It may just be September, but it appears like the Christmas countdown has begun.
And now we have our first look at the main event: John Lewis’ 2024 Christmas advert.
Last year, the shop released ‘Snapper, the Perfect Tree’, which told the story of a sentient Venus flytrap alongside Andrea Bocelli singing the original track Festa.
And now we see what is next, with a new ad centred on John Lewis’ recently renewed Never Knowingly Undersold price commitment.
Although it is still 87 days until Christmas, the department store has released three first-look photographs teasing one of the season’s most anticipated clips.
The ‘across the decades’ TV commercial is the first in a three-part campaign for the crucial retail ‘golden quarter’, which will conclude with the department store’s Christmas piece.
The first commercial uses archive video to show a single store window transforming over a century as it is dressed and redressed with things such as 1920s clothing and a toaster so ingenious that it took centre stage in 1925.
During the Second World War, the retailer’s Oxford Street store, the first John Lewis, served as a temporary war bunker and was targeted by the Blitz on September 18, 1984.
So far, the ad’s pictures have reproduced 1954 trends with mannequins with soft bobs wearing tea gowns, while a lady peeks into the window applying lipstick.
Later in the video, the window depicts the swinging 1960s and 1980s Lycra fitness crazes before coming in the present with high-tech LED anti-aging face masks.
At the end of the advertisement, the Never Knowingly Undersold commitment, which begun in 1925, is reintroduced in the shop window.
Laura Mvula sings the ad’s soundtrack, a version of Paul Simon’s I Know What I Know, while Samantha Morton, a Bafta-winning actress, does the voiceover.
On September 9, John Lewis reintroduced the pledge after abandoning it two years earlier due to worries about its relevance to buyers.
The retailer said sales had ‘increased significantly’ since the pledge’s re-launch, and organic visits to John Lewis- or those that are unpaid via search engines – had increased by more than 50,000 a day.
John Lewis customer director Charlotte Lock said: ‘We’ve looked to our heritage to inform our refreshed value promise to customers, making it relevant for today by matching not only high street retailers but also online competitors – and we are backing it with the biggest marketing campaign in our history.
‘We have drawn on our archives and are literally depicting a window on Britain, showing the changing trends and events over the past century.’
