There is no bigger time than Christmas for the UK advertising industry.
As a nation we're known to suppress our emotions. But, at the festive time of year, when our sense of community and giving is at its highest, the industry is poised to pull at our heartstrings and we see direct response ads give way to storytelling and sentimentality at its finest.
But this isn’t just the industry being soppy, it’s a big business with big rewards; the most shared ads rely heavily on emotional content, and deliver twice the profit. Tellingly, advertisers are set to spend a record £5.6 billion in the UK this year, £300 million more than last year.
Advertising’s huge cultural moment at Christmas is a quintessentially British phenomenon. The Aussie Summer doesn’t lend itself to scenes of snow and glitter. In continental Europe this is not the right economic climate for gratuitous, brand building films. In America November is cluttered with Thanksgiving and Black Friday ads, and their brands tend to follow political correctness - even avoiding the word Christmas altogether in favour of ‘Holidays’. Also, US brands do get to have their big emotional-brand-building opportunity at the Super Bowl in February (See: www.fcbinferno.com/news/multi-million-pound-ads-about-puppies).
So, to mark the start of Christmas advertising season we shipped our CEO off to BBC World News to discuss all this, the industry’s big moment.
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