Sainsbury’s has stepped up its battle with John Lewis to be the UK’s most popular Christmas ad with an animated West End musical-style story with James Corden on vocals.
The supermarket will launch its three-minute ad, which took seven weeks to animate using hitech 3D-printing techniques never previously used in the UK, on Monday, making it the last of the major retailers to kick off its festive campaign.
The upbeat film features the story of busy dad Dave who comes up with the plan of creating toy replicas of himself to stand in for him at work so that he can spend time with his family over Christmas. It will launch on social media and air for the first time on TV during I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here on ITV.
With increasing numbers of people watching programmes online or via catch-up, or recorded services where they can skip ads, companies are having to battle hard to grab attention during the busiest time of the year.
As well as Sainsbury’s, which beat John Lewis to be the most popular ad last year with 30m views of its Mog film on YouTube, Marks & Spencer, Waitrose and even Aldi have short-story films this year.
The Sainsbury’s ad, which retains the tagline “Christmas is for Sharing” used in previous years, will have a charitable link. Profits from a range of merchandise, including a gingerbread version of Dave and an animation kit, will go towards family accommodation at Great Ormond Street hospital for children.
Sarah Kilmartin, who is in charge of broadcast communications at Sainsbury’s, said the company did not have a specific fundraising target but raised £1.4m for Save the Children last year from merchandise related to its Christmas ad and customer donations.
She would not reveal how much Sainsbury’s had spent on the ad, but last year the company spent almost £22m on advertising over Christmas.
Directed by Sam Fell, an alumni of Wallace and Gromit maker Aardman Animations who went on to make comedy zombie animation ParaNorman, the film does not feature any Sainsbury’s products directly. However, unlike in the three previous years, when the supermarket ads were based on the Judith Kerr character Mog, a heartwarming tale of friendship on the battlefield, and a mash-up of Christmas home videos, Sainsbury’s has found a way to link this year’s ad to its stores.
Animators created tiny versions of Sainsbury’s prosecco, Christmas cards and homewares to fill the houses of the multi-racial mix of families who are in Dave’s world.
Fell said work on creating and planning the film began in March and was only completed last week. It took 16 weeks to build the sets and create the 26 puppets used in the film. All the puppets were built by Mackinnon and Saunders in Manchester, the company that makes most of the puppets for Tim Burton’s animated films, such as Frankenweenie. The puppets’ faces, 1,700 of which were used to create the film, were all printed by 3D Print Bureau in Stoke-on-Trent, a company which usually makes prototypes for engineers or items for medical use.
Corden’s song, which will be released for free via a partnership with Spotify, was written by Bret McKenzie, the Oscar-winning songwriter and comedian from Flight of the Conchords.
