Although they've tried in the past couple of years, John Lewis has failed to capture the heartwarming, lip-quivering emotion of 2011's The Long Wait or 2015's Man on the Moon. But this year's The Beginning, a shout-out to raise awareness of children in care, is making even the hardest of audiences cry into their cornflakes.
The 90-second ad - set to a cover of Blink 182’s All the Small Things by US artist Mike Geier - shows a man as he struggles painfully to master skateboarding in the build-up to Christmas. Viewers wonder why he's putting himself through the grind of mastering the art until the final scene, which shows a social worker at his door with teenager Ellie, who has arrived at her new foster home carrying her skateboard.
John Lewis said it understood that not all foster carers had the benefit of knowing who they would be looking after in advance and that its broader campaign also featured “authentic voices of carers” and “young people with different experiences of a complex care system”.
