Infographic: Retail Christmas ads - social media reaction

Analysis of the social media reaction, from the social listening team at Carat and the earned media team at iProspect. Each ad was analysed in the few couple of days after its launch.

M&S

M&S will likely be pretty happy so far. In a less than vintage year, releasing early and very close to John Lewis’s benchmark Christmas offering has meant that comparison of the two was inevitable. Twitter’s reaction was positive, particularly around the choice of stars. David Gandy and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley do what they do best (that’s wearing clothes better than you can), while Helena Bonham Carter seems too young to be playing the ‘oh-look-a-national-treasure’. It’s not a particularly risky ad – good cheekbones, a bit of fairy tale magic, and a hint of tongue-in-cheek irreverence – but hey, Christmas is all about tried and tested formulas.

Tesco

Tesco has gone for a very direct heartstring tug this year, but having your emotional buttons pressed in a less than subtle way tends to divide opinion. In part this is just a personality thing - some of us are suckers for the ahh factor, some of us hate it. But it’s also because Tesco, in going for ‘Christmas, warts and all’ is trying to tell a more emotionally complex story than JL or M&S. Life is short, nothing lasts forever, so make the most of it – it’s a tougher sell than Christmas being a time of year to rediscover your childhood. The focus on the specifics of the ad itself (production values and make-up came in for criticism) suggests that we’re not so jaded by Christmas that we want to dwell on our mortality – at least, not in mid-November. This might have worked better with a release on the 24th of 25th.”

Boots

Boots is the surprise package so far in 2013, with a more risky creative that took a bit longer to ‘get’, but pays off. It’s also one of the few Christmas ads that really pins down the shopping realities of Christmas for most people – we give each other bubble bath and perfume from Boots, rather than falling down magic rabbit holes.

The vast majority of comments were positive (46%), and we can’t help but suspect that negatives, along the lines of ‘he looks like he nicked all the presents’ were pretty much needed to make the whole ‘reveal’ mechanic work.

Sainsbury’s

Sainsbury’s is one of the most ambitious ads this season, drawing on the feature length documentary Life in a Day. Like the film, the ad is directed by Kevin MacDonald, and follows the 2011 YouTube / Scott Free collaboration’s crowd-sourced approach, showing Christmas as lived by families in the UK.

The social conversation centred on two very different points. On the plus side for Sainsbury’s, there was a strong emotional response. Though social listening sentiment can be tough to read, the comments around ‘made me cry’ can be read as a success for the ad’s closing sequence - no spoilers here, but the final frames did their job, it’s safe to say.

Less positive was the focus on the sighting by the hawklike eyes of the audience, who spotted Co-op products in the background of one sequence. The nature of the ad - real life, as lived - means it’s hardly a negative from a creative point of view, but it certainly diverted some of the Twitter conversation way from the core message.

Aldi

Aldi wasn’t competing with the Christmas heavyweights in terms of spend, but nonetheless might have hoped for more than the thirty tweets recorded in the period after the launch. Sentiment was generally positive, so this looks like a problem with reach more than response – 40% positive and only 7% negative. It might well have been a smart move for Aldi to have added an additional element to the campaign around social, perhaps taking a leaf from Argos’s book with an competition element to kickstart response, or using bought media on the platform itself targeting conversations on Twitter.

John Lewis

In the past three to four years, John Lewis has cemented itself as the benchmark for Christmas ads, and is the most regularly cited comparison point in other ads’ wordclouds. It has also created a new archetype for what a Christmas ad should look like – deliberately sentimental, a bittersweet edge, a big emphasis on the ‘remastered classic’ soundtrack, and not much in the way of products. 

Our social snapshot data suggests it has also managed to transcend the industry press, and become part of the countdown to Christmas for the populace at large – as shown by the huge amount of people Tweeting @JohnLewisRetail directly before the ad was released asking when it would be aired. 

Tesco, for one, has certainly taken a leaf from that book this year, but John Lewis themselves have looked to keep moving – after two huge successes in 2011 and 2012, it’s smart not to just go with more of the same.

John Lewis is also very smartly harnessed this almost desperate desire of the audience to see the ad by giving out little teasers before its big reveal during the X-Factor – so much so that the highest single day of buzz occurred before the ad even reached TV screens.

Morrisons

Morrisons have gone for an unashamedly cheesy formula quite at odds with the Tesco / JL approach, which has got a positive response in the social conversation.  Watching a little Gingerbread man singing a Disney classic to Ant & Dec made people feel Christmassy - more so than the Hare and the Bear, in many cases.

And while reaction around the ad wasn’t huge on Twitter, that may well not worry Morrisons too much. Twitter’s demographic skew – younger and richer, in essence – mean that John Lewis has a lot more to lose on the social network than Morrisons, whose key buying demographic are probably less well represented.

Argos

Argos looks like it was hoping to cash in on the familiarity of its Argos Aliens characters in this year’s Christmas outing, but familiarity may have actually had the opposite effect as the execution created very few mentions (123) despite Argos having a Twitter following of more than 70,000.  The Argos Aliens had a bit of a baptism of fire on Twitter, with the campaign to name the new baby attracting some suggestions unrepeatable in a family publication.

However, where they did score well was in their decision to tie the storyline of the ad into a side message of a #giftsforsanta hashtag that encouraged people to tweet in their own ideas of what they would buy Santa. #giftsforsanta was used in 57% of those overall mentions in the first three days of the campaign.

But, where they really scored big was two weeks later when they added a competition element to the #giftsforsanta hashtag where they offered up a chance to win a trip to New York, which increased mentions to almost 5,000.  

There are two ways to look at this tactic:

1) people enter just because they want to win – the low buzz around Argos when it first launched and offered no incentives is potentially very indicative of this

2) engagement with the #GiftForSanta campaign was low so they found a sure-fire way of boosting awareness and engagement.

Whatever the opinion it ended up putting Argos second to only John Lewis overall buzz for November so far.

Asda:

Social media agency Yomego said: Asda’s TV ad stood out this year, by competing on price. While the ad attracted little negativity – humbug basically, like so much of TV advertising, it drove a brief big two day spike, that then quickly returned to normal. Offers form the baseline of all Asda’s social content so the ad thus becomes another piece of content in a larger calendar. Given the economic reality faced by its customers, this is perhaps a shrewder move than you’d first give them credit for.