While the UK supermarkets are busy sending giants, ghosts and delivery vans into three-minute Christmas epics, Woolworths has gone the other way. “Tastes Like Christmas”, the first festive work from new agency Droga5 ANZ and the first major trans-Tasman Christmas campaign for the Australian and New Zealand supermarket, is 60 seconds of backyard lunch set to a rewritten carol. No plot, no mascot, no tears. Just food, family and a song that wants to be stuck in your head by December.
A carol written by the customers
The hook is in the process rather than the picture. Woolworths ran a social challenge asking shoppers on both sides of the Tasman what “tastes like Christmas” to them, with a $500 Christmas shop as the prize. Mumbrella reports more than 8,000 submissions. The winning ideas, including a trifle and a key lime pie, were written into the hero film, and the answers were turned into an original carol modelled on “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”. The new chorus is the line that sells the whole thing: “It’s the most tastiest time of the year.”
That deliberately clumsy “most tastiest” is the smartest decision in the spot. It sounds like something a kid or a slightly merry uncle would sing at the table, and it tells you straight away that this is not a premium, candlelit, Marks and Spencer style food fantasy. It is a summer Christmas in shorts, paper crowns and flip-flops, which is exactly how most of the audience will spend it.
What is on the plate
Visually the film is a fast montage of one long sunny lunch. Herbs hit a chopping board, a dad and his small daughter pinch berries off the top of a pavlova-style dessert before it reaches the table, a grandmother photographs the spread on her phone, a grandad drowns his plate in sauce, and a boxer dog patrols under the table waiting for something to fall. The lighting is warm, golden and green, the gardens are lush, and the food is shot close enough to make you hungry, which is the job.
The best moments are the small, observed ones that match the lyrics. One verse promises “some guy no one’s met before”, and the edit cuts to a nervous young man in the doorway, wearing a name sticker, being introduced by the teenage daughter while the whole family turns to stare. It is a genuinely funny beat and the only one that feels like it came from a real family Christmas rather than a stock photo brief. The dog under the table gets a similar payoff. These are the moments that will carry the campaign on social.
Where it goes flat
The problem is that the rest of the minute is interchangeable. Swap the logo and this could be a Coles ad, a New World ad or a Christmas spread from any of the last ten years of Australian supermarket advertising: multi-generational table, cracker hats, a pavlova, a sunlit lawn, a kid running across the grass for the wide shot. The customer-sourced idea is strong on paper, but on screen you would never know these dishes came from 8,000 real answers. The trifle and the key lime pie flash past without any sense of whose they are or why they matter. A single line of on-screen copy, or one family clearly owning its weird tradition, would have made the participatory story visible instead of leaving it in the press release.
The music also has to do all the heavy lifting. MassiveMusic Sydney handled music and sound, and the arrangement is polished and bright, but parody carols live or die on the lyric, and outside the chorus and the “guy” gag the words are hard to catch on first listen. As a 60-second TV spot that is fine. As the centrepiece of a Spotify partnership built around personalised “Christmas Cook Profile” playlists, it needs to be a song people actually want to sing.
The verdict
“Tastes Like Christmas” is a confident, likeable first Christmas for Droga5 ANZ on the account. It understands its audience, it keeps the product front and centre, and the “most tastiest” line is a good, ownable piece of brand language that can run through radio, OOH and in-store all season. But it plays safe exactly where the brief invited it to be specific. The customers gave Woolworths 8,000 real stories, and the film turned them into a generic sunny lunch. Pleasant, hungry-making, quickly forgotten, unless that chorus sticks.
Credits: Client: Woolworths (CMO Sean Barrett). Agency: Droga5 ANZ, part of Accenture Song (CCO Damon Stapleton). Music and sound: MassiveMusic Sydney. Director and production company were not named in the campaign materials we reviewed.
Rating: 3 out of 5