Advertising over Christmas had taken on a life of its own. The lines had blurred and the advertising had become the entertainment.

Data from YouTube, Facebook and Twitter revealed that over the last three years, the life span of the John Lewis Christmas ad was getting shorter and shorter. People were quite literally bingeing on it. Their Christmas binge was lasting 9 days only. What’s more 29% of all ad views were happening in day 1! This model was similar to addictive, must see box set behaviour where people devour a series and move on.

We needed the John Lewis ad to behave as the most sought after, binge worthy piece of entertainment and shift our advertising model from behaving as a beautiful piece of Christmas content pushed out to behaving as the must-see, highly-addictive Game of Thrones that people pull themselves towards.

In a unique advertising first, we partnered with SKY to create exclusive on demand access to the ad. For the first time ever a piece of piece of advertising rather than ‘entertainment’ took over the SKY EPG (entertainment program guide) to deliver the ad to 12 million households on demand, whenever they wished to see it. We included supporting behind-the-scenes content for those who wished to binge on more. This innovative use of the ‘on demand’ entertainment platform meant just like your favourite box set, you could view the ad as well as immerse yourself in more content whenever suited you, as many times as you wanted, across any device. The John Lewis ad took pride of place on the EPG next to must-see entertainment and dominated all Christmas advertising and entertainment in the most innovative way.

-Sales over the Christmas period were up by 4.9%

-The ad was trending #1 in the UK in 14 minutes and globally within an hour

-Over 721,000 combined unique downloads in 24hrs beating Sky’s download record

-All-time single day download record on Sky EPG platform (beating established programming, even bigger than the latest season of Game of Thrones)

-#Buster was trending above #Christmas! (Facebook API)

-On launch day, the ad became the #1 trending video, quicker than 2015 and any other Christmas ad this year

-#1 most viewed Christmas ad worldwide on YouTube

-The immediate affect was felt in-store and online as well as within media, with over 22,000 Buster the Boxer soft toys sold in the first 2 hours…