The Lockdown Advertising Wars — Christmas is Coming

Covid gave some brands the chance to spread their creative wings — whilst others flew too close to the sun. Now we’re on the precipice of Christmas ad season — how bad could it get?

If there was one reliable constant in marketing through the past few months — one single device that would summarise the difficulties we’ve all faced and workarounds we’ve become used to — it’s the Zoom-based TV ad.

As use of the platform exploded between colleagues, families and friends, brands and their agencies adopted it as a practical and tonally appropriate creative medium with ads being dreamt up, sold in and produced remotely — all in two dimensions.

From Purple Bricks to Facebook to Dominos to Virgin Media, the bandwagon was already at capacity by the end of month one in April. Not only were advertisers’ knee-jerking with eerily similar video call executions in response to ‘the unexpected’, they were all apparently borrowing the same teeth-grating copy from the same dictionary of clichés to do so.

“Togetherness”, “Community”, “Stay Safe”, “Look after each other” and “We’re in this together”. If we weren’t living through a pandemic, some of the more precious executions would’ve been ridiculed and removed from the face of the earth before they left the Art Director’s sketch pad. We were…