Christmas the y Ear the ads ramped up the Sob factor!
Remember Christmas Before John Lewis? God, it was horrible. The adverts were just images and descriptions of things you could buy. Nobody wrote news stories about them. Nobody crowded on to Twitter to deconstruct them. And nobody cried at them. Can you imagine a time when Christmas adverts didn’t go out of their way to make you break down in a fit of unmanageable sadness? I certainly can’t.
Make no mistake, we’ve lived in John Lewis’s world for a while now. The store’s campaigns have been a talking point ever since 2007, nailing the blueprint for sad adverts that didn’t appear to be advertising anything – as this year’s commercial, which debuted last week, proved. But there’s good reason to ramp up the sob factor, explains the media agency Total Media’s behavioural planner Stephanie Watson: ‘Making these emotionally charged ads has a clear impact. When sadness is stimulated, our tendencies towards high-risk, high-reward options with instant gratification increase.’
In short, we’ll probably shop more if John Lewis bums us out a lot. No wonder, then, that the ad agencies hired by the big stores start planning their Christmas marketing campaigns at least 10 months in advance.
So how does this year’s glut of festive commercials compare to the glory years? Lucky for you, I’ve been doing some investigating…