Iceland’s Quirky Christmas Campaign is a Real Cracker

Iceland launched its latest Christmas adverts at 9.30pm on Friday 1st December 2017 during I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here and Gogglebox. 

This time around it’s a tongue-in-cheek Christmas campaign that goes against the grain of traditional advertising at this time of year with a series of nine 20-second adverts using real video footage of families unwrapping Christmas gifts. 

The retailer has edited the user-generated clips to show people unwrapping Iceland’s impressive luxury Christmas food under their trees. The dramatic and hilarious reactions of real people are dubbed with comedian voiceovers, creating a series of light-hearted adverts that need to be seen – and heard – to be believed. 

During 2017, more and more new shoppers visited the retailer and have experienced the many fantastic benefits of frozen food – what Iceland calls the Power of Frozen. 

This notion of experiencing the Power of Frozen for the first time has been carried through to the theme of the Christmas campaign where we see people opening up gifts and discovering luxury frozen food from Iceland.

Mel Matson, marketing director at Iceland, said: “This Christmas we decided to go against the ‘tear-jerking, blockbuster’ grain with lots of 20 seconds ads that will hopefully make people feel jolly this Christmas. 

“Of course we know that children wouldn’t really wish for a Gilded Turkey or a Lobster Thermidor at Christmas, but we had great fun imagining how they would react to finding our award-winning food under the tree.” 

“In our experience, shoppers don’t start buying their groceries until early December when people feel it ‘really is’ Christmas, so we feel our timing is spot on – at Iceland we continue to conquer the festive season in our own, unique way.”

“We know some people will be feeling the pinch this year but with over 200 products in our Christmas range, we have impressive food to suit all budgets.”

The hero advert features five-year old Isla of ‘The Ingham Family’ – one of Britain’s most popular vlogging families – whose hilarious present-opening reactions last Christmas reached 38 million views.

The adverts feature real people from real online footage. Some of the people are already popular online but many are regular UK families.

Iceland’s Marketing Director, Mel Matson, said: “We noticed a rise in popularity of video footage of families unwrapping Christmas gifts and saw this as an opportunity to continue our approach of using real people to communicate the amazing benefits of shopping at Iceland. 

The adverts were created by Karmarama and the comic video hi-jacking involved visual and audio editing to show people finding Iceland products under their trees. The real-life footage has been dubbed with the voices of real comedians, who improvised voiceovers in real-time while watching the footage. 

The theme of hijacking has been continued through to the outdoor campaign which features traditional festive images and phrases disrupted by Iceland’s delicious Christmas food. 

The campaign is running across digital, PR, radio, out-of-home, instore, press, poster and the social media hashtag #ReasonsToBeJolly. The TV campaign runs from 1st December and until Christmas Eve.