Boots and Sports Direct go all-out with celebrity stars for Christmas 2021 ads

Sports Direct is a famously cheap and not-very-cheerful retail experience, but this Christmas ad totally reverses that perception. The retailer has shelled out proper money for sports stars including Jack Grealish, Emma Raducanu, Mason Mount and Jessica Ennis in this joyful and very watchable ad by an agency called Mox. It even manages to get some fun performances out of them, which isn’t easy to do.

Boots is relying on Jenna Coleman to bring alive its Christmas spot, by WPP’s The Pharm. She’s a class act and does a great job of bringing all the elements of Christmas together, but the Mary Poppins-style bag, containing endless amounts of stuff, feels a bit too much — and an awful lot of packaging — in the light of current efforts to think about the environment, even though she gives out some of it to family and friends.

MAA creative scales: a surprising 8 for Sports Direct, and a 6.5 for Boots.