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.
Bingo! The outrage button on the controls is flashing orange. Adjoa Andoh is not just a Bridgerton matriarch; she is also the actress who declared after the Coronation that the lineup of Royals on the Buckingham Palace balcony was “terribly white” — a remark which will stay with her for the rest of her career. So, if you’re ready to be triggered, you may wish to rise to the following bait: an actress who has form in dissing the royal family on account of being white is being deployed to front a Christmas campaign which features a useless white male known as Santa Claus and in doing so uses the plural pronoun associated with trans individuals. Hey ho. And duly, lots of people have got themselves worked up about it; and they are themselves being baited by the woke contingent for being – ho, ho – snowflakes.
There is a train of thought evident in some ad executives’ branding which assumes the more controversy, the better
It does seem unlikely that Boots was unaware of the potential for controversy in all this. In which case, we’re in the territory of, if there’s a fuss, it’s good, because then you get talked about, so more brand recognition! And if it’s trending on social media, even better, because the word that’ll come up in all this is, Boots. Win, win. There is a train of thought evident in some ad executives’ branding which assumes the more controversy, the better. Think of the “Are you Beach-Body Ready?” campaign on Tube posters featuring a curvaceous blonde which elicited so much outrage from women, it got the wretched product onto the radar in the way a weight loss product really shouldn’t.
Personally, I never watch Christmas ads. As far as I am concerned we’re not even in the Advent season, which is the actual countdown to Christmas, and starts at the beginning of December. I detest the campaigns to make us bored of the season way before it starts and which then switch gear to diet and fitness mode in the middle of the twelve days of Christmas. With all of them – John Lewis, M&S, Boots, the lot – I come over all Scrooge at commercialism masquerading as humour/philanthropy/feminism. That’s the actual outrage. Bah, humbug.
Melanie McDonagh is a columnist for The Standard
