John Lewis hopes its new campaign has the X Factor
EVER since its award winning advert two years ago featuring a boy impatiently waiting for Christmas to give a present to his parents – John Lewis has been under pressure to pull out all the stops for its Christmas campaign.
And this year it has stopped short at nothing less than booking an entire commercial break exclusively during ITV’s X Factor on Saturday night – watched by nine million viewers.
The two minute film – together with the intro and outro from ITV – cuts the length of the normal commercial break almost by half giving the X Factor crew just a frantic few minutes to re-jig the set and pat down their make-up. The whole thing of course had to be signed off by Simon Cowell himself, who apparently has yet to watch the advert.
The total campaign designed by Adam&Eve/DDB, cost £7m: £5m for the costly air-time and £2m on production and other expenses.
The 2D animation, drawn by ex-Disney animators who worked on Disney’s Lion King, is layered on top of a 3D set filmed in London.