzards of fake snow, Christmas adverts are often an accurate barometer of public mood. So, what does this year’s crop say about who and where we are as a country?
It has hardly been a typical year. And if Covid taught us one thing, it is that we don’t need as much new stuff as we thought we did to keep us safe and happy.
Meanwhile, an economic crisis engulfs the post-pandemic world, with inflation, interest rates and fuel costs rising. WITH three prime ministers in one year, the country is on the verge — is in the throes! — of a nervous breakdown. Advertisers must gauge if we are as wellby disposed as we once were towards dogs bouncing on trampolines (John Lewis, 2016) and Janet Mcteer as Mrs Santa Claus (Marks & Spencer, also 2016).
Not to mention cute snowmen encouraging us to believe it’s the little things that mean a lot, as they have done every Christmas.
I don’t know. Just hearing the opening bars of Marks & Spencer’s Christmas clothing advert — the harry Styles smug-a-long song, treat People With Kindness — makes me want to vomit. But that would be very ‘wrong’ of me.
For the M&S Christmas theme this year is one of community, and their advert features real-life community groups — with only the tiniest add-on hint that you might want to buy the M&S jumpers and pyjamas discreetly featured amid the message. Yet even then you are not being greedy, because the ‘gifts you give’ help M& S to support these projects.
One presumes by giving them money from the corporate coffers, but it is not made clear. Still, that is one way out of the dilemma.
John Lewis is also doing its bit for the less fortunate this year. Its festive advert, which is out today, features a middle-aged skateboarder who keeps falling over and injuring himself.
the reason for his bruising endeavours is revealed in the final scenes when he opens the door to a social worker and a teenage girl, her skateboard in hand, anxiously peering into what will be her new foster home.
One can see how the financial climate leaves high Street retailers in a moral quandary — how to advertise their wares and whip up the need for festive celebration at a time of national recession?
Rising interest rates have shrunk our spending power — and when family budgets are limited, no retailer can be seen to be encouraging consumers to splash out and get into debt.
Meanwhile, the traditional emotional blackmail so deftly woven into the advertisers’ festive narratives — buy this and you will be happier; buy that if you want your family to love you more — is just not going to wash this year. And to be fair, few of them try.
tesco has a brilliant campaign that addresses all these gloomy issues with a spoof political broadcast from ‘the Christmas Party’.
the campaign addresses the nation’s ‘ joy shortage’ and promises ‘ more pigs in more blankets for more people’. It also pledges ‘a dinner for five for under £ 25 quid’, a value- for- money message many will welcome.
Across the board there is a notable lack of champagne-fizzing pizzazz. the once ubiquitous sight of a giant turkey as centrepiece on a groaning table is virtually absent from proceedings.
Instead comes a tacit message of modesty and restraint, at times shading into a palpable fear of anything that smacks of gluttony.
It seems that viewers just don’t want to see that oh-so-2019 urge to gorge any more.
In the civil war of this 2022 budget battleground, advertisers see us as prudent roundheads rather than flashy cavaliers.
Supermarket chain Morrisons keeps it real with a gruff, Welsh character called Farmer Christmas, whom we see gathering in his root- veg crops on a tractor garlanded with fairy lights.
It also features real members of Morrisons staff proffering the kind of modest festive goodies that are not going to break the bank — puff-pastry mince pies, packs of smoked salmon and something Farmer calls a ‘bourbony bacony British gammon that is like a big edible Christmas present’.
to gift ham rather than to slice ham? that is a new development on the expenditure front.
Asda has gone with a campaign called have Your elf a Merry Christmas, which uses computer wizardry to implant Buddy the elf (played by Will Ferrell in the movie elf), into one of its supermarkets as a seasonal worker.
Some might cry at this commercialisation of elf — the 2003 film has become a Christmas classic — but it brings good cheer without a hard sell. Asda’s mince pies and maple syrup sausage rolls are fleetingly spotlighted amid a message of acceptance and humanity.
I know! Some cynics may find this brave new world, where brands are promoting caring and sharing over-indulgence and extravagance, rather hard to swallow.
Surely their place is to flog toasters and lipsticks, not sell us homilies and lectures about togetherness and family.
It is obvious why so few big stars have been chosen to front campaigns, for who among the pampered elite could carry off
such a nuanced message? Noddy Holder is an inspired choice for Iceland, while French & Saunders provide the voices for Fairy and Duckie, two characters in the animated Marks & Spencer food ads.
‘I suppose a mince pie could fill a hole or two,’ says Duckie, a tattered dog chew with rope legs. ‘I’ve been called worse,’ is what Jennifer Saunders didn’t say.
For Sainsbury’s, This Morning presenter Alison Hammond comes over all pantomime dame as a medieval countess who doesn’t like Christmas pudding.
‘Bring me something different, or else,’ she tells a trembling chef, as Stephen Fry provides the voiceover.
It is all very humble, focusing on the little treats instead of the big picture. Even Barbour, which must have spent a fortune on the hand-painted Paddington Bear animations that feature in its advert, is not promoting its covetable £300 waxed jackets. Instead, the focus is on a ‘Re-Loved’ initiative that enables customers who no longer have a use for their Barbour to exchange it for a voucher.
‘We wanted to demonstrate the importance of upcycling,’ says the company of its ‘one of a kindness’ campaign.
ABSOLUTELY everyone has a halo this year! The star of the Lidl ads is an adorably grumpy bear — one the budget chain is not putting on sale to cash in, instead asking customers to donate to its Toy Bank — while Boots promotes the ‘most affordable’ Christmas ever via shopper Holly.
She finds a pair of magic spectacles that allow her to see what gives her loved ones joy — including her teen boy cousin who wants to be a drag queen, so gets a lovely hairdryer. It’s all so marvellously inclusive. Aldi stars its mascot Kevin the Carrot, who misses his PeasyJet flight to Paris.
From carroty Kev to Harry Styles, sharing, kindness, reunion, family and human connection are the concepts this year, as shoppers are forced to make choices about what is really important to them. Advertisers will be hoping that despite the grim social messages which decorate some campaigns — such as John Lewis’s closing statement that 108,000 children and young people will spend this Christmas in care — kindhearted Brits will still find reasons to be cheerful, the conscience to care and the energy to celebrate despite any hardship.
Even if that is only with a second-hand waxed jacket and a bourbony ham.