Authored by Lee Taylor via The Daily Sceptic,
Strip away the Sam Fender cover and the talking dog, and the commercial message of this year's John Lewis advert is simple. If your grandchildren are rude, bored, and only interested in cash, go to John Lewis.
It took Saatchi and Saatchi three minutes and a Dame to make the most woke version yet.
We've been up and down with John Lewis over the years. Monty the Penguin made the country cry in 2014, and so did Man on the Moon a year later. Then it wandered. A few years of forgettable short films. Then last year looked like the recovery: a teenage boy, his father and a vinyl record, and not 'the message' in sight.
The interesting thing about this year's family is that John Lewis didn't invent them. They went and found them. Watch it again as a documentary rather than a commercial. The children arrive restless from a long journey and the first thing they do is fail to hug their grandmother. She brings down the old toys from the attic, and they lose interest the second someone shouts 'lunch'. They want cash, and they look crushed when the cards turn out to be empty. The parents stand there and let it all happen. The grandmother, alone in her kitchen, concludes that the only way back into her grandchildren's attention is to buy it. Somebody in a research group told Saatchi that this is what Christmas looks like now, and the research group was right. That is what Christmas looks like now.
