The Race to Make the Greatest Christmas Ad
December 24, 2024 at 08:30PMIt’s always a lovely day when you get to learn something new, like: Christmas in the UK is like the Super Bowl in the US, advertising-wise. “Newspapers review and rank them,” explains McGurk. “Links are forwarded, sides taken. When a dog from a John Lewis ad died, it made the news.” While Americans are having our yearly snicker about the incestuous Folger’s ad, people across the pond are having a national ad-induced emotional catharsis. How did it start? What’s the economic impact? How many people are rewatching John Lewis’s 2011 ad on YouTube and crying? Read on. (Subscription required.)
Priest’s team began to challenge themselves. Could you do a Christmas ad without people? “The Journey,” in 2012, followed the long trek of a snowman to get a hat and gloves for his snow woman. You never actually saw him move. Could you do an ad where Christmas itself was the present? In 2013, “The Bear and the Hare” envisioned waking up a hibernating bear, who had always slept through the season, on Christmas morning. It was addictive, says Priest, the thrill of it. Every year, he made the country cry.
The soundtracks took on a life of their own. Some became number one hits, and artists began pitching themselves. Ellie Goulding performed “Your Song” at the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. Soon, “every other ad on TV had a weepy Swedish recording of a song” and every high-street brand wanted a John Lewis-style Christmas ad. By winter 2014, when Sainsbury’s pitted its Christmas Truce ad, “1914,” against John Lewis’s “Monty the Penguin,” the press treated the rivalry as something akin to a new Blur vs Oasis.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/12/24/the-race-to-make-the-greatest-christmas-ad/
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