Waitrose has departed adam&eveDDB (along with big brother John Lewis) for Saatchi & Saatchi (big opportunity or hospital pass?) Here’s its Christmas debut from the new agency.
It’s a raucous multi-ethnic house party for grown-ups, with one Graham Norton popping in.
Theme being “It’s time for the good stuff” – even if other things go wrong (like the lights going out.)
CMO Nathan Ansell says: “We wanted to push against established norms. To cut through and be distinctive. There is no banquet of food that we often get in these situations. It’s got a fun, humorous twinkle-in-the-eye approach to Christmas.”
Does anyone (apart from some ad agencies) still think people celebrate Christmas like this? Waitrose customers are surely more likely to share too much wine with family and a few neighbours.
Parties really are the hardest thing to depict in ads. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be lots of them again this year. They’re nearly always just too actor-ish, as here. Music’s good.
A&E never hit its John Lewis heights for Waitrose (the two were combined on occasion) although there was a good one with a lock-in somewhere in the Yorkshire Dales.
This one is stuck in the foothills.
MAA creative scale: 4.
Rival M&S Food, by contrast, is determinedly going the groaning banquet route with an in-house effort featuring two glove puppets (not entirely clear what their purpose is, they’re armed with American accents for some reason) and an animated Dawn French (again) as a fairy.
And that’s about it, a minute pretty well wasted. Maybe next year they should give the job to new clothing and homeware agency Mother.
MAA creative scale: 3.
Update
Oh, they’re Welcome to Wrexham stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney. Couldn’t they have got them to kick a ball or something?
