M&S: Clothing

M&S has launched two remarkable Christmas campaigns - one for its festive food and one for its Christmas clothing. With 50 days to go until Christmas Eve, the campaigns are launching as customers are well underway planning for Christmas – with nearly half of them expecting to have finished their Christmas gift shopping by the end of the month (earlier than usual) and 'create your own' wreaths, table centres and flowers all selling incredibly well already.
Agency: Grey, London

This year customers really want to make it special, the recent M&S Family Matters report shows that 39% of families in the UK plan to do more to mark Christmas than they did before Covid-19 began, while 68% of people plan on getting together for a big family Christmas. Consistently insight shows that customers want brands to reflect the joy and magic they want to create with their families and these two remarkable campaigns do just that. The two campaigns share the strategy of heroing the trusted quality value of M&S’s own-brand product offer, from cashmere to canapes (of which M&S will sell 84 million this season as the home of party food). Food and Clothing & Home advertising space is purchased separately by M&S’s agency Mindshare, but the brand has united to launch the campaigns together for maximum impact. Today millions of customers’ social feeds will be dominated by M&S content and several TV breaks (including Good Morning Britain, This Morning and Emmerdale) will feature both the Food and Clothing & Home advert. The campaigns will also be unmissable for those commuting with a wrap on the Metro for Clothing that nods to the Food campaign. The clothing campaign created by ODD, shot by Autumn de Wilde and starring Madisyn Ritland, brings to life a whimsical musical world with the star of the ad dancing through the iconic moments of Christmas – from shopping for presents to having fun in family PJs. The advert is a continuation of the brand platform ‘Anything but Ordinary’ that M&S launched for Autumn/Winter. It shares how M&S’s style, quality and value products (alongside the seamless experience it offers) can help customers make the magical season anything but ordinary for their loved ones. As with the Food campaign, the creative will be executed across a range of channels – from print cover wraps to an activation at Waterloo station. M&S will also be taking over three large scale sites bringing to life some of the theatrical magic with hand painted murals. Within TV advertising, Video on Demand will continue to be key, and M&S will be the first UK retailer to use ‘Flowcode’ – an innovation which allows a QR code to be seamlessly worked into the advert.