What Happened to The Frog Chorus? #foundit

Retailer Debenhams 'premiered' it 2014 Christmas advertisement on 8 November, during the X Factor.  This guaranteed the ad 7-8 million viewers, although it had already been released on YouTube a week earlier.  At the time of writing the advert, called Found It, had been viewed nearly 350,000 times. By comparison with John Lewis and Marks & Spencer, this is a very muted response.

While some of the business press bubbled with enthusiasm about this "compelling customer proposition", others pointed out that the company's spend on making the TV ad has been slashed by two thirds.  As we noted in other postings, retailers this year aim to make more of their budgets by using a multi-channel approach: in Debenhams case there will be a lot of point-of-sale material in store, as well as the social media side.  They also promise 200 in store hot spots.

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The theme of the ad is gift giving - or to be more correct, finding the right gift.   Like John Lewis the focus is largely on small children and cuddly toys.  Debenhams, though,  have not attempted to produce branded merchandise in the way that John Lewis has successfully done with Monty the Penguin.

Debenhams is anxious to make its investment work harder, "A broad campaign which can play out across all media - paid and owned" (according to Marketing Week).

The choice of music is not explained: the ad uses a brass band recording of Paul McCartney's 1984 single Frog Chorus.  There are no voices until the final shots where we hear "We all stand together" being sung.  This choice has given the audiences the opportunity to ridicule the advertisement: online critics mock the fact that a song about frogs is the backing track to a film featuring reindeer and cuddly bears.  The Guardian ironically wondered if the plan was for Frog Chorus to be the Christmas number one: while Asda and John Lewis have released their soundtracks to iTunes and other digital music platforms, this doesn't seem to have happened at Debenhams.

Twitter is an important part of the campaign to create a hardworking meme: @debenhams has
incentivised the use of their hashtag by offering prizes, but to date the takeup seems to have been slow. The store is trying to leverage co-creation by encouraging shoppers to take selfies with their purchases, which can go onto Twitter or their own microsite.   Debenhams have been posting thumbnails of these online, although curiously the bulk of the pictures seem to have been posed, rather being true selfies.  The Debenhams Facebook page is also working hard for them, with over 300,000 fans.

All in all an imaginative broad campaign from Debenhams, but not something that looks likely to match what is being achieved by rivals John Lewis or M&S.

Every Little Helps: #MakeChristmas

In the run up to Christmas 2013, supermarket Tesco laid out £25 million for TV advertising, outspending all other UK retailers.  Tesco's sales actually fell by 2.4% over the period and the company was forced to issue a profit warning.

Still from the Tesco TV ad.  Source The Guardian

Fast-forward a year and retail sector are spending another £700 million on TV advertising.  Over the past few days we have written about the John Lewis campaign featuring Monty the Penguin, and Marks & Spencer's #FollowTheFairies.  The media research firm Nielsens suggests that overall TV spending will be down slightly this year, while most other experts believe that a larger proportion of marketing budgets will be spent linking these campaigns to social media.

At the time of writing, John Lewis's Monty advertisement had been viewed 10.5 million times on YouTube.  M&S, which had debuted a day later was on on 2.5 million.  #MontyThePenguin has remained 'trending' on Twitter since the launch on 6 November.  Both campaigns have a strong narrative element; like all the best marketing, they tell an engaging story.  They are strong visually and have powerful soundtracks - videos designed to engage with audiences, 'memes' to spread via FaceBook and other social media.

Last night (Sunday 9 November) it was Tesco's turn to launch its campaign.  They booked a slot during the finale of Downton Abbey, something calculated to get them in front of 8-9 million people.  As the press has been quick to point out, if any retailer needs a profit boost right now it is Tesco. The advertisement is called Lights On, and at the time of writing has had 200,000 viewings on YouTube - a good performance in 12 hours, most of which were night time.

The Tesco hashtag on Twitter, #MakeChristmas has seen very little adoption, most of it being around the time of Downton Abbey.  Tesco's creative people use language which suggests ideas very similar to those put out by M&S last week: "doing all sorts of unexpected things to help people have a brilliant Christmas".  It is difficult to know what they have in mind: @tesco stopped tweeting some time after Downton Abbey finished, picking up again at 8:30 this morning when almost all the twitter traffic was mundane queries and complaints.

The #MakeChristmas hashtag seems to be doing little to help.  Once again, almost nothing overnight and the few uses it was getting seem to be ironic or mildly critical.   Take this from @BoringOleFart: "It would be great if your stores could just donate that wee bit more to local foodbanks". Is the video "Behind the scenes of the Tesco Christmas campaign" going to go viral? We doubt it. 244 views in a day is not encouraging. A useful little lesson for marketing students, though.