Adland's happy tropemas messaging

It’s never easy finding something surprising to give people at Christmas. Especially when it comes to adverts. 

We seem to be increasingly presented with old ideas that have been dug out of the attic, wrapped in fresh paper and offered up in the hope we won’t spot we’ve been given them before.

As if to mitigate this, Christmas advertising has increasingly become a budgetary arms race to see who can spend the most on visual effects, famous talent, well known music and longer and longer time lengths.

This year we’ve been exposed to a broad range of tropes – wishes coming true. Dead relatives being missed. People and things turning into food.

With the cost-of-living crisis leading to skyrocketing high street prices the clearly enormous seasonal advertising budgets could seem a little tone-deaf to many, with the more savvy shoppers asking what the retailers spent on Christmas marketing and whether, if they were just a tad more frugal, their baskets would end up costing them a little less.

This year we’ve been exposed to a broad range of tropes.

Wishes coming true. Dead relatives being missed. People and things turning into food. Fairies, complete with copious amounts of dust. Gingerbread (in various forms). Anthropomorphised animals, toys and food. Celebrities, on a sliding scale of cost, talent and brand appropriateness. Rhyming couplets. Mrs Claus, in what seems like an annual advertising appearance. Sweeping shots of tables loaded with often overwhelming cornucopias of food. Gnomes.

Yes. Gnomes.

Poor old Asda for some reason bet an entire cringe-worthy collection of puns on their audience finding the common-or-garden gnome in any way Christmassy, not to mention In any way appealing.

Asda's punpacked Christmas spot – not one for the gnomophobic.

And whilst there’s plenty of turkey on show, more ubiquitous this year is cheese.

A smile, as they say, costs nothing.

Which is just as well, because if advertisers were paying ‘by the smile’ their production budgets would be even more eye-watering than they’ve clearly ended up being.

Ads should make people feel something, and that something could lead to a smile. Invariably, simply showing people smiling has dramatically the opposite effect.

The glut of ‘joyous smiles’ may be the result of what was clearly a major thrust of this year’s creative brief: It’s tough out there. People are miserable. We need to empathise. We must make them feel better. Show people being happy!

But what most seem to have missed is that ‘smiles’ need to be a desired outcome, not an input.

Ads should make people feel something, and that something could lead to a smile. Invariably, simply showing people smiling has dramatically the opposite effect. For me there are two great examples of ads that successfully make us feel something rather than simply showing us how we should feel. 

Waitrose’s whodunnit twin-part series is a delightfully effective piece of filmic entertainment. The budget went on great actors, on-point directing and perfect musical scoring, rather than visual effects. Which makes a refreshing change amongst all this year’s VFX extravaganzas and therefore makes them stand out hugely in the break. 

Even the food is appealingly presented like it would be on an actual dinner table, rather than in some forgettable, never-ending tabletop drone beauty shot.