Advertising budgets have to work harder than ever before.
In an age of 3-second attention spans, integrated omnichannel campaigns and cutting-edge creative are key to achieving cut-through.
Here’s our latest ad land insights to bring you inspiration for your next campaign…
Snapper the festive venus fly trap
Brought to life by Saatchi & Saatchi in their first ever John Lewis Christmas ad, this year’s campaign is dripping in kitsch Little Shop of Horrors vibes as the brand wave their emotionally-driven formula of previous years goodbye.
Embracing the weird could be a good move. John Lewis say the campaign is a response to consumer demand for something more fun and uplifting, and research shows that 72% of consumers would choose a brand that uses humour over their competitors.
With shorter product-focused clips, in-store activations, OOH, an installation at Kew Gardens and plenty of purchasable merch, the focus is well and truly on driving sales, in contrast to last year’s impact driven messaging which put their long-term charity partnerships in the spotlight.
The campaign has embedded greater collaboration with digital channels, as part of what Marketing Director Rosie Hanley describes as a “consideration to conversion” mission around the brand’s Christmas campaigns.
This is unsurprising given that John Lewis saw a 2% decline in sales in H1, and research shows that purpose-driven messaging doesn’t perform in advertising.
System1 data, which predicts sales effectiveness, ranks this year’s ad 3.6 stars out of 5.9 – the best score John Lewis has had since 2020. The ad has landed outside the top 10 Christmas campaigns, but public response has been positive and as always, the campaign has earned coverage and got people talking.
Oblivia Coalmine, the fictional oil CEO encouraging people to clean up their pension investments
According to make My Money Matter, a staggering £88bn of UK pensions is invested in fossil fuel companies.
2023 has seen oil companies declare bumper profits, but publicly roll back on climate targets.
68% of savers would like to see their pension investing in renewables, but industry action is slow – no UK pension schemes have yet committed to stopping finance for fossil fuel expansion.
To raise awareness and create more public pressure, Lucky Generals have turned Academy Award Winner Olivia Coleman into ‘Oblivia Coalmine’ – the latex-clad dystopian CEO of a fossil fuel company thanking the public for their all support this year.
With nods to greenwashing, plenty of oil puns and dark, patronising satire, the ad highlights the “cruel irony” that while we all save for the future, our pensions are being invested in industries actively destroying it – according to Lucky Generals creative founder Danny Brooke-Taylor.
Olivia Coleman has proved a good choice to front the ad, and not just because it opened up witty word-play on her name. Research shows that people are more likely to choose products that are endorsed by a celebrity rather than a non-celebrity, and they make that choice faster. In one study, viewers had less pupil dilation when choosing a product that was advertised with a celebrity – an indication that they were spending less time deliberating their choice and were more confident about their decision. Whilst this advert isn’t selling a product, it does effectively leverage a popular celebrity as a trusted messenger – even if she is playing the villain!
According to System1 emotional trace tracking, the ad elicits feelings of anger, disgust and contempt, which get stronger the longer people watch.
When it comes to memory trace, research shows that campaigns which generate strong negative emotions actually have a higher recall than those which generate positive emotions.
Positive emotions do have a higher impact on the level of engagement that the consumer has with the ad, and with regards to taking action, 71% of people who took action on campaigns felt some element of “care emotions” when consuming the ad, versus just 20% who took action following “negative” feelings in this research study.
In the case of Oblivia Coalmine, the focus is on awareness raising and getting people talking, so triggering action may not be the biggest priority. Interestingly, though, the use of satire and humour also triggered positive feelings of happiness and surprise, according to the System1 tracking, which suggests that this ad may have hit the sweet spot needed to turn emotion into action.
Oatly’s disruptive Out Of Home installations get the internet talking – but for the right reasons?
Alt-milk brand Oatly is no stranger to disruptive outdoor advertising tactics, and they’ve leveraged them again recently for their launch in Paris.
The French capital has a rule that any commercial walls have to be “more art than ad”, so they can’t show product or logos, and they have to be artfully done.
As a workaround, Oatly included only lettering on the wall space, and then added product images using separate objects like a van or pallet of boxes, which could be placed in front of the murals and lined up to create a forced-perspective effect when filmed from certain angles.
It was truly a static OOH campaign for the social age, designed to be most effective when delivered via video. And in terms of shareability, it certainly got the internet talking, with rave reviews from the advertising press and LinkedIn.
But as a new country launch, the campaign may not have been as successful.
As TikTok creator Ashley Rutstein summed up, the city of Paris has banned commercial advertising on walls because residents don’t want it. Oatly approached this as an advertising problem, seeking ways around the ban, rather than integrating the campaign in a way residents would respond positively to. So perhaps it’s no surprise that the ads quickly fell victim to graffiti.
Commenters on Rutstein’s video wondered why the ads weren’t in French, which rightly raised the question, who were the ads really for? Was it to launch the brand in France, or was it to go viral? For a brand that has long taken an anti-advertising stance and carved out their niche as innovative industry anarchist, this campaign feels like it failed to hit the mark.
Farm to Foodhall: not just any food campaign
This summer, M&S launched an ambitious new campaign to highlight the provenance of their food and efforts to be more sustainable, with their most integrated campaign to date.
90% of M&S customers say that value isn’t just about price, it is also about taste and provenance. In response, the retailer launched a 12 week campaign fronted by chef ambassador Tom Kerridge.
The 12 ‘Farm to Foodhall’ films showed the chef visiting M&S Select farmers to talk about how the products are made, with a strong focus on their quality credentials.
Alongside the TV spots, the campaign included a recipe microsite, paid social, advertorials in print, and a tie-up with Ocado to buy the ingredients for the recipes, which was supported by an email campaign – sending customers the story behind their purchase within half an hour of them buying a product. The aim was for 9 out of 10 UK adults to see the campaign more than 13 times over the summer, with over 15m personalised interactions with customers integrated into its design.
Through high quality production, authentic storytelling and endorsement from a much-loved celebrity chef, M&S brought the often complex and misunderstood world of food sourcing to life in an accessible and appealing way. The adverts created a sensory experience around the food ingredients reflective of M&S’s now signature style, and allowed the retailer to stand out in a world where everyone is claiming to source their food ethically, invest in regenerative farming and sell traceable products.
To get more insights like these direct to you inbox, sign up to our advertising insights series and inspire your next campaign!
