Daneswood
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I woke up this morning with the standard morning ritual of a twenty-something and upon turning off my alarm I opened up Facebook & Twitter and glanced through my emails.
This morning, however, I noticed one distinct change in what I was seeing. No, not the Trump election, my entire digital life had in fact been taken over by #Bustertheboxer.
This is not the first time, nor the last time I’m sure, that John Lewis have taken over everything I am seeing at this time of year, however with yesterday’s events in mind, I found it truly impressive that they have been able to dominate social media with the release of a single advert.
So let’s do a little breakdown in how John Lewis are dominating the social media Christmas every single year.
TV Advertising:
The announcement that Christmas is here with the release of a TV advert is nothing new, Coca Cola had this nailed for years before John Lewis came along with people saying “Christmas is here” the second they see the Coca Cola truck advert, this makes the John Lewis takeover even more impressive however.
But how did they take over from a giant like Coca Cola? It was simple really; Coke had become lost in releasing the same advert every year which would generate the exact same sentiment whereas John Lewis have been releasing thought provoking campaigns that promote emotional responses since 2007.
This year’s advert was released just 3 hours ago at the time of writing and already has over 37,000 views on the official YouTube channel. This is an exceptional turnout for an advertising campaign and does not include views on their Facebook or Twitter pages…
Social Media:
By creating a hashtag around this campaign they have successfully created a huge buzz around their marketing campaign with millions upon millions of people tweeting about and sharing this campaign.
Firstly let’s take a look over what is currently trending in London on Twitter:
Not only is #bustertheboxer the top trending subject for London trends, #JohnLewis has also achieved another TWO places in the trending list for this social media platform. They have even achieved top place in worldwide trending, even above Trump!
As you can see, even worldwide they have obtained two separate places on the trending list.
Trending on Twitter however, could be for all the wrong reasons, but this is not the case with this advertising campaign, look at the love they’re getting:
“Aww I love the @johnlewisretail advert! Got to love #bustertheboxer“
https://youtu.be/sr6lr_VRsEo
Even other brands are joining in as shown in this Aldi tweet where they have used their own video to jump on the back of the impact of John Lewis with their own marketing campaign.
It’s the TV event of the year, and Kevin couldn’t be more excited… #BusterTheBoxer #KevinTheCarrot pic.twitter.com/cvhDh9piDk
— Aldi Stores UK (@AldiUK) November 10, 2016
This 30 second video would have cost a fraction of the price of the John Lewis campaign but has created 227 retweets and 407 likes in under 2 hours, thrusting Aldi into the forefront with a simple marketing trick, this video would have been created weeks ago to push out the second the John Lewis advert began trending.
On Facebook, the video was posted 3 hours ago and has over 5.4 MILLION views in just 3 hours with over 250,000 shares, this is something I have only ever seen John Lewis achieve amongst all the other Christmas marketing campaigns that hit this time of year.
At the start of this blog post, I mentioned that the advertising campaign had taken over my email, well amongst all the normal emails I begin with in the morning I was greeted with this:
A simple yet effective email that achieved the intention of getting me to the YouTube channel the moment I saw the link.
Cleverly, they knew their marketing campaign would achieve this and the second I finished watching the video I returned to my email to read the rest of what they had written and saw this:
Even to my trained eye of marketing tricks, I proceeded to buy one of each of the teddies for my nieces as Christmas presents.
Did I mention that this “TV Advert” hasn’t even made it to TV yet? This is the power of Digital Marketing.
Well-done John Lewis, take my money. You win.