Well 2013 looks set to be the year the Christmas commercials of some of our leading retailers get their ‘Superbowl Moment’. If you have picked up a paper in the last week, you cannot help but notice that it is the TV campaigns themselves that are making the news.

While amplifying TV adverts through editorial is always a dream scenario for marketers, this year’s most significant development has been social media moving centre stage in building excitement and buzz with audiences.

A case in point is John Lewis’ latest offering Bear and Hare. The retailer was trailing its new advert to its fans on social media long before it decided to book out the entire first ad break of last Saturday’s X Factor for the campaign’s premiere. It even went as far as to set up a Twitter feed for the advert’s animal characters, Bear and Hare (@JL_BearAndHare if you care to follow).

“Social media is moving centre-stage in building excitement”

Within just four days of the online ad reveal, this dedicated feed had attracted more than 3,000 followers with the hashtag #bearandhare spawning almost 12,000 mentions on Twitter.

Engagement figures from this online preview have been used effectively by John Lewis’ PR team to create news about the scale of its Christmas ad campaign, which the national press lapped up. The results are indeed impressive: as of this Monday, views for John Lewis’ 2013 ad of 3.8 million had already exceeded last year’s total of 3.6 million, and that figure will grow substantially in the coming weeks.

Other big retailers including Littlewoods and Debenhams have all cottoned on to the John Lewis template and have been building buzz with varying levels of success about their own Christmas campaigns, using Facebook and Twitter to launch teasers and previews. M&S, which also debuted its ‘Believe in Magic & Sparkle’ campaign online, has linked the traditional media and social media worlds explicitly by allowing consumers to vote via Twitter and Facebook on a name for the highland terrier that features in its campaign. The winning choice appeared on the dog’s collar in an ad during Downton Abbey.

Both John Lewis and Marks & Spencer with their 2013 TV campaigns have shown the virtual circle that can be created through social media interaction driving editorial amplification through PR, driving more online and offline interest in the TV campaign.

This is a model for TV campaigns that will increasingly become the norm, even beyond the intense Christmas trading period. In marketing terms we are heading for a much more integrated 2014!

Daljit Bhurji is global MD of integrated communications consultancy, Diffusion

Read this: Which supermarket’s ad will turn on Christmas shoppers most?

Topics