Warehouse Christmas ads

I’d planned on sharing these ads this past weekend, but life got in the way. Naturally, since last week was the first full week of November, I saw some of these ads a lot. Those gifts won’t buy themselves! Well, not yet, anyway.

The video above is the long version (30 seconds) of an ad for discount retailer The Warehouse, part of the same group that owns Noel Leeming, whose ads I shared the other day. Like that store’s ad, the long version is the strongest, but unlike it, the short versions work, too.

What I like about the ad above is, first, that it represents the diversity of modern New Zealand life, and the message that there’s no single or “correct” way to “do” Christmas is strong. This is also the main commercial running at the moment.

The short (15 second) version I’ve seen the most is this one:



That commercial includes scenes from the main long commercial and another long one I haven’t personally seen on TV:



It has its own short version, which is more specific to the scenes in the second long ad:



The reason that the short ads for The Warehouse work as stand-alone ads, unlike the Noel Leeming ad, is that they aren’t trying to tell a specific linear story that has to be truncated. For makers of Christmas ads, having short scenes that can be mixed together in various ways must be really useful; it’s certainly a way to keep the ads seeming fresh because none of them are precisely alike.

The Warehouse often does ads that are perfectly fine: They do the job they’re intended to do, they’re not offensive and—not the least because there are several versions—they’re not overly repetitive despite being in heavy rotation. I think they did well.