Where Has All the Great Christmas Radio Advertising Gone?

Winter is a season of stories. Since early civilisation, they have provided a diversion from the dreadfulness of the weather and The Deep Midwinter. Christmas is a holiday that has evolved to intertwine narratives, blending the Nativity with the St Nicolas myth, Good King Wenceslas and hundreds of others depending where you live. There is something about the combination of the cold (and probably the kind of drinks you are likely to imbibe to overcome it) that inspires to us to tell stories or seek them out. We may not huddle round the campfire any more but whether we book tickets for fairy-story adaptations (sing-a-long Frozen anyone?), opt for an annual chocolate box Tchaikovsky ballet, or simply sit on the sofa curating our TV film and drama watch-list, there is something inherently comforting about the telling and retelling of stories.

The human need for narrative is of course oft-reflected in seasonal advertising. Most of the big-hitting Christmas campaigns were built upon heart-warming stories. Sainsbury’s ‘Christmas is for sharing’, John Lewis ‘Monty the Penguin’, Boots ‘Because she’s special’, Mulberry ‘Win Christmas’ et al. These campaigns owe some of their effectiveness to the storytelling narratives they punctuate on TV. There is, of course, a value exchange here: we are more accepting of a commercial message when we have been diverted or entertained in some way. 

But this year has also been a notable winter for audio tale-telling. The runaway commercial-audio success of the Serial podcast was a welcome accompaniment to the brilliant drama you’d expect from the likes of Radio 4. Although I haven’t quite made it through the New Year’s Day War and Peace yet. Historically, Classic FM has used high profile actors to tell fairy-stories in the ad breaks in the run-up to Christmas for Ford Galaxy, while IRN-Bru hired an Aled Jones-alike to sing a seasonal spoof of The Snowman.  But while TV advertising consistently succeeds by lifting narrative ideas, it seems a shame that radio advertising is not used more often to do the same, not least when music - i.e. audio - has such a central place in much of the narrative advertising of the moment.

Radio is an intimate medium. It has the power to liberate the imagination as well as to reassure and to entertain, so why are notable festive radio commercials so conspicuous by their absence? In the clamour for emotional purity on TV, radio often ends up as the tactical business-driver, its story-telling potential remaining sadly overlooked again this year. When understood and exploited properly, the emotional attributes of radio can play an incredibly potent role in longer-term brand-building . Now that heavy-weight Christmas TV campaigns have become the norm for big advertisers, I’d suggest that one way for them to cut through this would be to do something unexpected and brief their agencies to create the radio equivalents in 2015.

Now, back to War and Peace*…

*erm….Frozen