Expressing Their Values In A Heartwarming Way

Lifted from the comments,

That would be the advert currently trending for all the wrong reasons, and regarding which viewers’ feedback has now been disabled.

Says commenter Min,

Yes, they were often rather sweet with an agreeable, universal sentiment. Missing friends, shyness, loneliness, not wanting to leave people out, etc. Hibernating bears. Machine-tooled emotional manipulation. Which is how a department-store Christmas ad should be.

Now, however, they seem convinced that we’ll be enchanted by rude, selfish, misbehaving children whose affection has to be bought with great effort and at great expense, in desperation. And the decision to make those children brown – because apparently you can’t have an advert without the statistically unlikely interracial couple – adds a dynamic that I somehow doubt was intended.

Commenter [+] quips,

What’s remarkable is that the project must have involved any number of highly-paid, supposedly clued-up experts, masters of nuance, and endless meetings, over months… and no bugger spotted how readily the ad lends itself to much less festive interpretations.

I watched it again this morning and am still processing just how weirdly misjudged it is.

For instance, that heartwarming moment when the scowling, diverse grandchildren shake their Christmas cards in annoyance, having found no money in them. Behaviour enabled, one assumes, by the ineffectual, unapologetic parents, who allow their offspring to wreck other people’s homes and to jump up and down on other people’s furniture.

And remember, we’re supposed to like these unparented brats, enough to care about pleasing them. And we’re supposed to identify with the grandma who wants these brats to love her, if only for a few minutes, before they presumably resume their scowling, ungrateful ways.

Feel that Christmas spirit, people.

It does rather suggest a gulf between, on the one hand, progressively-inclined John Lewis management and progressively-inclined London ad executives who think that sneaking trans flags into Christmas adverts watched by children is terribly clever – and on the other hand, actual John Lewis customers and the general public.

We’ve been here before, of course. When customers were expected to find charming the thought of their homes being trashed by a selfish, vamping, cross-dressing child.

And then there was the attempt to endear customers by announcing, very proudly, that they employ middle-aged transvestites with whipping fetishes because doing so results in “a better connection to our customers.” Thanks to these “identities we share.”

As I said at the time,

It’s hilariously insane. But in fairness, very now.