It’s nearing the festive season. And by the “festive season” I mean, of course, the end of Q4 of the financial year, a time to analyse our KPIs, distribute our bonuses and pledge our troth once more to Mammon, the demon of wealth and wolves. (I’m speaking to a very narrow subsection of our ABC1 readership here.) Anyway, here are some of our favourite corporate psy-ops – or “Christmas ads”, as I believe you call them in the suburbs.
Amazon
Amazon has a strange habit of focusing its Christmas ads on regular working stiffs of the sort it usually conscripts into overscheduled and underunionised labour. In this year’s iteration a sad-eyed janitor sings forlornly to himself as he works in a theatre. “With our brothers and our sisters from many far-off lands, there is power in a union,” he sings. Only joking. He sings: “What the world needs now is love, sweet love. It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of.” This song is vague in its reading of cause and effect. It certainly fails to associate the absence of love with the dominance of unregulated capital.
Consequently, when the melancholy janitor is overheard crooning by colleagues, they are inspired not to organise their labour in defiance of a resource-hording elite but to organise a small concert at which he will perform for free and experience a fleeting moment of happiness before returning to his toil. And so it is that he sings his song of unspecific longing in a spotlight on a stage while wearing a suit ordered from Amazon (not a local retailer) instead of at a picket line. His workmates are moved to tears, possibly because they know their wages will be docked for doing all this while technically at work.
John Lewis
While shopping in John Lewis (a British department store, not a man) a woman wanders through a rack of clothes, Narnia-style, into scenes from her past. It’s basically regression therapy. However, while in some ways she engages with her own fragile psyche, she is, on a deeper level, hoping to buy something. “Are you feeling some deep emotions? Then buy stuff,” is the John Lewis marketing credo. Some years it forgets to drive that message home, so I applaud the honesty here. I suspect Freud wouldn’t be hugely surprised that this is where psychoanalysis ultimately led us.
Patrick Freyne: My favourite corporate psy-ops of the season – or Christmas ads, as they’re called in the suburbs
Doctor Odyssey’s core message: just imagine Pacey from Dawson’s Creek holding you tight and saying, ‘Shhh, it’s okay’
Rivals: The thrusting bum is intercut with spurting soap and overflowing champagne. We are in safe, if filthy, hands
The 2 Johnnies – what you get if you feed Ant and Dec a Tayto sandwich after midnight – are taunting us now
Aldi
As long-time readers of this column will know, I have huge problems with the foul Christmas weirdo and sentient root vegetable Kevin the Carrot. Like a German fetishist on the dark web, Kevin’s deepest desire is to be cooked and eaten. This is his whole reason for being. In this instalment he rises from where he is awaiting death on a plate beside a mince pie in order to pursue some humbugs who have stolen the spirit of Christmas. I assume the spirit of Christmas is meant to be “Baby Jesus”.
[ The John Lewis Christmas ad is about shopping. Disgusting isn’t it?Opens in new window ]
Anyway, Kevin and his wife (?) have some escapades that involve, at one point, Kevin donning a humanoid arse. I’m sure that’s somebody’s fantasy, and I don’t begrudge them their moment. Ultimately, this decadent tomfoolery leads to freeing Baby Jesus, thus restoring balance to the universe and allowing Kevin to be chomped upon once more. I imagine at some point Kevin and the other carrots will have their collective consciousness raised and they will descend upon us with their freakishly small mouths agape.
Coca-Cola
In this nightmarish AI-created advertisement a fleet of oil-guzzling Coca-Cola supertrucks drive through snowy countryside while unseen tunesters chant “Holidays are coming” and hyperreal members of the animal kingdom – polar bears, deer, squirrels – look on goopily at what are presumably the final days of man. The trucks arrive in a glittering American town where everyone is smiling too widely. An unseen figure with a Santa-coded sleeve disembarks from a lorry and an unsettling grinning townee offers him a bottle of Coke. He grasps the bottle. The simpering townsfolk cheer joyfully, presumably because Santa has the correct number of fingers. (That isn’t always guaranteed with AI.) Then we all smash our screens with hammers and go wash our eyes. And thus a new Christmas tradition is born.
TK Maxx
A llama in a jumper. A duck in boxer shorts. Another duck in a scarf. A hedgehog in a hat. A goat in a beret. It’s finally happened. Animals have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and, seeing they were naked, have clothed themselves, much like Adam and Eve in the Bible (a book by God). And much like Adam and Eve they do all this while strutting to Let Me Blow Ya Mind (also by Eve).
Boots
As Santa Claus sleeps, Mrs Claus and some fashionable elves magic up stuff that’s available at Boots and fill Santa’s sleigh with the stuff. This is ostensibly quite feminist until you realise that Mrs Claus took Santa’s name on marriage. Maybe she should be called Ms Easterbunny or whatever. (I assume she harks from one of the other seasonal dynasties.) Fragile cranks on the internet are furious because the fictional characters in this ad aren’t as they picture them in their fevered minds. To which I say: Lads, you won. Fascism is back. Stop whining about ads.
Marks & Spencer
M&S traditionally runs two Christmas ads, one for food and the other for clothes and furnishings. Presumably, blending the two would ultimately be an ad for “stains”, and thus these ads do not share the same reality.
In the food advertisement a curmudgeonly Dawn French is confronted by an animated toy fairy voiced by herself. She is terrified initially but succumbs to the convenience of having an uncanny supernatural being tidy the house and dress her like a child. The fairy then organises a celebration of gluttony involving Dawn French’s neighbours, whom she hates. Anyway, if you’ve read Dawn French’s biography you’ll know this all really happened.
In the M&S fashion ad a child in a glittery frock is wallowing in ennui until she realises that she can control things and people using an enchanted snow globe. A little like the protagonist of Jerome Bixby’s short story It’s a Good Life, the glittery child uses her grotesque powers to puppeteer people like hellish yet fashionable automatons. The Christmas dinner in this ad, incidentally, seems to be colourful geometric shapes and not actual M&S food, lending credence to my theory that M&S food and M&S clothing do not share the same cinematic universe.
Lidl
A little girl notices injustice in the world – lonely boys, old people struggling with shopping, overwhelmed families – and is given a magic bell that grants wishes. Her family go on a sorcerous rampage, manifesting raccoons, turkeys, giant gingerbread men and three Christmas-jumpered ukulele players. (This is my favourite bit of the ad. Essentially, this trio were either magically ripped from homes or were created out of nothing, yet they’re not screaming in terror.)
Ultimately, the little girl is a bit of a scold and insists that the magic be used to give the family’s own stuff to the less fortunate. She’s basically this newspaper every election cycle. “No, thanks, we’re voting for the tax breaks!” says you, which is no more than we’d expect. We’re continuously disappointed in you, really.
