The new M&S advert may not, I’m sorry to say, be as conducive as its producers hoped to the spirit of Christmas. On the face of it, it’s sweet enough: very much a Christmas advert of the new school. No mention of M&S products, no “Massive boxes of Chrissy Chocs going cheap!” yelled in a persuasive voice. No scenes in the shop: “I’m looking for a present for a disliked uncle and I’m on a tight budget!” “This way, madam – these cardigans look much better than they really are!” Not even an idealised depiction of a shopping street with thickly falling fake snow.
No, as is the current fashion, they’ve gone with the heartwarming yuletide fable format, as pioneered by Charles Dickens and then at long last given a capitalist raison d’etre a century and a half later by John Lewis. It’s set on Christmas Eve, in a quiet street near sleepy, snow-covered Primrose Hill – the closest Marks is a Simply Food in Camden – and it features the lovable Paddington Bear, the second phase of whose sensitive reboot is certain to be the star atop the glittering tree of our cinemas’ seasonal offering. So far so adjective. But adjective is a noun! So far so nounlike. Festive! That’s it.
But let me tell you the actual fable, which is entitled Paddington and the Christmas Visitor. Paddington is woken from a dream about marmalade by the noise of a rotund bearded burglar in a red anorak slipping over on the roof just outside the window. The bear goes to investigate and mistakes the burglar for Father Christmas, and his sack of stolen presents for as-yet-undelivered ones.
Paddington then sets about helping the burglar/Santa return/deliver all the gifts, at the end of which adventure the thief finds redemption and is deeply moved by being given a marmalade sandwich. He hugs Paddington, saying “Oh thank you, little bear!”, though some respondents online claim to have mistaken the phrase, muffled as it was in the tight embrace, for something much ruder. That would be quite a chilling thing to hear an enormous criminal hoarsely whisper while he hugged you, and would represent a sudden tonal shift in the piece that I don’t think the M&S team was going for.
It’s a nicely made advert and will surely enhance the reputation of M&S, Paddington 2 and burglars this Christmas. My concern is for the other major, albeit absent, figure in the story: Father Christmas. We’re not going through a phase of unquestioned respect and admiration for patriarchs, so this is a bad time, if Santa’s crucial role in the magic of a child’s Christmas is to be sustained, to remind everyone that fundamentally he’s a big fat guy who breaks into people’s houses. It’s just not a helpful way to think about him if you want to be swept up in the season.
My little brother instinctively thought about Father Christmas that way from an early age, which must have caused severe collateral damage to his sense of wonder. He absolutely did not want any strange beardy mystical old men coming into his bedroom bearing presents, and so diverged from family tradition and, instead of putting his stocking at the foot of his bed, left it downstairs in the sitting room. That was as close as Claus was allowed with his suspicious sackful of offerings. I think, in my brother’s ideal world, it would all have been forwarded from a PO Box.
The M&S advertising team probably reckons the elision in children’s minds of Father Christmas and rooftop miscreants is a price worth paying to push up seasonal pant sales. Particularly as it’s a price they don’t pay themselves. Their own Christmas of CGI bear-induced redemption is yet to come. But all advertisers must surely be aware that it’s not just about what an advert says, but the surrounding mental associations it also conveys.
Or are they? I was moved to doubt it when I was in the cinema the other day and saw the latest Chicken McNuggets commercial. It is amazing. The ad is basically a series of people saying that they’ve heard there’s all sorts of dodgy stuff in McNuggets — “bits”, “beaks”, “beaks, feet”, “innards, feathers”, “bits, beaks and feet” – while a warmly indulgent voiceover reassures us it’s not true and that they’re actually made from “100% chicken breast”.
I’m sure that’s factually correct. The voiceover does not claim the chickens are free range and they aren’t. The cash value of the antibiotic-infused breast of a captive chicken is almost certainly so low that there’s really no need to start the fiddly business of harvesting whatever those creatures’ tortured existences have left of their beaks and feet, and then grinding them to the point where they could pass relatively safely through a human. So I don’t dispute the claim for an instant.
Nevertheless, at the end of the ad, three words are left echoing round your head: McNuggets, beaks and feet. Over those 40 seconds, the two concepts – “McNuggets” and “beaks and feet” – are inextricably joined in the mind, as if by some psychological welder.
This is such a peachy example of extreme foolishness I barely know where to start. How certain must the advertisers have been that everyone thought McNuggets were 100% beaks and feet, that they felt they had nothing to lose by addressing the issue head on? “I know what you’re all thinking – they’re just beaks and feet! But let me tell you, you’re wrong!” But what if that’s not what everyone was thinking? For every customer whose suspicions are allayed, there may be several who had never thought any such thing but now can’t get the idea out of their heads.
The ad leads me to two conclusions: first, that the team behind it, when confronted with McDonald’s chicken nuggets, were swiftly put in mind of beaks and feet. For them, the inner mantra “beaks feet beaks feet beaks feet” started whenever they looked at the product. “We’ve got to address the beaks and feet thing!” they agreed in the meeting, while eating nicer food.
And second, the notion that McNuggets are made of beaks and feet is entirely plausible. The ad effectively concedes that it would be a perfectly natural thing to think McDonald’s might do. It’s a surprise to learn otherwise, a counterintuitive fact, the sort of thing that would come up on QI.
Even if only to deny their presence, conjuring up images of piles of hen offcuts, endless bits and pieces of mangled poultry corpse, is not a mainstream sales strategy. All it will do, just like Paddington and the Christmas Visitor, is flog a few more M&S sandwiches.
