If you’re a humdrum high street retail outlet associated with pain relief and you want to draw attention to your Christmas offering, what could be better than a good row on social media? Boots’ Christmas ad campaign has got three lemons in a row on the jackpot that is a TikTok trend: it features Adjoa Andoh; it has annoyed conservative males; it includes a transgender pronoun and it has been dubbed woke.
So, we have an advertisement showing our old friend Santa Claus dozing by the fire. Christmas is coming, so Mrs Claus, aka Miss Andoh, aka Lady Danbury on Bridgerton, decides that someone has to get the presents sorted and it’s plainly not going to be the fat male by the fire. So, she sheds her fur trimmed red cloak to reveal a slinky evening gown and sets off to stir up the useless elves and fairies in the present department, who are all of a flutter at the prospect of work. Luckily there’s a perfect mountain of French macrons to keep them going. Lo, it turns out that everyone wants something from Boots, including one of those LED eye masks which makes the wearer look like Munch’s Scream. Mrs Claus pops a balloon to reveal something dinky and gift wrapped and ready to go. She uses the “they/them” pronoun at one point. Then she returns to the fire where the old bloke has just woken himself up out of his slumber to find that his lady wife has everything sorted.
