This Local British Burger Joint Just Trolled Christmas Advertising - Here’s How

Christmas ads are an expensive affair. A top ad agency, a world class director, an elaborate production, a multi-million media budget to plaster your campaign on every possible screen and surface.

One burger chain from Herefordshire, in the West Midlands of England, is shaking that hierarchy at the roots with an emotional story about a soft-hearted boy and a pair of old lovebirds that took just six hours and £400 to shoot.

It’s blown up, with over two million views, and to say it takes you on a rollercoaster ride is an understatement - but before you read any further, make sure you check it out for yourself.

This story came about when Anthony ‘Murf’ Murphy, one of the co-founders of The Beefy Boys had the idea of doing their own ‘John Lewis Christmas ad’.

“The whole Christmas ad thing’s become its own sort of genre in the last couple of years. Each year, they just gradually seem to get worse, I think, as they get sort of more influenced by focus groups. I think the idea was to sort of take that John Lewis concept, play with the cliches, like getting a well-known popular song, recording a slowed down, cheesy acoustic version of it and then having a soppy, heart-warming, soft, focused kind of story  - but then we wanted to give it a Beefy Boys edge to it as well,” explains Anthony. 

The ad follows the familiar story beats of sentimental Christmas ads. A little boy sees the same couple sharing a burger on the same bench throughout the year, but come winter, the woman is sitting cold and alone. The boy rushes into The Beefy Boys, using his pocket money to buy her a burger to cheer her up - only to discover that not everyone is going about their lives as if they’re starring in a commercial

Anthony fleshed out the idea with the other Beefy Boys, including Lee Symonds who edited the campaign too. They teamed up with friend and long-time collaborator Ed Deacon, who produced the ad, Anthony developed the storyboard and took on directing duties, working with Ed, and Lee edited the video.

It’s not the first time that The Beefy Boys have turned their hands to entertaining seasonal video content - they like to do things for Hallowe’en and plans are afoot for April Fool’s Day (don’t tell anyone). This year, though, the Christmas ad very nearly didn’t happen. Having landed a cookbook deal with a tight deadline, they soon found their plans to make a Halloween and Christmas film under threat. Halloween was the sacrificial goat - and Christmas nearly didn’t happen too.

But they felt the idea was so strong that they would do it as long as they could do it quickly. And quick it certainly was. The shoot took place on December 1st, over just six hours, was edited the day after and was online by December 4th.

Because of the flash-fried turnaround - and the fact that they’d have to capture three seasons on one chilly December day - the team realised they needed to make sure that the pre-production was thorough. Where previous videos were shot on the fly, Anthony and Ed spent time at the restaurant taking photos of potential shots and angles.

Lee’s son took the starring role of the thoughtful boy, while the older man was someone Anthony knew from his performing arts days and the older lady was suggested by a theatre director friend. The cast, crew and snow machine for the day cost £400 all together, plus they had to pay Ed for his services. Comparing it to a shoot for a major national TV campaign, Athony laughs, “I imagine we're not even their catering budget!”

The edit was fairly streamlined as the team had shot more or less exactly what they needed, but for Lee it was a surprisingly emotional process. The genius of the film is that, despite its comic ending, it leans hard into the sentimental storytelling.

“I knew the storyline of it and I was welling up editing it, and I had to go over and over and over it,” laughs Lee. “By the hundredth time, I was immune to it, but the first few times I was going through the footage, genuinely, I was welling up. It’s just how good the acting was.”

When it comes to the music, The Beefy Boys teamed up with their friend Jake Gamble, a musician who came third on The Voice UK. They had a good idea of how they could crack the Christmas code - a popular song with a maudlin, acoustic cover. They’d tried a range of songs, but in the end Rick Astely’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ was perfect.

“Because of what the lyrics were, it made sense. But also the whole Rick rolling thing was almost a clue to people that this video isn't going to end the way you think it's going to end,” says Anthony.

Creativity is something that’s driven The Beefy Boys since the beginning. Lee and Anthony have known each other since art college days - Lee being into design and Anthony performing arts. From their late teens, they’ve been working together, first promoting club nights they were probably technically too young to drink at, till eventually they owned a couple of nightclubs, which they ran for 15 years. At the clubs, they would shoot videos of staff parties to entertain their employees, and that’s where they first got a taste of production and filmmaking. 

Their initial foray into the world of burgers came when, for a laugh, Anthony, Lee and their friends Dan Mayo-Evans and Christian Williams entered the UK-based barbecue competition Grillstock. They only went and won Best Burger. They were consequently entered into the World Food Championships in Las Vegas. That’s when they started to get serious about video. First, they had to raise funds to get their own Indiegogo and when they got a sponsorship from Wye Valley Brewery. As part of the sponsorship they had to create some video content, so they brought along Ed (who was then just 17) to shoot behind the scenes footage. With little hope of winning, they decided that they’d make ia Spinal Tap-inspired mockumentary. And then they came second.

But that quirky sensibility was already baked into the brand they were creating. “From the get go -  this is before it was even a business really, this was just a hobby - we made amockumentary thing about it. And then we sort of had that sort of weirdness, I guess, from the start, so when we started doing little videos of us making burgers, we would try and do them in a more interesting way. So we put quite a bit of like, thought into them.”

As they got into food and the burger scene, the four Beefy Boys would host pop ups in the garden of one of their clubs. As the burgers took off and the underground scene started to fade away - and they began to find that constant late nights were somewhat less fun in their 30s - and so they swapped parties for patties full time, opening their first restaurant in 2015.

Since then that creativity and silliness has bled into everything from their social media presence, to their branding. “It's about the brand and about being sort of quirky. Because burgers are kind of a ridiculous sort of food anyway. So it's kind of good that the content we create is a bit ridiculous,” says Anthony, who explains that creativity is inevitable when you’re marketing burgers. “The more publicity you get and the more people are talking about it and the more you can stay in people's minds and the more burgers you can sell ,ultimately. That's what it boils down to. There’s only so many ways you can advertise a burger before you have to get creative with it.”

But, says Lee, business imperative aside, going that extra mile and being creative is something that the team gets immense satisfaction from. “We do enjoy making the videos. It’s cool as an ad, but it’s just all as something that we’ve done and can be proud of.”

That creative approach seems to be really working for The Beefy Boys. Since 2015, they’ve grown to three restaurants, in August they’ll be releasing their cookbook, published by Hardy Grant, part of Penguin, in the UK, USA and Australia - and on December 23rd they’ll be appearing on BBC One show Saturday Kitchen, to show off their Christmas Boy Burger.

Ultimately, what The Beefy Boys have shown is that technology has democratised creative advertising to the extent that any small or medium sized business with a strong idea can still reach a sizeable audience. Of course, they’re not the only business that’s taken the DIY approach to Christmas ads and found success - this year Charlie’s Bar in Northern Ireland became a viral hit with their tale of a lonely widower and in 2019, a Welsh hardware store got national coverage for a sweet story about discovering your inner child, which was made for £100. All sorts of businesses are turning their hands to making Christmas ads, including this Kent-based electrical appliance retailer, Herne Bay Domestics, who contacted LBB with their festive message to the local community.

“What's kind of interesting… is  that with that video, we've reached about two million people and it costs us just the cost of doing that video. So you know, a lot of people would spend hundreds of thousands on trying to do that. Obviously John Lewis and all these people, they literally spend millions. But I think the whole thing is, unless you've got a good idea, you know, you could chuck millions and millions at something and if it's not a good idea, it's not gonna resonate,” says Anthony. “All businesses now do have the ability  to get out there and advertise, it's been democratised quite a bit. With the right creative idea you can get it out there to so many people.”