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UK free newspaper Metro has highlighted some similarities between AMV/BBDO’s ‘Christmas is for Sharing’ Great War epic and a Paul McCartney music video from 2008 for ‘Pipes of Peace,’ featuring Macca doing his bit for both sides.
Here’s Macca:
And Sainsbury’s:
Not guilty. It’s famous (possibly fictional) event from 1914 – so there to be used.
Someone from a rival agency pointed out to me today that this and the John Lewis Christmas ad have served to remind the business world that advertising can, indeed, resonate with the great British public. In a way that ad-free online this and that do not.
So we should celebrate both of them.
Note the importance – by proxy in this case – of old musical associations. This evokes McCartney’s Pipes of Peace from 1983. The John Lewis ad uses a cover of Lennon’s Real Love (produced posthumously by the other Beatles in the ’90s) and the Debenhams ad uses McCartney’s We All Stand Together which was a hit in 1984 and again in 1985. It’s still a Beatley world folks 😉