Ladies and gentlemen, let’s not dilly-dally around the issue of Christmas advertising. It’s everywhere and it’s so aggressive that 90% of the time you feel less like it’s the most wonderful time of the year? and is more akin to being drugged and lured onto a railway platform by a sexually excited Jeremy Clarkson.
It’s only really supermarkets that show any interest in being nurturing and suggesting that your entire Christmas experience will be easier if you shop with them. That is until you step through their front door to be confronted by a modern-day reenactment of the Battle of the Somme. You’ve all seen it. Grandmothers entrenched in the biscuit aisle launching barrage after barrage of garibaldis on the “boche” in their dugouts made from microwavable Christmas puddings and tiny tubs of brandy butter.
There’s obviously some digression in there. The long and short of it is that Christmas marketing is mostly lies and aggressive selling to make us feel bad that we haven’t spent enough money.
That is until you hit the kids’ market. What’s the best way to make you, the adult, feel like you haven’t spent enough on your little bundles of joy? That’s the easiest job in marketing. Tell the kids about all this great stuff that they don’t have. You don’t even have to mention it explicitly; kids are so inherently evil that they know exactly what features the latest all-singing, all-dancing Optimus Prime figure has without even needing to be told so marketing becomes even easier.
The real problem is, what do you do when you’re not shouting directly at the children? You need a song. You need a really, really catchy song. You need a song that people can recite the lyrics to despite not having heard it in 300 days. Why not try something like this?
Yes! That’s it, that’s the one. You’re singing it now. There could be anything written on this line and you wouldn’t have a bloody clue. Your child is hideously ugly. Anyway, let’s move on. Toys R’ Us gave us one of the most iconic Christmas adverts of all time with this effort. You can’t see any of the products but you know it sells toys and an absolute ton of them at that. Easy, right?
Subsequently they have updated the advert every year to take into account new advances in animation etc. As you can see in this one from last year they just updated the animation without removing any of the message from the advert. You can buy pretty much any toys you want from this superstore from a massive, anthropomorphic giraffe. Why change a winning a winning formula?
Well, they did and now we have this.
Oh.
Usually we’d spent another 500 words picking the ad apart and referring back to what was said in the opening paragraphs. That’s pretty much the structure of one of these articles. To break from the tradition though, here’s an impassioned plea from people who grew up thinking Toys R’ Us was the most magical and wonderful place in the universe (because we could bully our parents into buying us toys).
Toys R’ Us isn’t Argos. It’s not somewhere to pragmatically advertise the product and the price in a bland ineffective way. You’re trying to capture the imagination of kids without having to resort to a Bieber-esque musical number about remaining a target for paedophiles well into your late thirties.
Change it back.
Go on.
Seriously. You know what you’ve done, that’s why you’ve disabled the comments on your new ad. You know it’s terrible as well. You’ve paid good money to inflict that upon the public and now you can’t take it back. We know that and we don’t blame you for it. Next year though, eh? Let’s see a triumphant return to the good ol’ days.
If you don’t, you’ll probably lose an entire generation of Toys R’ Us kids, kids, kids, kid, kid, ki, ki, ki, k.