Upbeat Boots Christmas ad also has 'most affordable' message

By

Nigel TAYLOR

Published
Nov 4, 2022

In a sign of the times, UK health & beauty retailer Boots is mixing seasonal joy and cost-consciousness in this year’s Christmas campaign called ‘Joy for all’.

 
Alongside, the upbeat message of ‘joy’ the ad also positions itself as offering the ‘most affordable’ Christmas ever during the cost-of-living crisis.
 
The ad features a character called Holly who discovers a pair of magical spectacles and seeks to bring to life the magic of receiving the perfect present.

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Set to You Make My Dreams (Come True) by Hall & Oates, the two-and-a-half-minute film stars It’s a Sin actress Lydia West as Holly.
 
The film opens with Holly travelling home on the bus. She discovers a pair of magical glasses that give her the power to see the joy hidden inside the people around her, such as her colleague indulging herself with a bubble bath, her cousin getting dressed up, or her dad's love for the family dog.
 
When Christmas morning arrives, Holly’s loved ones receive presents that spark that joy. The film concludes with the realisation that it was in fact Santa Claus’s lost spectacles that brought the magic. 
 
In the midst of these tough times for consumers, Boots’ chief marketing officer Pete Markey told Campaign that getting the tone right was tricky: “We aim to keep customer insight front and centre of everything we do," he said. "Right from the start, as we were pulling the brief together, we listened to our customers to understand the mood of the nation. We considered both how people were feeling and what Boots’ solution would be.”
 
While in 2021, people wanted to reconnect with loved ones and spend time together, this year the Boots team was aware that value for money was very much in people’s minds. "The brief was: how do we capture the essence of joy that people still want, but make it affordable?” Markey said.
 
Markey predicts the campaign will reach 99% of all adults, at least 17 times during the run-up to Christmas. Beyond TV, it will roll out across online, social, video-on-demand, cinema, radio, digital and out-of-home.