John Lewis, Marks and Spencer, Debenhams and all the other big stores are well-known for their Christmas adverts, engaging every year in a battle for the best one. This year sees some more crackers (excuse the Christmas pun), with John Lewis spending a whopping £7million on their story of a hare who wants his friend the bear to enjoy Christmas. But what is the best ever Christmas advert? Here at Her Campus we have chosen our top five.
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Marks and Spencer’s 2013 fairy-tale inspired advert is typically stylised and littered with celebrities, such as gorgeous Rosie Huntingdon-Whiteley, David Gandy and legendary Helena Bonham-Carter. Rosie, face of Marks and Spencer’s lingerie, finds herself transported from modern day London to the mad hatter’s tea party, in the role of Alice, where she finds David as mad hatter and is chased by people wearing playing card costumes. Then follows an Aladdin-esque magic carpet, upon which the two models are standing, Rosie wearing beautiful magenta underwear and dressing gown. A trip down the yellow brick lane brings Rosie as Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy, red heels and all, Helena Bonham-Carter taking on the role of the wizard. The advert is full of products: clothes, bags, shoes, perfume, jewellery, summed up cleverly by the tag line, ‘Believe in magic and sparkle.’ The advert is extravagant and full of beautiful locations, items and people, (and clearly very expensive to produce) with all the necessary sparkle of Christmas. They even throw in a cute fluffy dog for good measure!
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This year’s Sainsbury’s advert makes the list, purely because of its depictions of real families during their Christmas Day. Titled ‘Christmas in a Day,’ the advert is a compilation of lots of clips showing the different stages of Christmas. With families putting up Christmas trees, excited children leaving carrots out for Santa’s reindeers and flustered parents trying to time dinner to perfection, the advert is a realistic portrayal of normal Christmas life. Christmas adverts with a focus on family are always a hit and Sainsbury’s even manages to get an emotional ending in, with a father returning from Afghanistan to spend Christmas with his children. The advert sells Sainsbury’s in a heart-warming way, the official spreadsheet to organise the cooking of the dinner making us laugh and the return of the soldier kind of making us want to cry, reminding us of our own family rituals on Christmas Day.
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Last year’s John Lewis advert is one that pulls at the heart-strings as we somehow find ourselves becoming emotionally attached to two snowmen (specifically one snowman and one snow-woman) and the male snowman’s quest to buy a present for the snow-woman he loves. With a stunning backtrack of Gabrielle Aplin’s cover of ‘The Power of Love,’ the advert shows lots of clips of the male snowman in different settings, first in forests, blizzards, by rivers and mountains, before reaching a motorway bridge, a high street and, finally, the John Lewis store, where he buys a set of red gloves, hat and scarf for his beloved snowfriend. ‘Give a little more this Christmas,’ is the tag-line, and gets us wanting to run straight to the nearest John Lewis to be like our hero and new favourite snowman.
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The famous Coca-Cola advert is not particularly complicated, unlike Marks and Spencer’s elaborate concoction of three fairy-tales. It simply shows excited families running from their houses and crowding in a street to see a lorry drive past. Sounds familiar? The Coca-Cola lorry has become a symbol of festivity, marked by many as the beginning of Christmas. Facebook literally explodes when the advert comes on TV for the first time, almost every user declaring that, ‘The Coca-Cola advert is here, now it’s really Christmas!’ Covered in hundreds of lights, the lorry goes down a street equally covered in lights and filled with people, the backtrack song ‘Holidays Are Coming’ immediately creating a festive sense of excitement. This classic advert has been on our TV screens for years and will hopefully remain there for many more to come. As unlikely as it sounds, the appearance of a great red lorry really does trigger the start of Christmas and makes it worthy of second place.
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As much as the Coca-Cola lorry is a necessary symbol of Christmas, the undoubtable winner is John Lewis’s 2011 advert, in which a young boy waits impatiently for Christmas Day. Tapping, sighing and trying to cast a spell on a clock, the little boy seems anxious for his Christmas presents. In an array of adorable outfits, such as a shepherd and a wizard, he counts down for Christmas, rushing his Christmas Eve dinner and running to bed. In an emotional twist (that, unless you are totally heartless, will make you cry), the boy runs past his own presents in the morning so that he can take a messily-wrapped present through to his parents. The beautiful cover of The Smith’s ‘Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want,’ the tag line, ‘For gifts you can’t wait to give,’ and the final smile of the little boy as he holds the present out to his parents will floor you. With nearly six million views on YouTube, this is a deserving winner.
Edited by Faiza Peeran