How Christmas Adverts Play With Our Emotions

Christmas TV adverts are now playing with consumers' emotions rather than just telling them to buy their products, according to an advertising expert.

Commercials by retailers such as John Lewis, Sainsbury's and Marks and Spencer have become as much a festive tradition as turkeys, mistletoe, carols and mince pies.

They sometimes cost millions of pounds to put together but rather than relying on television to get their message across, the ads are also shared hundreds of thousands of times on social media.

One of the most well-known commercials this Christmas has been John Lewis' seasonal offering featuring a little boy called Sam and his friend Monty the Penguin.

The video has had more than 750,000 shares on social media and the campaign also included a wealth of merchandise including the "Monty" toy which sold out on the firm's website.

Advertising director Christopher Nicholson told Sky News: "Instead of it just being 'buy this - it's great', now we're playing with emotions.

"And we're creating emotional moods and emotional feels... montages, mood pieces around a brand to tie in that emotion with the brand."

Sainsbury's advert is set in the World War One trenches and focuses on the famous Christmas truce of 1914.

It features British soldier Jim and German Otto who meet in No Man's Land.

They swap stories and play football before going back to their trenches and Otto discovers Jim put a chocolate bar into his jacket as a gift.

The ad, which has the tagline "Christmas is for sharing", has been viewed more than 10 million times on YouTube and shared almost 400,000 times.

Meanwhile, Marks and Spencer's advert Follow The Fairies has been viewed three million times and shared more than 26,000 times.

Professor of marketing Jeremy Baker told Sky News that using social media has boosted the retailers' brand.

He said: "In the olden days, you got your ad which cost millions and then you got it on the TV which cost million and millions.

"Nowadays you spend millions on the ad and people pass it to each other and the immediate cost is zero."