The battle of the Christmas ads has become Britain’s equivalent to the Super Bowl: the anticipation and hype around who will be crowned the Christmas ad champion has become a cultural event in its own right. Therein lay the problem for arguably the biggest player in the Christmas market, John Lewis - each new campaign is hotly anticipated, analysed, debated, critiqued, rated and talked about.
John Lewis' Monty the Penguin makes an entrance
The Big Idea
Our pitch was simple: pair up the most talked about advertising event of the year with the most talked about TV show to create something truly special and introduce the new star of Christmas 2014, #Monty. We uniquely created a solus break in Gogglebox to launch ‘Monty the Penguin’, alongside a network roadblock of all the channels across the C4 Sales portfolio. This gave John Lewis the scale, credibility and engagement they needed with this campaign.
So far, so simple – but to create intrigue and anticipation in the build up to launch, we created a creative team comprised of the globally renowned Adam and Eve DDB with 4Creative to rework the distinctive Channel 4 ‘moving perspectives’ idents so they were fully integrated with Monty and filmed at the same time, using the same production techniques.
Making it Happen
The theme of partnership was weaved into every aspect of this campaign. 4Creative/Adam and Eve shot the brand new creative on Oxford Street, taking the famous Christmas lights and making them come together to form a bespoke ‘4’ as Monty passes by on the bus. This creative broke new ground by creating the most commercially integrated ident Channel 4 has ever broadcast. By deliberately de-branding these idents we sent our viewers and the Twittersphere into a frenzy of speculation – so much so that before the ad even launched #MontyThePenguin was mentioned a massive 1.5m times!
To ensure nothing detracted from the all-important spot on the launch night, C4 ensured the break was to only feature the John Lewis creative and this was top and tailed with a bespoke into/outro giving this Christmas love story the gravitas it deserved. Post-launch, Tom Odell’s soundtrack became so popular, Alan Carr couldn’t help but have him on the show. Monty became a celebrity in his own right, and created such a buzz that our Goggleboxers reviewed him in the next week’s episode. This added huge scale and ensured this was the most talked about ad that Christmas (Gogglebox verified!).
The Results
2014 was most definitely the year of the penguin, with Monty and Mabel winning the hearts of the nation. The C4 TV launch was seen by 10.5m and engaged viewers, with break retention higher at 93% than the previous year’s premiere break with ITV (89%). And not only did the campaign reach 83% of the UK, but was also viewed 29m times online and shared over 800,000 times socially. And whilst we also loved the Sainsbury’s ad, with a 5.5% uplift in sales versus a market increase of only 1.5 and 17m more views online than their brilliant piece of creative….we think it’s safe to say Monty was crowned King of Xmas!
