Each year it’s the eagerly awaited John Lewis Christmas video that kicks off the festive season.
Their first Christmas TV advert was released in 2007, but it was the story telling approach in ‘The Long Wait’ in 2011, when a little boy tries to use magic to make Christmas arrive sooner, that captured the public’s hearts and enthusiasm.
Christmas is a popular time for promotional videos, whether for large corporates or small businesses.
Perhaps you’ve watched some Christmas videos this year and thought, ‘I wish I’d done something like that’!
Obviously, it’s probably too late to do a Christmas video for 2018, but it’s the right time to be thinking about one for 2019.
Depending on the business, you might need to film in December while the decorations are up, especially if you have a retail premises or destination that’s open to the public. Even if not, it’s a good time to be thinking about the production for next year whilst you’re in the festive mood.
Planning a Christmas video
Allocate budget now and film when it’s frosty or snowy or during the winter, and you can have the editing done later in the spring. That way you can spread the cost but have something ready to deploy well in advance of December to make the most of the Christmas sales.
You might have a specific Christmas offering, so producing a professional production can really help to capture the imagination of your customers. If your Christmas sales start earlier in the year though – for example hotels and restaurants – you’ll need to have it ready and launched in late summer.
Video styles: Elegant, sophisticated or a little bit quirky
This is an example of an elegant Christmas video to show off the facilities and the options for a great Surrey hotel (all filmed during Christmas 2017).
It doesn’t have to be filmed though, you can be really creative with animated productions like the two examples below – one very sophisticated and the other quite quirky!
But if you don’t have a premises or a specific Christmas offer, but you do want to take advantage of the marketing opportunities of the festive season, there are lots of options if you think creatively about it.
Take an example from this year, one of our best clients – Reply – wanted to find a way of using Christmas to promote the work that they were doing around Quantum Computing. They wrote a great piece for LinkedIn which was around how Santa can use Quantum theory to improve his efficiency. That’s when they contacted us to see if we could adapt it and bring it to life using video. Yes we could!
We decided to use the angle of a corporate case study, but obviously taking the Micky as Santa was the client. It was a funny and light-hearted way to make potential customers aware that Reply were very much operating in this space though – and we think it turned out pretty well. Judge for yourself below!
More Christmas video ideas
For more Christmas video inspiration, here are some productions that we didn’t make, but show the different approaches you can take on creating a festive video.
And if you’d like a reminder of all the John Lewis Christmas videos from 2007 to 2017, you’ll find them here.
Ask us to help you with a little Christmas video planning now, so you won’t have that FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) feeling in 2019.
