John Lewis and Partners’ Christmas adverts have become a staple part of the build-up to the holiday season. We now look to these adverts
as a harbinger of the holiday season.The brief was to portray John Lewis and Partners not as just the go-to for Christmas gifts but for all-year-round inspiration and source of spreading joy.

 

John Lewis & Partners’ slogan is ‘For us, it’s personal,’ this is a theme has to come across clearly in their adverts. John Lewis & Partners
are not only there for one time of year
or one day. They are there for a lifetime and
all the moments you celebrate in-between.

 

This is where I started with the advert concept,
by looking at all the times a brand can be there
in your life. In my second year, we had a brief
which was to start a conversation. The brand
I chose to work on was Ben and Jerry’s, a well-known ice-cream company the year I completed this project was their 40th anniversary. Though I loved the project I knew after a year I could push it further due to the amount of time spent on the project for Ben and Jerrys along with the amount of skill I had learnt in a year. This helped me push the direction of the concept and the standard of the creative to be worthy of a D&AD Award.

 

Some of the inspiration for the advert was Wilkinson – Afterglow music video, where it shows a couples’ life over 5 years and all the moments, they share through numbers.

​

This was the perfect fit for John Lewis and Partners’ with their key advertising style
being to sell through emotion. I chose to use a silhouette cut out so that it isn’t one person or demographic and that any person could be the silhouette. Along with this all of the product that featured in the silhouettes were sold by John Lewis and partners at the time of production.

 

John Lewis and Partners are known as modern shop with a strong brand heritage with a specific target audience and tone of voice. With this it was important to show different diversity of people that would shop in the store, I portrayed this by having different hands being used
in the advert.

 

Just before John Lewis and Partners brief was realised by D&AD they undertook a re-brand. They went from John Lewis to John Lewis and Partner. Apart of the specification in the brief was to use their new brand guidelines which is where the iconic strips where used in the final overlay of the frames.