Christmas commercials 2014: Aldi, David Jones among ads that tug at the heartstrings

YULE shed a tear at these emotional Christmas ad campaigns. It’s not just the Brits tugging at the heartstrings anymore.

Ads that will melt your heart

COULD these be the first Christmas adverts to melt Australians’ hearts?

Following the British tradition of emotional festive ad campaigns that leave Brits welling up annually, German-founded supermarket Aldi has unleashed an ad campaign on us, their unsuspecting Southern Hemisphere shoppers.

Big UK stores such as John Lewis, Marks and Spencer and Sainsbury’s have been tugging at viewers’ heartstrings for years, and so far we’ve been mostly removed.

But now we have two ads competing for our TV tears — one from Aldi, the other David Jones.

The Aldi advert, released two days ago, is more like a short film.

It features a man named Johan, who has returned to his lovely remote snow-covered village Julbacken after a trip Down Under with strange tales of a summer Christmas.

Rather than throwing their products in your face, it instead makes you feel something. Following up from their surfing Santa ad of last year, and manages to tug at our heartstrings.

Viewers are given a glimpse that an Aussie Christmas can be more authentic than the “typical” Northern Hemisphere yuletide we have long been shadowed by.

Australian retail giant David Jones got in first, about a week earlier with its latest offering, which it describes as “a move away from merchandise driven campaigns”.

The commercial tells the story of a boy worried he will be forgotten by Santa because his house does not have a chimney — something we can all relate to.

The two-minute ad, released on YouTube on November 3, features Tina Arena covering 10CC’s Things We Do For Love.

David Jones see it as “a heartwarming tale reminding us that Christmas is that time of the year when love is put into action”, and so far it’s working, attracting 94,000 YouTube views.

Casting back to the UK, the king of Christmas ads, retail giant John Lewis sets the bar high.

When it released its 2014 advert on November 6 on Twitter, it caused a media storm.

Their eagerly awaited #MontyThePenguin ad, which cost $1.8 million to produce, is about a boy and his best friend, a penguin, with a soundtrack of John Lennon’s Real Love sung by Tom Odell.

Monty the Penguin trended on Twitter for over a day after its release, and the YouTube clip has been viewed 13 million times so far.

And not only does it make you feel good, it does good for charity.

The ad is helping the World Wildlife Fund raise awareness to protect the Antarctic home of real life “Monty and Mabel” Adelie Penguins at the South Pole.

You can even buy a mini-penguin to help, as part of its Adopt a Penguin program.

Last year, Sainsbury’s 2013 commercial was hailed as their “best yet” with thousands watching it online before it even aired.

One person tweeted: “I love it — made me cry at the end!”

It focuses on what it means to have a family around at Christmas, showing the excitement of a child seeing a pile of presents under the tree to the loneliness of an elderly man who marks the event on his own.

The ad is a montage British Christmas created using 350 hours of footage sent in by real families to create a 3.5 minute film that took 14 months to complete.

This year, Sainsbury’s couldn’t afford to get it wrong, and today released a mini-film epic of 3.4 minutes on YouTube.

Made in partnership with The Royal British Legion, the heartwarming ad is set during WWI, on a snow-dusted battlefield and recreates a rare truce “inspired by real events from 100 years ago”.

Fitting for the 100th anniversary of the start of WWI, the video captures the Christmas truce of 1914, where British and German soldiers ventured into No Man’s Land to greet one another and exchange gifts.

Can someone please pass the tissues?

Originally published as Christmas commercials 2014: Aldi, David Jones among ads that tug at the heartstrings