Ideas We Love: Christmas Special 🎄🎅🎁

Issue Number 35: Its beginning to look a lot like Christmas

Hello there! How are you?

SuperBowl Sunday is often cited as the one time of year where brands have fun in-public, creating their most engaging work on the biggest stage for one day of the year before going back to business as usual.

So much great work, dropping across a single weekend gave us the license to create a SuperBowl Special for #IWL8. In the U.K. “November” has become a similar moment in time. Many brands in the U.K. seek to stand-out in the run up to Xmas since John Lewis blazed a tinselly trail in 2007 with a new form of blockbuster Christmas ad. But, whereas a couple of years ago many of these plays exploited the same formular, we’re starting to see brands get much more playful - and adventurous - with their christmas creative. Even John Lewis have worked hard to stress test the formula that made their annual ads so appealing.

Here are five other festive favourites we’ve seen drop in the past couple of weeks …..

#1 Sweet Suspicion: A Waitrose Mystery 🍰

There’s a lot to like about this. The main spot riffs on the time-honoured tradition of the Christmas Murder Mystery. It’s absolutely jammed full of well known and well loved British faces - giving us Brits our very own version of a Knives Out style mystery in the process.

Better still - at least to our minds - is the way that the tropes of the genre have been pulled out into secondary content strands: individual character stories, but perhaps most importantly - a return for TV detectives Kate Fleming and Steve Arnott who join the hunt for the culprits. It’s the tentacles of this idea and the way it allows the brand to stretch out in new media contexts beyond the ad break we really like. Lovely.

#2 Ho-lidl-days are coming? 🚚

Lidl, a retailer that’s known for duping famous brands, have gone one step further in the run up to Xmas this year by duping Coca-Cola’s most famous festive campaign with their own Christmas truck that will tour the UK this winter.

Taking this bad boy, which looks more than a Lidl familiar…

…to cities across the UK, just as Coca-Cola announced the return of their own tour.

Watch the promo video below!

#3 Currys go ‘Beyond Techspectations’ 📺

Currys is showing all the signs of a brand hitting its stride and finding its voice.

Its new platform Beyond Techspectations unlocks plenty of creative potential, and the playful portmanteau signals a willingness to have some fun along the way which they’re turning up to 11 across social media.

Just in the past week they’ve given air fryers the Patrick Bateman treatment…

@currysLet’s see Paul Allen’s Air Fryer. #viral_video #americanphysco #fyp

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…and flipped the Gen Z slang trend that they’d already riffed off we featured a few short weeks ago on its head by poking Millennial slang in the eye.

With Christmas ‘season’ starting earlier and earlier it seems - and events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday pulling consumer spend further forward - Christmas advertising doesn’t always have to be all tinsel and Turkey.

#4 Louis Vuitton’s New York Flagship-Scaffolding 🧳

This one is not exactly a Christmas ad either, but the same logic stands.

At a time when the internet is increasingly overrun with Generative AI driven content and Generative AI ‘stunts’ - it’s refreshing when a brand does audacious stuff in the real world. As the brand prepares to tear down it’s New York Flagship store and rebuild - Louis Vuitton has erected a mega structure designed encasing the building site on Fifth Avenue that is designed to look like their iconic luggage.

A good example of maintaining mental availability even when physical availability might be diminished. Everything is media, everything communicates! The theory of costly-signalling and ‘media as body-language’ means this kind of thing is exactly the way a luxury brand should behave - It’s extravagant, especially against the context of other brands leaning into Gen Ai for the heavy lift on this sort of thing.

#5 Burberry’s Wrapped in Burberry 🥼

We were big fans of the recent It’s Always Burberry Weather brand relaunch from Burberry. A clear return to some of the brand thinking which they were founded on, a return to some of the iconic fabrics and products for which they’re best known - all married to a new generation of iconic British Talent.

Wrapped in Burberry is the Christmas iteration of that - featuring the famous check, iconic london landmarks and a set of famous faces to front the campaign. Christmas advertising with a sense of humour, a sense of place and a sense of style.

BONUS Xmas Bauble: Check your bits!!!

Although off the festive theme, we couldn’t resist putting one more present in this post - a lovely little reminder we’ve seen in the wild between Bankside and Borough Market from Breast Cancer Awareness who’ve turned lumpy pavements into reminders to check yourself.

The best time to check is today. Don’t wait.

That’s a wrap 🎁

Until next time,

Matt & Tom x

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If you liked this post, you might love…

Matt’s ‘A to Z of Media Planning Project’ over here

Tom’s thoughts on modern brands and communications planning over here