Advertising over Christmas had taken on a life of its own. The lines had blurred and the advertising had become the entertainment.

Data from YouTube, Facebook and Twitter revealed that over the last three years, the life span of the John Lewis Christmas ad was getting shorter and shorter. People were quite literally bingeing on it. Their Christmas binge was lasting 9 days only. What’s more 29% of all ad views were happening in day 1! This model was similar to addictive, must see box set behaviour where people devour a series and move on.

We needed the John Lewis ad to behave as the most sought after, binge worthy piece of entertainment and shift our advertising model from behaving as a beautiful piece of Christmas content pushed out to behaving as the must-see, highly-addictive Game of Thrones that people pull themselves towards.

In a unique advertising first, we partnered with SKY to create exclusive on demand access to the ad. For the first time ever a piece of piece of advertising rather than ‘entertainment’ took over the SKY EPG (entertainment program guide) to deliver the ad to 12 million households on demand, whenever they wished to see it. We included supporting behind-the-scenes content for those who wished to binge on more. This innovative use of the ‘on demand’ entertainment platform meant just like your favourite box set, you could view the ad as well as immerse yourself in more content whenever suited you, as many times as you wanted, across any device. The John Lewis ad took pride of place on the EPG next to must-see entertainment and dominated all Christmas advertising and entertainment in the most innovative way.

-Sales over the Christmas period were up by 4.9%

-The ad was trending #1 in the UK in 14 minutes and globally within an hour

-Over 721,000 combined unique downloads in 24hrs beating Sky’s download record

-All-time single day download record on Sky EPG platform (beating established programming, even bigger than the latest season of Game of Thrones)

-#Buster was trending above #Christmas! (Facebook API)

-On launch day, the ad became the #1 trending video, quicker than 2015 and any other Christmas ad this year

-#1 most viewed Christmas ad worldwide on YouTube

-The immediate affect was felt in-store and online as well as within media, with over 22,000 Buster the Boxer soft toys sold in the first 2 hours…

This is the story of a radical new approach to Christmas advertising in the UK, using the popularity of John Lewis’s previous Christmas campaigns to give us the right to treat our advertising like valuable content. A ground-breaking media first using the ultimate Christmas content platform meant we stayed ahead of the pack of aggressive competitors and led to our best ever Christmas results.

Just like any must-see piece of entertainment we needed to create an ‘on demand’ launch where people could devour and savour our content whenever and wherever they wanted.

This was a massive departure from previous planning where we pushed the content out through smart seeding, a perfect launch, and pulsing activity. This time, we crafted our idea around consumers pulling content towards them whenever they wished.

We launched with a social-only tease campaign with four times the budget of the previous year’s tease stage, giving us the maximum opportunity for reach and buzz.

TV spot advertising became a secondary medium, running select spots to drive frequency rather than reach, and serving to support our main communications channel…

Against the backdrop of ad blocking, Christmas is the one time of year when people view advertising as entertainment, rather than the thing getting in the way of it. John Lewis advertising is recognised as signalling the start of the festive season. It is synonymous with Christmas and is hotly anticipated. It is no surprise that Christmas is the most important time for the brand. It makes up 20% of total sales annually and even more important, 40% of total profits. Simply put the business is won or lost at this time.

Over the years, other brands have followed in John Lewis’ footsteps and upped their game over Christmas. With competitors raising their game, John Lewis needed to find a way to stand out and protect its business, but with only 4% share of spend and the lowest budget in five years the challenge could not have been any tougher!