The new John Lewis ad is a vibe, but where is the story?
Beautifully shot, nostalgic, and good on paper, but Ollie Edwards, deputy ECD at Good Relations, just wasn’t feeling it.
Perhaps I'm showing my age.
Scrolling LinkedIn last week, my feed was awash with gushing praise for John Lewis’s new spot, a sprawling 100-second, one-shot epic named ‘Tableau’, that enlists the vocal talents of one Mr Mike Skinner (AKA The Streets).
Designed to present a tapestry of British life from the past 100 years, it is undoubtedly beautifully-shot and a feat of technical brilliance from director Kim Gehrig. But at around the 30-second mark, I found myself wondering: ‘Is this it?’
I can’t have been the only one. Where was the storyline? The tugging at heartstrings?
Where were the characters to convince me to carry on watching, rather than skipping to one of the other thousands of possibilities competing for my attention? Without any of this, the full 1 minute and 40 seconds of watching felt like a slog.
It is undoubtedly vibrant, and also vibey. It is clever and self-referential (laden with the ‘easter eggs’ so beloved of marketers and clients, yet invisible to most of the target audience). And yet, I feel nothing.
For comparison's sake, it sent me immediately in search of Adam&Eve’s 2010 masterpiece for the same brand:
On paper, it is a very similar advert with an almost identical message. But one with a narrative arc, and characters that make you care and keep you watching.
Perhaps this is a sign of the times. Yet another example of a societal shift from facts and functions to the less well-defined ‘vibe’. The natural endpoint of individual liberalism. But it also feels to me like a missed opportunity.
A struggling national treasure like John Lewis is crying out for the emotive storytelling that once made its annual Christmas advert a cause for a national media frenzy. Instead, we get style over substance. Colours instead of characters. Snazzy camerawork where once there was a storyline that demanded you care.
This geezer needs more excitement.
Image credit: John Lewis campaign film
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