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What Makes a Good Christmas Advert | Hampson Nattan Williams
- 1. What Makes a Good Christmas Advert? Andrew Nattan & Martin Williams Hampson Nattan Williams wordsthatwinbusiness.com
- 2. The Elephant in the Room
- 3. 1. They Cost Loads of Money Cost of John Lewis’ Christmas Adverts: 2016: £7,000,000 2017: £7,000,000 2018: £7,000,000 + Elton John’s fee 2019: £7,000,000 Total: A metric sh*t-load
- 4. 2. Increased Awareness isn’t Delivering Profits Good numbers :) Bad numbers >:(
- 5. 3. Event Ads are Outperformed by Ads with Actual Benefits
- 6. What Makes a Good Christmas Advert? Stop ranting about John Lewis and get on with it.
- 7. 1. Make Sure Your Product is Festive. Otherwise, just do a normal bit of advertising.
- 8. 2. Be Fun and Relatable ✅ Tacky jumpers. ❌ Sad orphaned monkeys.
- 9. 3. Combine Emotion with Purpose Nobody’s that invested in a CGI dragon. But they definitely love their kids.
- 10. 4. Don’t Overthink It Smiling kids + pissed up relatives + minor drama = Christmas
- 11. Really, Don’t Overthink It. Anti-schmaltz
- 12. 5. You Talking To Me? Overthunk, undertargeted.
- 13. One Final Thing. Cliches & Puns are Ho-ho-horrible. Bingo card courtesy of Vikki Ross
Editor's Notes
- We’re Andrew and Martin from Hampson Nattan Williams, and we’re just here for a laugh where we try and find out what makes a good Christmas advert. Not because we’ve made them, but because we were free tonight and we have Opinions.
- Before we begin, let’s address the elephant in the room. The Christmas Event adverts. Three slides, 20 seconds, I’m going to try to prove to you that these are absolutely rubbish. You can tell me why I’m wrong later. Ben Hampson’s already tried.
- They’re dead expensive. Minimum 7 million pounds to make. OK, John Lewis is expensive, so this isn’t a deal breaker. But...
- Correlation doesn’t equal causation, but even though they’re spending loads on these adverts, John Lewis isn’t actually performing any better at the tills.
- And finally the adverts that deliver biggest increases at Christmas are for brands like Lidl who do benefit-led adverts that give customers a reason to shop. Ok? Ok.
- Anyway, where were we? What makes a good Christmas advert? Well, using our tried and tested method of arguing for six hours before looking at the numbers and going with what works, we’ve come up with five things to do.
- First thing. Make sure whatever it is you’re selling is Christmassy. Otherwise, you’ll get nowhere. For example, here’s a Christmas advert for Dyson. It’s nice. It shows off the technology, it’s quite clever, and it looks the part. But it fails spectacularly. A: Martin, do you want a Dyson for Christmas? M: No. A: Do your parents, girlfriend, mates down the pub or other person on your list want a Dyson for Christmas. M: No. If you try and shoehorn your product into the festive season when it’s not either festive on its own, or a present people would like, people are just going to find it a bit cringeworthy. Just do something you’d do any other time of the year. We see it a lot with b2b emails. Someone will decide that you need to do a Christmas advert for anti-virus software, or office cleaning, and it always comes across as a little desperate. Like the product doesn’t speak for itself unless you hang some tinsel off it. Unless you’re selling something people want more of at Christmas, the customer’s needs haven’t really changed, so you don’t need to shoehorn in a reindeer.
- Who remembers that Iceland advert from last year, with the traumatised cartoon monkey, Rang Tan? And who remembers the ones with someone you vaguely recognise wandering round pissed with a prawn ring making risque jokes? Sad monkey led to a 1% drop in like-for-like sales, and cost loads more than sticking a Lambrini in a D-list celebrity. That’s because people associate Christmas with fun, family, and not orphaned monkeys and the plight of the rainforest. I really like this advert for crisps. Martin doesn’t, as he thinks it’s the death-knell of popular culture in the face of late-stage capitalism, but I think it’s fun, it shows the product in a relatable light, and it sticks in your head. It’s Christmas. People are thinking about watching films on the couch, wearing naff jumpers and seeing the family. They’re not focusing on the plight of species endangered by our reliance on palm oil.
- I promised I’d moved on from John Lewis. I lied. Blame Hampson. The main problem with John Lewis is that their adverts are emotional for the sake of being emotional. It’s almost as if they’re begging for you to form an instant connection with whatever merch they’ve tied into their advert. Please buy a dragon, or a penguin, or an old lonely man. They start with emotion and try and tack on some purpose. This advert does it better. It’s for a telecoms company - because who doesn’t want a phone for Christmas - and it’s all about the relationship between a father and a son told over a few decades of Christmases. It’s all about connection. The emotions serve that purpose. And like any good Christmas advert, it’s fun too.
- Right, here’s the kicker. Don’t overthink it. You’re trying to shift product here, not win an Oscar. When half of the market is churning out four minute meditations on the concept of belonging, Lidl decided on this advert. Here’s the concept: Christmas isn’t as ideal as adverts pretend, but it’s great anyway. The takeaway from the John Lewis advert is something like “combining the twin hazards of fire and frozen ponds can lead to a disaster.” Lidl’s takeaway, and Coca-Cola’s, and Aldi’s, and the others that drive sales is “Christmas is great, we’ll help you make it even better.” There’s a reason that the Coca-Cola truck is the most successful Christmas advert of all time. It’s because it’s simple. Christmas is coming, and you’ll probably want to stock up on fizzy drinks.
- What a line! ‘A Christmas You Can Believe In’ - simple, real. Real people. Real scenario. No fantasy Xmas schmaltz. Just that warm fuzzy family feeling.
- You talking to me? First impressions were that the ad’s welcoming me back to Tesco. But I like Aldi. It’s decent and cheaper and am I’m not going to be going back to Tesco (like many others). You’re not talking to me though are you Mr Ad, you’re talking to the turkey? It’s a bit of a joke. That I didn’t get until I’d reminded myself that I’m not a Tesco customer any more.
- If you’re doing a fun, relatable, simple ad for a festive product, you’re probably onto a winner. But that doesn’t mean you should present the customer with a sleigh-load of Christmas puns. You might think that it’s a cracker of an idea but copywriters have been stocking up on puns all year, and love to dump them into our inboxes from November onwards. Face it. Yule think you’ve got a gift but what you’re really serving up is a turkey. Right, that’s our advice. Follow it, or don’t. After the break we’ll go through some of the Christmas ads that have caught your eye, and have a chat about that.