Love and Adverts at Christmas time.
(Feature article. Intended publication: The BJM Christmas issue)
Christmas is just around the corner, and it certainly did sneak up on us all…
It’s been a year unlike any other, and we have all felt the effects of it. Aside from the whirlwind of 2020 we all seem to have blinked and before we knew it Christmas started knocking on our doors, all jingle bells on the TV and Santa suits in supermarket isles! For a lot of us this year, Christmas presents and cards will be the only way we will be able to show our loved ones we care. Which is convenient since there are endless options available for gift buying. From lavish wines, gift baskets and food, you name it and you’ve probably seen an advertisement for it. From adverts about dancing animals, family gatherings and love in times of darkness, we have all connected to an advert at some point in our lives. But why is this so important at Christmas?
In 2015 the company John Lewis released an advert called ‘The man on the moon’ which The Independent Newspaper reported caused a large boost in sales: ‘online shoppers boost Christmas sales by 5.1% to nearly £1bn for that year. In fact, the most recent John Lewis advert from Christmas 2019 received 88k likes on their YouTube page by November of this year. This shows a huge engagement with their target audience. Adverts work. And we buy into them. But who cares what they’re selling, when deep down the love is what we really buy into? The warmer the pull of an advert the more likely a sell, and equally, the more likely a smile at Christmas.
This year has been all about learning new ways of connecting to the people we love without actually seeing them. New ways to love and be loved without the luxury of touch. The Christmas adverts we are bound to see this year will without a doubt compress all the negatives and positives we have all experienced this year. This will make us more likely to invest in companies that make us feel good, in the hope that we can pass those feelings onto our gift receivers.
Advertisements are there to sell us a product or encourage our purchase of something. But put this aside, and here we find companies forming adverts with the aim to pull on our heart strings, to appeal to the warmest parts of our humanity. Drawing us in with stories of love, friendship and family. At Christmas our hearts are open to an overflow of emotions that may manage to elude us for the rest of the year. Evenings full of hot chocolate, glowing Christmas lights and fresh mistletoe hang on our hearts.
But some days are far too short, and some nights a little too cold, and from the highs to the lows, we all face our issues at Christmas. It isn’t always a picture-perfect scene, and a click on the remote may mean the greeting of an advert full of all the things that make Christmas feel warm, and our hearts, feel that little bit lighter.
