Christmas starts when the John Lewis ad plays out. The whole nation is waiting and youâre never going to please all of it.
Thatâs Anna Braithwaite, John Lewisâs chief customer officer, who, a week after launch, has yet to post her teamâs Christmas ad on LinkedIn.
M&Sâs ad went live three days after John Lewisâs, and Stuart Machin, the M&S chief executive, was at his keyboard at 7am announcing it himself.
Somehow, over at John Lewis, no-one above marketingâs pay grade has found the time.
Not one post.
Odd. Given the nation is waiting ân all.
What did Anna Braithwaite post about a month ago?
The Box Studio: John Lewisâs new content production suite on the fourth floor at Oxford Street.
Anna pointed out that if John Lewis could make something people chose to watch once a year, it needed to learn how to make something people want to watch all year round.
Someone already has, and John Lewis is having its arse handed to it.
This is not just an arse. This is an M&S arse.
YouGovâs Best Brand Rankings 2026 puts M&S first for the fourth year running, John Lewis was fourth.
Six years ago it was the other way around: John Lewis first for the fourth year running. M&S fourth.
Itâs a complex picture, obviously. One reinventing itself, one using past glories as a crutch, structural this, omnichannel that, blah blah blah.
And, Kathryn Turner.
Vogue just called her The 50-Something TikTok Star Ripping Up The Influencer Rulebook.
That might be true had Kathryn Turner ever read the rulebook. Kathryn just works at M&S. Sheâs director of product development at M&S Food, joined in 1995.
In May she started posting on her own TikTok, with about thirty followers and two twenty-somethings from her team behind her. She currently has over 600,000 followers, across TikTok and Instagram.
The strategy behind Kathryn Turner was once Anna Braithwaiteâs.
M&S Insiders launched in 2018 letting shop-floor and head-office staff post from their own Instagram accounts. Anna ran it and grew it.
Last year Anna left for John Lewis.
M&S now regularly has viral sell-outs.
Oh dear.
A fifty-something whoâs been at the same shop for thirty-one years, breaking out as an internet star? Surely that should have been John Lewis! The staff own the company!
The fact was added to the brand in 2018: John Lewis & Partners. The same year M&S Insiders launched.
But...no.
Instead, John Lewis is tangled in its own fairy lights.
Strangled by them, even.
A decade ago, the John Lewis Christmas ad trended on Twitter within thirty minutes of launching. Globally.
On YouTube, the ads of those years pulled 28â30 million views. Last yearâs effort: 2.6 million.
This yearâs: 969,000 views after six days.
Launch day it was adding 11,000 views an hour. By Friday, that number was 7,100. Six days in, 3,400.
If the curve holds, 2026âs ad will end up at 1.2 million by Christmas.
Donât worry. The adâs launch plan still includes ITVâs Coronation Street.
Romantic.
27 million watched Hilda Ogden leave the street on Christmas Day. That was in 1987. Today, four million might tune in, many of them thirty-nine years older.
By next yearâs ad, a fair few will have left the street themselves.
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Department stores can lose money for half the year. Christmas makes or breaks them.
Both John Lewis and M&S hedge their retail businesses.
With food.
M&S Food is 71% of what M&S sells in the UK. Waitrose is 68% of everything the John Lewis Partnership sells. Take the food away and whatâs left is two businesses a similar size: M&Sâs clothes and home, ÂŁ3.9 billion; John Lewis, ÂŁ3.7 billion.
(M&Sâs number is from its cyber-attack year. In a normal one it is about 14% bigger than John Lewis.)
M&S is smarter about it. One name over both doors. When Kathryn Turner holds up a sausage roll, all of M&S gets the credit. The M&S you canât eat has made ÂŁ150 million so far this year.
The Partnership runs two brands. Waitrose earns the money and John Lewis spends it, and a Waitrose trifle does nothing for a John Lewis sofa.
In the six months to August this year, John Lewis retail lost ÂŁ83 million.
And while people gulp at the ÂŁ7 million a Christmas ad costs, this year, the Partnership will put ÂŁ600 million of âcatch-upâ investment into shops, electronic shelf labels, supply-chain automation, that kind of stuff.
ÂŁ50 million alone will go on improving stores, like Cambridge, Reading, Liverpool, Leicester, and Glasgow. The real marketing.
So a Christmas ad is the satsuma at the bottom of the stocking. Itâs the last little surprise.
What keeps it there is superstition: that without it, that ÂŁ83 million loss never gets nudged back into the green. And I mean nudge. Last year John Lewisâs entire profit was ÂŁ58 million. On ÂŁ3.7 billion of revenue thatâs a 1.6% margin.
A satsuma will do it.
Put another way. The ad is the trading yearâs Hail Mary. One long throw, late, when all other options are spent.
All a Hail Mary needs is a receiver.
Thatâs Annaâs assumption: the whole nation is waiting.
What if they arenât?
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Nothing says âChristmasâ like a huge turkey. #johnlewis
Thatâs Les Binet, posting on LinkedIn, six days ago. A former rocket scientist and advertisingâs famed data analyst. Wrote two papers proving the sales impact of John Lewisâs Christmas ads.
âItâs their worst one yetâ is the new tradition for the John Lewis Christmas ad.
Reaction content.
All thatâs left of the strategy.
This yearâs ad is the story of a grandma who lives in a Georgian townhouse and doesnât know what to buy her grandchildren, who she appears to have only just met.
No penguins, bears, aliens, or flesh-eating plants. Just the grandma: Dame Kristin Scott Thomas. And her childhood wooden Fisher-Price dog, who comes to life as a brand manager, dragging granny past all the other shops into a John Lewis.
The grandkids seem disappointed granny hasnât just slipped a few notes into their Christmas cards, like she was planning.
Saved by letting them run riot in her study, which is now a John Lewis granny grotto. Hooray!
Give a little love. Give a little more love this Christmas. If you know the person, youâll find the present. If you canât find the words, find the gift. Donât give up on giving.
The last one is this yearâs line, but pick any.
Granted, the setting is magnificent. I have a West London Georgian townhouse myself. I know what they cost. Which makes the ad tricky from the get-go.
By its own research, John Lewis customers are older and richer than the ones it thinks it needs to win. 35 stores, 19 of which are in or an hour from London.
So, the grotto scene is full of things that all cost under ÂŁ100, a nod to the cost of living crisis â weâre told. Elsewhere thereâs Jigsaw cashmere, Weekend Max Mara and a Mulberry tote.
Dame Kristin does her best. But the script forces her to play old. At sixty-six, sheâs just not.
The makers of the ad?
Not old enough.
âThis is the first for a lot of my team,â said Franki Goodwin, chief creative officer at Saatchi & Saatchi, which made it.
Not their fault.
Iâve sat in enough reviews to know how much confusion went on in the writing room for the final edit to end up like that.
It takes discipline.
And training.
In the years the nation really was waiting for the John Lewis ad, the people writing and creative-directing started mostly from the same place: an unaccredited one-year course at a further-education college in Hertfordshire.
Watford.
Six ads, 2011 to 2016. Every one had a Watford-trained creative director. Four were written or art-directed by Watford alumni.
Tony Cullingham ran it for thirty years. At its peak, five hundred applicants for twenty places.
Tony kept a blog. One post was called âHow to write a John Lewis adâ:
Come to the Watford Ad Course
Get brilliant
Get a job at the agency that runs John Lewis
Write 200 scripts
Then write some more
Get one made
Get brilliant was Tonyâs job.
My dear friend Matt Lee told me his experience:
We would be briefed at six the evening before. The next morning Tony would pin all the work up on the wall, then walked along it and ripped the ads down, usually with one word, or a few.
Lazy thinking. Unoriginal. Contrived. Crap. Seen it before. Not true. Off brief.
If your work survived, you were relieved. If he liked it, you were walking on air for days.
What they didnât realise at the time was that he was training them for rejection. For the other 199 scripts. It was never personal, only the work.
From those walls into those ads.
So, if one ever made you cry, the heart you were feeling was Tonyâs.
The course closed in 2021. Tony died two years later.
He was sixty-six.
âŠ
The M&S Christmas ad is sexy, sweet â and puts John Lewis to shame
Thatâs The Independent, written the morning after M&Sâs CEO made his announcement on LinkedIn.
Starting to make sense, then, that Anna, who chaired the judging at Campaignâs Agency of the Year, is keeping her distance from... the advertising.
What she posts about, and pays for, is Gift List: a chat show out of The Box Studio, Angela Scanlon in the hostâs chair. Paloma Faith. Louis Theroux. Michelle De Swarte.
8.7k views. 28k views. 83k views.
Itâs a start.
Next door, Waitrose is a little further ahead.
Dish, its chat show with Nick Grimshaw and Angela Hartnett, has passed a billion views. Is that working? A survey says so.
This yearâs Christmas ad is a sequel: six minutes of Keira Knightley, a wedding, and Joe Wilkinson with a beef Wellington. YouTube first. Waitrose still bothers with ITV: 8pm, and its own line in the TV listings.
Then thereâs M&S.
Santa shaves his beard off and turns out to be James Norton, in a towel.
Satsuma.
And, Kathryn Turner.
3.2 billion of us scroll. Every time you pull down the feed, the machine makes three trillion calculations on what to feed you next.
It could be three minutes from Saatchi & Saatchi, or a product developer holding up a sausage roll, the machine doesnât care which.
Kathryn Turner has been posting on TikTok about once a week. 28 videos in the last 25 weeks, 38.7 million plays, averaging 1.4 million each. Same again on Instagram. NIQ has her name in M&Sâs October numbers: grocery up 10.7% in four weeks, âgrowing social media interestâ.
How much of it is her, nobody has worked out.
Definitely maybe.
Hereâs what we do know.
On the Tuesday morning John Lewis launched its ad, Kathryn posted two minutes on a chocolate and cornflake cookie. Thirty years at M&S.
#kathrynsigneditoff
By Thursday people were queuing up at M&S for it.
Waiting.
â„
Markets
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Consumer prices rose 0.4% in October, more than expected | CNBC
Brands
Creators dominate marketing, but celebrities still own Christmas ads | Digiday
Britain is already anticipating the holiday ads | The New York Times
I could make five better John Lewis Christmas ads with AI for under ÂŁ100k | The Drum
The AI-or-not debate is advertisingâs most pointless argument | Adweek
Your AI marketing strategy is generic | Fast Company
Synthetic audiences fall short: What marketers need to know | Marketing Dive
Marketing has 5 years to get honest, per Anthropicâs IPO claims | Ad Age
Research shows marketer-CEOs deliver higher shareholder returns | Department of Creative Affairs
Maybelline redefines âmaybeâ in a refresh of its brand line | The Wall Street Journal
The Spice Girls have a menopause WhatsApp group. Brands need to catch up | The Drum
This former NASA YouTube star with 85M subscribers on avoiding slop | Entrepreneur
The unbearable mediocrity of microdramas | The Atlantic
Elizabeth Holmes unintentionally drove a beef jerky brandâs sales | Marketing Brew
Government âBe Readyâ campaign drives emergency supplies sales surge | BBC
Startups
Poppiâs founder launches hydration brand post $2bn exit | Fast Company
Heights founders reject tax breaks, urge government to support hiring | The Times
Yvonne Bajela brings $17M in fresh capital to Europeâs startup scene | TechCrunch
Startup tackles womenâs mental load with new solution | Maddyness
Tech
Please let the internet die | Wired
Google threatens to cut search access for schools banning AI | Futurism
Can Nvidiaâs Jensen Huang rebuild trust? | Harvard Business Review
Money
Anthropic pursues IPO at $1.4 trillion valuation as OpenAI retreats | Mashable
Food delivery startup Wonder files for IPO | TechCrunch
PepsiCo to cut about 1,000 jobs as North American business struggles | CNBC
Smart-ring maker Oura to buy AI-native primary-care company for $625 million | The Wall Street Journal
Skydance outlines its $6 billion in planned cost savings | CNBC
Design
Diorâs festive pop-up at Harrods draws inspiration from animated short âChristian Diorâs Night in Colourâ | Wallpaper
28 industry voices on navigating creative careers in uncertain times | Itâs Nice That
PriestmanGoode designs multi-generational private jet | Wallpaper
Happiness
Dads are spending 3x more time with their kids | Big Think
Can money buy you a better brain? | Vogue
Four writers, one affair, infinite versions of the truth | Vulture
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