Hmmn, how to stand out in a crowded Christmas ad market? If you’re Tesco, the answer is: dial up the sweet treats by turning everything – from houses, lampshades and animals – into gingerbread. And why not?
Last year’s Tesco ad turned people into trees and snowmen by dint of ‘catching’ the Christmas spirit. This time around, the Christmas spirit isn’t transforming people (phew) but inanimate objects, which starts after a young man is given a box of gingerbread from his grandad on his way out of the house.
One bite in, and the world suddenly starts turning into baked goods. The houses are gingerbread, the trees are gingerbread. Even the stray foxes are gingerbread.
It’s a Christmas paradise, but as the sounds of Gorillaz’s On Melancholy Hill inform us, all is not well in gingerbread-land. For our unnamed hero is grieving the loss of his grandmother, who (we deduce from the pictures on the fridge) loved Christmas too.
Of course, things end happily enough, with grandson and grandad making a gingerbread house (what else) together in her memory, but still, the message feels poignant. After all, despite the amount of glitter being shoved down our throats at this time of year, Christmas isn’t always fun for people, especially in the first years after losing a loved one.
In a market that is full to the brim with dancing llamas and festive murder mysteries, that feels like a breath of fresh air – so it’s a shame that the ad feels a bit disjointed in how it’s been put together.
I get it: in an era of 30-second, minute-long and three-minute long TV commercials, it needs to clipped any which way (happy! Sad! Selling products!) to fit in with the demands of the marketing team.
Still, it doesn’t make the storyline feel any easier to grasp. I had to watch it twice to figure out how our two main characters were related to each other – and who exactly it was that they were grieving.
Having to play detective may dilute the power, but then, given that we’ll be watching this about 20 times before the big day, perhaps a bit of replayability is no bad thing.
The ad still leaves you with a sense of the warm and fuzzies, as well as a burning desire to buy a packet of gingerbread. And isn’t that what the festive season is all about?
