Are You Doing Christmas? Seasonal Marketing

As soon as the Halloween and Bonfire Night window displays were put away for another year, Christmas came to a TV set, banner ad or social media update near you! In the last couple of weeks we’ve seen our local shops put up their Christmas decorations, supermarkets shelves groaning under the weight of mince-pies and tins of Quality Street, and of course the launch of John Lewis’ Christmas campaign.

Jumping on the Christmas bandwagon we thought we would share our all-time favourite Christmas adverts. Most of these come from those companies who expect to see a spike in sales in the pre-Christmas rush, but one demonstrates how an organisation not normally associated specifically with this time of year, can eventjack very successfully!

MY FAVOURITE CHRISTMAS AD IS…

Emma: For me it’s going to have to be the Quality Street advert with the lollipop lady and small boy – I still can’t see a box (or tin) of QS without the song playing around in my head. So a great piece of advertising (for those of us old enough to remember or were born!!!) and I think at the time it positioned them as one of the leaders of boxed chocolates.

I really did not remember quite how long ago they released this…

1992 | Quality Street | Magic Moments

After the success of this one they used this slogan throughout the 90’s for various adverts..

Izzy: I am a BIG fan off the john Lewis adverts, and have to say my all-time favourite Christmas advert is the 2011 one with the little boy, Even now, it still gets me emotionally and I just think it’s a really special message! Especially now I have a little boy of my own!

For those of you who haven’t seen this year’s John Lewis ad #ManOnTheMoon, you can watch it at the bottom of this post.

Sharon: I bagsie the original 1995 Coca-Cola Holidays Are Coming. This campaign has now been running for 20 years, and this year a Coca-Cola Christmas truck will tour the country on a route decided by the public via Twitter. You can follow the tour here.

Karen: I loved the 2014 Sainsbury’s Christmas advert; it depicted the giving nature of Christmas perfectly to provide an emotional and heartfelt advert.

Sainsbury’s were clever in utilising the milestone anniversary of 100 years since the start of the First World War and showed this with the brief truce that took place in No Man’s Land when the troops played football and wished each other a Merry Christmas. I thought this was smart marketing from the supermarket as it was first aired not long after Remembrance Day, meaning that thoughts of the fallen were still fresh in the public’s mind.

Small business can see from this marketing that utilising key calendar dates and current new stories is a great way of gaining traction and creating a buzz!

Elise: I’m going for “Misunderstood” the 2013 Apple iPhone Christmas commercial;

This resonates well with me as I have a pre-teen who stares into a screen at every available opportunity. While it’s easy to always think he’s otherwise engaged in social and fun it’s encouraging to see how much creativity and thought generation the tech inspires.

Jane: My favourite ad this year, thanks to James at NRG Digital who told me about it, is the Currys PC World Spare The Act campaign with Jeff Goldblum. Out of the various ads it has to be the jigsaw one that kind of sums up some of the presents I’ve been given over the years – Mum please don’t give me another book on origami…

Finally, here’s an ad that shows how a business can use Christmas, and any other seasonal event, to sell a product or raise brand awareness even if they are not a traditional Christmas ‘supplier’.

Jamie: I’m going with the original Yellow Pages advert with the boy standing on the directory so he can kiss the girl with the mistletoe. Fantastic use of product within the advert, and amazing how people still refer the elements of the advert without even remembering that it was an Xmas advert.