The cheapest Christmas ad.
Lidl Dienstleistung GmbH & Co. KG
Issue 47 | June 2018
Agency
Proximity Worldwide GmbH
Creative Team
Chief Creative Officer Wolfgang Schneider (BBDO Group) Creative Managing Director Tobias Grimm Executive Creative Director Michael Schachtner Creative Directors David Missing, Nicolas Linde Art Director Shelley Lui Copywriter Nico Baumann Script EDEKA
Production Team
Chief Production Officer Steffen Gentis Agency Producer Silke Rochow Production Company (Film) Florida Reklame und Florida TV GmbH Post Production Company Good Guys Entertainment Music/Sound Design Not A Machine, Berlin
Date
December 2017
Background
In Germany in the countdown to Christmas, all the supermarket brands were trying to outdo each other with costly, emotional Christmas ads. The films had little to do with selling goods and were largely interchangeable.
LIDL, by contrast, wanted to stand out by proving that Christmas did not need to be expensive.
Idea
LIDL sold goods and foods of similar quality to those sold by the more expensive supermarkets but at way cheaper prices.
The idea was to take this business model as a blueprint for the Christmas ad and show how Lidl could do the same job but for a lot less money.
EDEKA, the John Lewis of Germany, known for their emotional Christmas commercials, had made an ad with big special effects and big music all about Christmas a hundred years from now. LIDL shot exactly the same commercial but as cheaply as possible. Instead of nicely-constructed model robots, Lidl’s were made of cardboard. And the music was an acapella group trying to sound like an orchestra and choir.
It was another blow struck in the ongoing PR feud between the two brands, in which Lidl came across, yet again, as the cheeky but friendly brand sticking up for commonsense.
Results
On December 6th, exactly one week after the release of the original commercial, the copycat film was uploaded to LIDL’s social media channels like Youtube and Facebook, where it gathered millions of views and sparked a heated debate, all on a total production budget of just €70,000.
Our Thoughts
Ten years ago, John Lewis showed that big brand campaigns could also drive footfall and sales at Christmas. So, every other brand piled in, including EDEKA. What Lidl has managed to do here so brilliantly is puncture the emotional balloons of so many other advertisers at this time of year with brutally down-to-earth realism.
The metaphor is clear, to me at least. It’s not just brands that go mad at Christmas and spend ridiculously inflated amounts of money, people do too. It is a timely reminder that with care, thought and, indeed, love, you can probably have more fun and joy on a shoestring as you might if you threw money at the celebrations.
It’s not just a message about a supermarket, it’s a message about human behaviour.