The Christmas ad is broken – time to kill it off completely

It was the moment it went too far. A family on TV shown fast-forwarding their way through the John Lewis Elton John Christmas advert – only for it to be part of another Christmas ad, for a different part of the John Lewis empire, Waitrose.

And it is not the only John Lewis parody out there. In its Christmas ad, Twitter has used @JohnLewis, often described as the most patient man on the internet for the way he deals with people who think he is a shop. Frankly, the Christmas advert is eating itself, and repeating on us worse than the sprouts will on the big day itself.

At least Lidl tried to introduce an element of class warfare into the format – tweeting: “Just because you don’t have £872 to spend on a piano, doesn’t mean you can’t be the next Elton” – highlighting the cheap electronic keyboard it sells with the strapline: “It’s a Lidl bit funny.”

The problem is that, in less than a decade, the whole format of the big Christmas telly advert has become jaded. A survey by market researchers System1 suggests 2018’s crop aren’t hitting the spot. Only about a third of ads shown to people were rated three or more out of five – with Heathrow airport coming out tops.

This isn’t Christmas humbug. The genre has warped from a couple of high-profile set-piece campaigns into an industry-wide arms race. Along the way it has cynically manipulated us – tugging at our heartstrings and preying on our relationships in mawkish attempts to make us all cry. Who wants to be crying at Christmas?

An industry in itself, the seasonal retail space vacated by Halloween goodies has to be immediately filled with Christmas treats. And every store knows that its Christmas ad will be judged against the John Lewis one, meaning they have to get it out and on to our screens a few weeks before John Lewis does – pushing launches back to the first week of November.

As a nation, we cannot go on like this. We need our retailers to declare this year’s Christmas ad war is the one to end all Christmas ad wars.

A brief history of the Christmas TV advert

1955: Adverts are shown on British television for the first time. At Christmas, there are more adverts for toys, but basically nothing interesting happens for a few decades.

1995: The Coca-Cola “Holidays are coming” adverts featuring the “Christmas caravan” vans are shown for the first time.

2007 to 2010: All the elements of the John Lewis Christmas tradition begin to fall into place. Its 2008 ad featured the first cover-version soundtrack – shop staff singing the Beatles’ From Me to You. In 2010, Ellie Goulding covered Elton John’s Your Song.

2011: The Long Wait is the first John Lewis Christmas advert to really become part of the UK’s cultural landscape. It saw a naughty impatient child waiting for Christmas to come, but then – heart-warming plot-twist ahead – it was actually because he really wanted to give his parents their presents. A scenario no parent in the country believes to be likely. The soundtrack was the Smiths’ Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want performed by Slow Moving Millie.

2012: This John Lewis advert had a snowman making a difficult journey to find the perfect present for his loved one. Gabrielle Aplin sang Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s The Power of Love. Fortunately the snowman managed to avoid panic-buying in the lingerie department on Christmas Eve, unlike many an ill-advised partner before him.

2013: Starting off with the cheery premise “There was once an animal who had never seen Christmas”, and soundtracked by Lily Allen singing Keane’s Somewhere Only We Know, the 2013 John Lewis effort featured an animated bear and hare, with the retailer spending £7m on the campaign.

By now Marks & Spencer had taken up the Christmas gauntlet, with an epic fairytale trailer with echoes of Alice in Wonderland, Narnia and the Wizard of Oz. Unlike most fairytales, it featured an underwear sequence.

2014: Monty the lonely penguin looking for love was the star of the John Lewis campaign. Tom Odell was the voice of the advert, covering John Lennon’s song Real Love.

Sainsbury’s had a huge success this year with an advert explicitly recalling the Christmas truce, 100 years on.

2015: A lonely old man on the moon is spying on a small child through a telescope for no apparent reason in the John Lewis advert, one of the stranger creative decisions of the festive season. Aurora turned in a version of Half the World Away by Oasis to accompany it.

2016: Marks & Spencer made Mrs Claus the centrepiece of its campaign, while Buster the Boxer was the focus for John Lewis. The real stars of its ad, though, were the foxes, badger and hedgehog seen jumping on a child’s new trampoline in the ad.

In retrospect, this presumably made the trampoline look used and second-hand, leading to the kid’s parents spending half the morning on the phone to customer services or tweeting angrily at @JohnLewis. Not quite how they had imagined Christmas morning.

Sainsbury’s also scored a big hit this year with a stop-frame animation ad featuring the vocal talents of James Corden.

2017: M&S was at it again, this time with an advert featuring Paddington, which inexplicably led to the company having to issue a statement that nobody swore at the bear, after viewers misheard and posted their outrage on social media.

John Lewis, meanwhile, featured #MozTheMonster hiding under a little boy’s bed, in a campaign that has had, to date, more than 10m views on YouTube.