}

Friday, November 03, 2017

First Christmas ad worth sharing


The video above is sweet. It’s a Christmas ad for Farmers, a New Zealand department store. It was posted to YouTube yesterday, but I saw it on TV for the first time tonight. While not actually the first Christmas ad I’ve seen this year, it’s the first worth sharing.

The ad reminds me a lot of the story ads used at Christmas by British retailers, and like the best of those, this one just works. Through its story, it shows what the real meaning of Christmas is for most of us—kindness, love, and togetherness—while including very subtle product placements for Farmers itself. Those placements were so subtle that one might even miss them—in fact, I did miss them the first time I watched the ad, though I was vaguely aware of the Farmers delivery truck (and I give them bonus points for subtly reminding people they can order products and have them delivered—brilliant).

The best television and video advertising tells a story, one we can relate to and become a part of. Christmas is the perfect time for such ads, and especially for ads that pull at heart strings in ways that probably wouldn’t work most any other time of the year. This ad does all that.

I give this ad 5 out of 5 Santas:

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