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John Lewis: about loving your sister
We traditionally start our advertising review with this brand, because it was John Lewis that created the genre back in the day – about twenty years ago. However, they are not the best in the genre for a long time, and they are first on our list solely in the name of tradition.
In recent years, the brand has been dense on the theme of inclusiveness and telling us that uncomfortable loved ones are also loved ones and should be loved. They preached love for a dragon that burns everything around it with its breath, or sympathy for a toothy plant that devoured everything and everyone in the house. It was touching, but it got tiresome after a while.
And, thank goodness, this year they’ve moved away from that theme. In 2024 John Lewis made a video about a woman in a hurry to choose a gift for her sister, falling into the depths of memories, as if into Narnia. Here she and her little sister quarreled over nothing, here she was a teenager bringing a boy into the house for the first time, here she was pregnant with her first child. The public was not particularly enthusiastic about this video, but it is good that at least it is not as luscious as the previous ones.
Barbour: Shaun the Lamb again
British clothing brand Barbour has always made beautiful cartoons – then with Father Christmas, then with Paddington Bear. And last year it started to show new characters – Shaun the Lamb and his fellow dog Bitzer. They also became the main characters of Barbour’s advertising this time: the sheep and Sean are trying to learn the Christmas hymn, but they can’t sing as they are freezing from the cold, so Bitzer rides a moped to Barbour and brings them scarves and hats. The sheep put them on and start singing (some of them in bass for some reason). It’s heartwarming, but it’s not really to the credit of the video’s authors. It’s just that Sean and Bitzer are so charming and charismatic that they create a good mood just by their appearance on the screen.
M&S: young Skylar Blue (and the fairy with the food)
The M&S brand, as before, made two commercials – one about food, one not about food.
The food story was more or less predictable: a kind Christmas fairy (also played by actress Dawn French, but smaller in size) flew to a lonely British aunt, waved her wand, and a table with a mountain of food was set up. M&S Food doesn’t traditionally play emotional games with the audience, it just reminds them that the most important thing about Christmas is to eat plentiful and delicious food. The only feeling you might get while watching this video is anxiety: will she have to eat all of this alone? (Thankfully, no, she’s expecting guests).
M&S non-food is another matter: they had to be more creative. And they invited Skylar Blue, a young star from the 15th season of Britain’s Got Talent, to star in their commercial.
The young star, according to the plot of the video, was very bored on the day before Christmas, but she found a magic crystal ball with snow and started spinning it, and the whole house started spinning, dancing and turning different colors. Remember the Russian Yupi commercial from the 90s? The one where “Water was tasteless, colorless, odorless until Yupi came along”? Well, it’s the same thing, but with a crystal ball.
Lidl: a hat for a boy
Lidl chain this year renewed its Toy Bank program, which aims to send 100,000 toys to children who may be left without gifts. And their advertising is also about this: how a girl from a well-to-do family takes pity on a boy from a disadvantaged family and gives him a hat to keep him warm.
I don’t know where Lidl in 2024 will find such poor families in such numbers who can’t buy their kids toys. They have some Victorian idea of poverty. In reality, toys and sweets are cheap, and the real poor British families on benefits have plenty of that good stuff. What is lacking is good housing without mold and with separate rooms for children, an adequate social security system, good schools and equality of opportunity in life. But it is not Lidl or even Santa Claus who should be held responsible for the lack of all this.
Waitrose: in the darkness of night a pie has gone missing….
Waitrose’s commercials have been good this year. In fact, there will be two of them in the season, but so far only the first one has been released, in which the stars of the TV series “Trashy” and “Sex Education” portray the heroes of the crime drama. The plot goes like this: an important and crucial pudding – Waitrose Red Velvet Bauble – goes missing from the fridge at a fateful moment, and a detective (Matthew McFadyen) tries to guess who stole it. But the first clip ends the second the detective exclaims that he’s figured it all out (as usual, by getting everyone in the same room together).
But who exactly stole – we will be told only in the second video (but for now, watch the first one).
Morrisons: More tacking
Morrisons has managed to hit the classics of the genre in just one year. Just last year the brand introduced its funny singing tackles, and this year it already seemed like Christmas was impossible without them. It’s a fantastic success for a brand that didn’t really put any mental effort into marketing at all until 2023.
Thankfully, the Morrisons didn’t give up the tack this year and revealed a new hit song of theirs: it’s “Give a Little Love” from the musical “Bugsy Malone.”
Amazon: The art of being yourself
Win-win videos invariably turn out to be those where the characters are given a chance to express themselves, fulfill a childhood dream, or otherwise be themselves on Christmas Day. Amazon realized this a few years ago. Remember their 2020 Christmas ad where, in the midst of a pandemic, an aspiring ballerina dances in the street in front of a window-seating audience? Or their video from last year where a grandmother, watching her children frolicking in the snow, orders three “podpopniks” for herself and her big-aged female companions to ride down the slide? That was not bad at all.
This year, Amazon didn’t stray from that path and showed us an elderly janitor in a theater who happens to be a good singer. And to support him, his colleagues order him a costume for a performance. It arrives immediately, and the hero performs on stage.
The only thing Amazon can be blamed for is that in order for the janitor to be able to sing on stage in his new costume 30 seconds after his talent was discovered, the company’s delivery man had to drive very fast and may not have had time to eat breakfast and go to the bathroom in a bottle.
Sainsbury’s: The Big Friendly Giant.
Sainsbury’s took inspiration from Roald Dahl this year and made a video about the Big Friendly Giant (BFG), who, along with supermarket employee Sophie, travels halfway around the world in search of good food for the festive menu. It’s not social, it’s not deep, but it’s cute.
Sainsbury’s hasn’t made an outstanding Christmas video in years, and it’s not as if it needs to. It entered the golden classics of the genre 10 years ago with a commercial about singing German and French soldiers from the First World War, and is still resting on its laurels.
Boots: Hassles Mrs. Klaus
Around the world, the equal rights agenda is going out of fashion, and even John Lewis this year chose to tell its tale not about acceptance and inclusion as before, but about the more fundamental value of family ties (see above).
But Boots is still not ready to abandon yesterday’s agenda. This year, the drugstore chain decided to support women and made a video about Mrs. Claus, who (as is most often the case in ordinary families) carries the bulk of their gift-wrapping household with Mr. Claus.
Moreover, Mrs. Claus, by the way, is black in the Boots video. But don’t start this discussion again, please. Just watch the clip.
Greggs: you can’t do that to Nigella Lawson.
Nigella Lawson’s work may be regarded differently, but that she is a star of British cooking is an undeniable fact. Her books are in every other kitchen in the country.
So when she starred in a Greggs Christmas commercial this year, I was initially taken aback. But then I went to the kitchen, cracked open her oiled and dusty recipe book on the first page I could find, and found a recipe for Italian Golden Lentils – lentils with leeks and garlic butter.
“So how is this so much cooler than Greggs patties?” – I thought. And I accepted it.
But then, watching the video, I was still unpleasantly surprised by how unsophisticated and banal it was: there was no original solution, no joke. Nigella was just reading out the usual food-porn text praising the goodies from Greggs. It sounded like a fragment of Daniela Steele’s audiobook.
Hey, Greggs, is that any way to treat a star?
McDonald’s: a respite for tired parents
The most subtle idea this year is probably McDonald’s. And at the same time it is very simple: their advertisers made a point that tired pre-Christmas parents will take a break at McDonald’s in an attempt to have time for everything.
Never have I felt more deeply grateful for McDonald’s existence than after this video. Never have I sat back and remembered how often this chain, which has become an undeserved symbol of bad food (how is it so much worse than Nigella’s Italian lentils?), helped me out when I returned drunk from a disco, or tired after giving up my room, or – yes – from Christmas shopping.
At the same time, their video is not at all pitiful and tear-jerking: on the contrary, parents go to “McDonald’s” to the cheerful Satisfaction Benny Benassi, and on their way everything around them becomes colored and decorated, as in the above-mentioned Yupi commercial.
Argos: again boredom
All I can say about Argos is what I said a year ago: bring back those producers who made your 2019 Christmas creative. The one with the dad, the daughter and the drums. That was just divine!
And this year they have again (like last year) some uninteresting story about a plastic dinosaur, nothing to even watch.
Tesco: why everything is gingerbread
It is not a difficult task to squeeze a tear out of the viewer, and the authors of the Tesco video coped with it in one or two times, showing in the beginning of the video how a grown-up son and his elderly father remember their mother who passed away on the eve of the holiday. But in this clip there is an additional artistic meaning, which becomes clear not immediately and is revealed to the viewer not head-on, but gradually. It was only after the second viewing that I realized what the gingerbread figures that the main character sees everywhere mean in this clip.
I won’t explain, watch it (twice if necessary) and understand for yourself.
