The Bookseller.com

7th January 2009

Graeme Neill is retail reporter of The Bookseller.

The chains' Christmas specials

06.11.08

The book industry has started slightly later than last year, with Christmast adverts beginning in November instead of mid-October in 2007. Waterstone’s and W H Smith began broadcasting their festive adverts last night [Wednesday, 5th November].

Publishers felt its strong advertising was one of the reasons that WHS fared so well on the high street last Christmas. Are new campaigns good enough to drive footfall in a tough economic climate?

W H Smith has been showing television adverts for the past number of weeks with an autumnal theme and they have been excellent. The adverts continue W H Smith’s "Think" tagline and using celebrity narrators like Michael Parkinson, cram a huge number of offers into a very short period of time. Like Smith’s stores, the adverts basically underline the value offers that have been the driver of the retailer’s success. And they seem to be everywhere, daytime television, during the middle of X Factor, it seems most of the time you switch on a television you will hear some celeb touting titles. That coupled with a widespread print campaign has resulted in heavy visibility for the high street store.

Waterstone’s has also been running excellent autumnal print adverts for the past weeks. And like W H Smith, their television advertising campaign is a neat encapsulation of what the retailer is about. Its tagline is “Discover Something New”, which I think is pretty good.

There are two versions coming from Waterstone's. The shorter, 10 second, adverts pan across several promoted titles on a shelf, with a Christmassy Waterstone’s store in the background. Very simple and very effective. They are much better than last year’s ads, which I felt used the allotted broadcast time poorly and looked a bit like the kids cartoon Mr Ben.

Waterstone’s longer television adverts are very unusual for this time of year. Instead of underlining the top books on offer this week, they are more akin to the quirky European beer advertisements of Heineken, as my colleague Catherine Neilan put it. They show fictional scenarios where the protagonists wait for someone to “discover” them. In one case the advert features a crime scene where a victim waits, completely bored, to be buried alive by his kidnapper. The kidnapper refuses to do anything until they are “discovered”. Believe me, this is actually much funnier visually than the previous two sentences suggest.

But in contrast to the shorter adverts, there is no explicit display of Christmas titles. It seems that Waterstone’s is pushing its range and recommendation offer in this advert, rather than talking tough on price. It’s a strange ad but crucially one that caused a bit of conversation in the office – perhaps what Waterstone’s is wanting to achieve.

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