Iceland Use Social Media To “Share” Their Story This Christmas

It’s around that time of the year again where major retailers begin their big marketing push in for the bumper Christmas period. With Black Friday less than a week away, it’s also a time when people will have their eyes peeled for a few bargains. Although for many, myself included, it’s still too early to think about the C word. Billboards, radio stations, newspapers, bus stops and our social feeds are flooded with festive messaging to help us on our way to creating that “perfect” Christmas. Few companies however, manage to capture the “magic” of Christmas in their ads like British retailer, John Lewis.

Each year they put together ads that manage to mix music, characters, animation, family and the “magic” of Christmas to leave millions of people who watch them in tears. This is content marketing at it’s absolute best and is something that people all over the UK and the internet, look forward to. Below is their effort for this year;

If you’ve taken a moment to cry after watching that like I may or may not have, then it’s hard to argue that John Lewis are not the best in the business when it comes to Christmas ads. Despite the army of parents complaining that their own kids were now expecting £800 pianos for Christmas, the ad within a day of posting already had 75,000 shares on Facebook and shot straight to number one on the Youtube trending page where it was widely well received.

It’s well on it’s course to reaching the same or greater amount of people as their previous viral holiday pieces but sadly that won’t be enough for it to “win Christmas” this year. This is because less than a week before the release of their latest masterpiece, they’d already been beaten at their own game. They’d been beaten by an Orangutan.

Not only does Iceland’s ad have a distinctly John Lewis feel to it (see their 2013 animated classic), it focuses the thing that people online love more than anything else - activism. People love sharing, commenting and engaging with content that highlights a certain cause. Whether it’s the damage of single use plastics, worldwide social injustices or even the plight of Steven Avery, people love to support the latest trending cause. This was a PR masterstroke by Iceland who obviously understand the power of “hashtag activism”.

What really gave their ad the extra push it needed was the fact that they shared it on social media after it was “banned from TV for being too political”. By positioning TV as a representative for the “mainstream media” and by using the word “political”, Iceland painted the ads message and your sharing of it as being almost rebellious. Their tag line of “Will you help us tell the story?” is a not so subtle call to action that gives it a final push.

I don’t believe the ad was ever really intended for TV. If you think about it, it’s an animated piece that seems geared towards young children but it’s dark subject and Bambi-esque mother sequence is neither Christmassy nor really suitable for a young audience. I can’t even picture it on TV alongside a cheerful Vodafone ad or one for the latest popular children’s doll.

I believe going down the route of social media was part of Iceland’s strategy from the beginning and it has so far been a massive success. With over 650,000 shares on Facebook alone and over 15m views at time of writing, the video has gotten an enormous reach and has highlighted a very important issue that Greenpeace are working to fight against.

Those of us who were blissfully unaware of how damaging palm oil could be, will surely have to be more conscious about what we buy. That might be harder than most of us think though, if you've shared the Iceland video then you may need to have a closer look at some of the staple items in your weekly shop. Bread, lipstick, cookies, pizza dough, margarine and many other household products all said to contain palm oil.

In fact, the use of palm oil is so rife in consumer goods that Iceland themselves have stressed that they’re only getting rid of palm oil in their own brand products while trying to encourage some of their other suppliers to do the same. So we can expect to see palm oil products on their shelves for the near future anyway. To me that's kind of like taking a stand to be vegan but only when you’re the one doing the cooking!

Nevertheless, I do think that Iceland have played an important role in educating people about this issue while managing to give their own brand an enormous lift at a crucial time as part of it. Their continued use of “Geurilla marketing” show they're committed to sharing this story and making changes in more ways that just a once off viral video but whether this results in wider changes to consumer behaviour is yet to be seen.

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