Posts tagged ‘Christmas’
homemade gifting is on the up, but will AdLand feel the impact?
I detected a definite shift this year towards homemade gifts, with jam, chutney, Turkish Delight and flavoured vodka all being unwrapped at my house on Christmas Day. Having heard similar stories over the last few days I can only imagine that businesses selling kilner jars and jam pot covers had a bumper December.
From Kirstie’s Homemade Christmas to Lorraine’s Last Minute Christmas, switching on the TV it was easy to get the impression that if you weren’t making your own gifts in 2011, you just weren’t trying.
It’s lovely that people are choosing to go back to basics and put more thought and effort than cash into their gifts, but all this domestic goddessing is slightly tricky to reconcile with my career in an industry whose primary purpose seems to be to get people to buy more Stuff.
I do appreciate that sometimes we create very worthy behaviour change – persuading people to eat more healthily, support charities or drive more sensibly for example. But when it comes down to it, the majority of the British marketing industry’s turnover comes from businesses that sell food, toys, cosmetics, alcohol, furniture and so on. Stuff we might want, but don’t necessarily actually need.
Ok, we do need to eat, but we don’t necessarily need an unlimited supply of Ferrero Rocher, a Heston Christmas Pudding or an Iceland prawn ring in order to celebrate Christmas properly.
Of course you can always reassure yourself that you’re not telling people they need more stuff, you’re just persuading them that should they happen to need item X, your brand is better than the alternatives.
I don’t know yet quite how the two trains of thought fit together. If we’re moving away from consumption as a measure of success and/or affection and towards something more personal and meaningful, what does that mean for the economy? But then there’s the positive impact on the environment to consider too…
My head hurts and I haven’t even tried that flavoured vodka yet.
M&S and X Factor – which brand are they actually promoting?
So, I said I’d deal with the M&S X Factor Finalists Christmas Commercial in a separate post.
Now obviously, this is part of a much wider M&S / X Factor tie up that includes sponsored airtime competitions, behind the scenes films and so on.
I assume the brief was about repositioning M&S for a wider, younger audience, but with a touch of festive fuzziness thrown in.
God knows how much they’re spending on re-edits as finalists drop in and out of the competition like yo yos and heaven help the poor agency account managers if Clearcast have insisted on re-approving each version.
The behind-the-scenes film looks they filmed all the original finalists – including the four who were dropped prior to the public voting. Which ended up being rather handy when Amelia Lilly came back in following the Frankie Cocozza drugs malarkey. In fact, a cynical type might suggest that having an extra four ‘maybes’ known to the public but not in the final was designed to deal with just this kind of commercial problem.
exhibit A: the origional ad (I think):
exhibit B: the latest version (we’re due another one about now):
I did a side-by-side comparison and all the edit changes currently happen between 30 and 45 secs. It’s a cunning plan – put the good acts likely to stick around at the beginning and end and the ones likey to get voted off in the middle to simplify editing.
Anyway, is the ad actually any good? IMHO, not particularly. It doesn’t have enough warn and fuzzy family stuff to jerk the heartstrings a la John Lewis and the X Factor lot aren’t big enough yet (singly or together) to endorse as huge a brand as M&S. So it ends up as more of an ad for the TV show than the retailer.
I wonder if this December’s trading (and viewing) figures will bear me out?
xmas ads – Christmas Crackers and Festive Flops
There are some great Christmas ads already airing…and some not so great ones too.
Boots has continued the Here Come the Girls theme with a crack team of women getting Christmas sorted while everyone else is asleep. It’s engaging, funny, on brand and totally relatable. It also stands up to repeated viewing, which is a good job since it has been on air for several weeks already:
John Lewis has done it again with their ‘thoughtful kid’ ad, that judging by twitter seems to have reduced most Mums to tears on first viewing. I’m not sure how this one will stand up to weeks of airing though:
Waitrose’s School of Christmas Magic is great too – another double hander from Delia and Heston but interestingly focusing on semi-scratch solutions to Christmas catering:
There are, however, a few less impressive festive ads out there as well.
Argos use blue aliens to demonstrate why you should avoid stressmas shopping and ‘check and reserve online’ all your gifts and then pop down to Argos to pick them up. I’m not sure that slagging off high street shopping then suggesting you would be better off doing all your shopping by reserving online then shelpping down to the Argos store to pick it all up is actually a winning strategy:
I found the Argos ‘making of’ ad on youtube (why do so many brands feel the need to add a Making Of ad as if they’ve just made a major movie, complete with director, cast and client interviews?) and the client talks of how the campaign is brave, bold, arresting and “really bringing to life the dichotomy of the high street at Christmas”. I think you might be overthinking it a bit love – and that’s coming from a Planner…
I posted about the Littlewoods Christmas ad the other week (it seems to be to be rather heavily inspired by a scene in Love Actually), but even after having viewed the ad several times and written about it, talking to an agency bod this week I merrily misattributed the ad to Argos, which doesn’t say much for its memorability. I’m also not sure in Austerity Britain that ‘make your family happy by buying them lots of stuff’ is the way to go:
So some Christmas Crackers and a few Festive Flops. Let’s see what the next four weeks brings.
PS I know I haven’t mentioned the M&S X Factor ad, but I think it deserves a whole post to itself…
Christmas all wrapped up thanks to Innocent
The nice folks at Innocent Drinks (the smoothie people) always pop something lovely in the post to me at Christmas (like this and this). For xmas 2010 it’s this very lovely wrapping paper:
The accompanying card asks me to ‘wrap up something good for someone who deserves a bit of goodness’. So my very recently redundant friend (anyone in the North need a brilliant design/integrated account director on a short-term contract?) will be getting her present wrapped in little robins or snowmen this year.
Guinness and Grolsch get into the spirit
It’s shaping up to be the Christmas of Musical Alcoholic Beverages.
First we had Guinness and their take on Jingle Bells:
And now Grolsch have weighed in with their version of Oh, Christmas Tree:
Great minds think alike?
John Lewis Christmas ad – have I found another version or perhaps a work in progress?
I’ve been doing a little online detective work this evening.
I regularly pop over to AdAge to check out their Best Ads and the John Lewis Christmas ad is currently one of their top picks.
Except it wasn’t the ad above. ‘Your Song’ had been replaced by ‘How Deep Is Your Love’. I have to say I prefered it!
I can’t seem to embed the version I’m on about, but you can view it here at Creativity Online (who seem to supply AdAge with content). I think the track used is by The Bird and the Bee, from the Sex and the City soundtrack:
Can anyone from John Lewis, agency Adam and Eve or production company Partizan shed some light on this?
P-p-p-pick up a festive trend
Trend fans, I can report that this Christmas its all about Penguins.
As of this morning, my haul of Christmas cards had penguins outnumbering robins 3 to 1.
Pablo the Penguin is apparently going to be the new Percy Pig at M&S:
Santa even took his penguin friends with him to open the Harrods Christmas department (in August, so I think the snow might be courtesy of photoshop):
Want to be in with the in-crowd this Christmas? Looks like you need the Pingu boxed set:
all I want for Christmas is a sensible v-neck jumper…
Somewhere in my blog reader this week (I really should have saved it) there popped up a post about how perhaps this year’s crop of festive ads were a little too knowing (if you know whose post it was, please comment & I’ll link to them).
I think the post referenced in particular the new M&S ad, which is based around festive celebrity vox pops and includes Phillip Glenister’s announcement that Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without “that girl prancing around in her underwear”.
By breaking the fourth wall, M&S move away from their previous festive fantasy lifestyle approach (Take That and Twiggy in a country house at Christmas and Bondesque fantasies) and sort of get back to basics, but I’m not sure that the M&S brand needs much help in the ‘sensible jumpers and nice quality stuffing for the turkey’ area.
Given that Morrisons have spent the last few years using celebrities to push shopping trolleys through unlikely locations in pursuit of their freshness message, perhaps M&S’s new chief exec will encourage something slightly more lifestyley for Christmas 2010?
On the first day of Christmas, my agency plagiarised for me…
The Argos Christmas Ad is here. Scamp loved it – and then the rest of the world pointed out that it was pretty much a direct rip off of the Rowan Atkinson scene from Love Actually.
Now I like a good RomCom as much as the next girl but this ad seems to be taking the old adage that ‘imitation is the sincerest form of flattery’ a bit far when its pretty much a facsimile shot by shot.
For comparison purposes, the Argos ad can be viewed here,
and here is Love Actually (the crucial bit starts about a minute into this clip):
I can’t help but have a sneaking suspicion that it won’t have occurred to the Argos client or the team at CHI that Love Actually has been watched so many times by the target audience (mostly of Mums, I’m guessing) that they’re practically word perfect and fiercely loyal to anything penned by Richard Curtis. So they might actually be a bit hacked off rather than appreciative that someone has nicked from their favourite chickflick.
Some of the comments on Scamp’s blog have also pointed out that Argos’ version makes the all-singing, all-dancing wrapathon look like quite a nice way to do your Christmas shopping…
Those important dates can be tricky to remember
An informative booklet as spotted on a restaurant table today – just in case you weren’t sure which month Christmas fell in…
