John Lewis Laid Bare

John Lewis is the brand on everyone’s lips this week as their Christmas advert launched during ‘The X Factor’ on Saturday. The ad is over 2 minutes long which meant it was the only advert shown in one ad break of the highly popular talent show.

Although the £7 million pound advert only features one John Lewis product it has certainly got people talking about the luxury department store. After last year’s advert being so memorable everyone had been waiting in anticipation to see if this year’s could beat it. The response has been mixed in terms of whether it has beaten last year’s romantic snowman story. Not only did last year’s advert include more John Lewis products, it also included people which has been said to be a good and a bad thing.

 This year’s advert is magical and has that Disney feel to it but the only item it promotes is an alarm clock, and yes we have checked – you can purchase that exact alarm clock featured on the advert. John Lewis have cleverly launched Bear and the Hare merchandise including wrapping paper, mug, onesie and cuddly toy, a lot of these products have already sold out online. John Lewis’ website also offers a ‘make your own’ Christmas card service which is Bear and the Hare themed.

The launch of the advert prompted 86,300 mentions on Twitter over the weekend, according to research from We are Social which was a 29% increase in mentions from last year’s Christmas ad launch weekend. Only 1% of tweets were outright negative about the ad with the positive tweets saying how the ad had reduced them to tears and how ‘cute’ and ‘sweet’ it was. The brands social media presence saw a huge increase over the weekend with 7,000 new Twitter follower, 12,000 new Facebook fans and 4,600 additional YouTube subscribers.

Although last weekend seemed to be the launch of all of the Christmas adverts this seems to be the favourite and most talked about. Radio 1’s breakfast show couldn’t help but discuss the touching ad on Monday as they also played the adverts theme song, sang by Lily Allen which reached Number 5 in the charts on Sunday even though the ad only launched the previous day. The song is currently at Number 2 in the iTunes chart.

Coca Cola has traditionally gone with the classic ‘Holidays are coming’ ad that gets everyone in the mood for Christmas as that is usually the first one shown.  The Coca-Cola logo is unmissable throughout the iconic ad with the trucks covered in large logos and in Coca-colas brand colour scheme. The product is shown clearly as Santa is seen drinking a bottle of coke on one of the trucks as it drives off. Here at apt we love how Coca-Cola has repeated the truck ad making it iconic and is always seen as the start of the countdown to Christmas.

 Here at apt we have been having a bit of a discussion on these two Christmas adverts in particular and one of our employees suggested that John Lewis could’ve maybe shown the same advert as last year although this is debatable looking at the response via social media. However although this ad has been talked about a lot through various forms of media we can’t help but ask the question, does it make you want to buy into the brand? It certainly doesn’t have us rushing into John Lewis wanting to buy Christmas presents from there. We are going to wait until the Christmas sales figures are released to see if the £7 million advert did increase sales for John Lewis or if it has just boosted Brand identity. Even that is questionable as the only form of branding in the advert is the logo shown at the end.

The brand has made a hare raising Twitter mistake. The bio on the John Lewis twitter account directs people to @JohnLewis_Bear and @JohnLewis_Hare: but the accounts tweeting are actually @JohnLewisBear and @JohnLewisHare.

John Lewis Has told The Drum that the Twitter handle was changed to the more streamlined version with no underscore to help people find the accounts.

This is not the only Twitter handle screw-up that people have had with John Lewis since the ad was launched: @JohnLewis was receiving a lot of messages complimenting him on his Christmas ad, which he duly passed on to @JohnLewisretail.

Take a look at the advert for yourself here:

What do you think about the John Lewis Christmas advert? Does it have you wanting to go into your nearest John Lewis or do you just think it is a cute advert? Here at apt we would love to hear your views and join in on our discussion.